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Staff / From the minds of Ars

Introducing comment voting on news articles and features

Learn about our new experimental system for reader comments.

In our continuing effort to promote the best and brightest discussion on news articles and features, we are testing a new voting system on comments. It's an experiment—we built the system with the minimum number of features to launch with, and if readers take to it, we may very well expand it to do more. Here is how it works:

Users who are logged in will see a vote count on each post, in parentheses, with up/down buttons for voting. The arrows will change colors based on whether or not you have voted (at present you are able to change your vote). Eventually, posts that cross a certain threshold will receive special treatment. We have yet to determine what those thresholds will be, but we envision highlighting posts with a good number of upvotes, and minimizing and ultimately collapsing posts with an excessive number of downvotes. We also hope to eventually use this to enable readers to quickly see the best comments (by vote).

We go into this knowing it will be a controversial move. Ultimately, this is more about highlighting great posts rather than punishing crappy posts. This is one reason why we introduced the "ignore" feature before rolling this out. In an ideal world, the trolls and the whiners would just be ignored, and everyone would move on. But we hope that the voting system will help improve the overall quality of comments. We have considered at length the rather typical rejoinder to voting systems such as this, namely that it creates an echo chamber. We are willing to take that risk.

We believe most of our readers are highly intelligent (and very passionate) technologists. The overwhelming majority are able to disagree and criticize one another, and our work, without resorting to insults, hyperbole, or other childish behavior. This move is not about the small number of recalcitrant trolls who inhabit our comment system. It's about the discussion, and our strong desire to see it grow in quality for you, and to grow in usefulness for us. On this latter point, I will simply say the following: each and every one of our writers and editors deeply desires intelligent and useful feedback and criticism.

It is our hope that the voting system will lead commenters to consider how others might receive their feedback, and that this should lead to stronger comments overall. It should also greatly cut down on the number of "me too" posts, since it is now possible to simply vote up a comment that you agree with. In the end, we decided to move forward with this experiment because we thought some degree of inter-commenter responsibility would improve our discussions.

We know some readers will absolutely hate this, while others will find it a long-overdue improvement. As with most changes, we will give it some time before assessing, and we will likely have a poll in the coming weeks to try to quantify some of your responses. In the meantime, we encourage you to try it out, make suggestions, and have patience. We will keep you updated on significant changes and tweaks we make to the system.

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