= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
witzvo comments on Proposal: Show up and down votes separately - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (65)
Thanks! That discussion also mentioned the issues list. So now I can at least get a peek at what's needed to effect a change. Would submitting a patch do it? Well, now I know more about where to look.
I also found this comment interesting:
I agree with the sentiment. I think the useful low hanging fruit would be to allow you to select a section of a post with your cursor and up/down vote that section. This, and other good proposals, certainly complicate the UI, though. Another proposal there was to require a comment with a vote. This is simpler to implement but adds user-friction and clutter, so I'm not sure about the tradeoff.
Is there more I'm missing? I tried some searches but couldn't find the right phrases.
What would that actually do? (This most definitely is not low hanging fruit.)
Bad idea. For starters, it means there is no way to downvote trolls without starting flame wars.
Not if the mechanism for including a comment with your vote is separate from the usual commenting mechanism: e.g., you can enter up to 140 characters (or 80 or 72 or some other traditional number) to describe your reason for voting as you did, and then hovering over the upvote or downvote count shows a selection of these reasons. (All of them, if there aren't too many.) No provision for replying to these, other than by editing the comment that was voted on or adding an extra comment.
I don't know whether this would actually be a good thing on balance, but it doesn't seem like it need lead to flame wars.
I can imagine a vote-tagging mechanism that doesn't lead to interaction, but my intuition is that this requires that the vote-tags be standardized. The moment the tag becomes an actual comment expressing a novel thought by an individual, the usual conversational dynamics allow for interaction with the person addressed. (If the system makes this awkward by requiring it to be implemented as a comment that doesn't obviously descend from the thing it's replying to, that won't stop people from responding to it, it will just make people annoyed by the awkwardness.)
interesting point, but I'm unsure whether that makes it a bad thing.
Anyway, the basis my preference for just letting you highlight some text before you click (above) is that (1) it's low effort which increases participation (2) it pinpoints the cause of the appreciation/disapproval (3) it's more flexible than a fixed set of tags.
I think an implementation is easier than you might expect (but I'll try to do more to prove it). I haven't looked at the code on the site yet, but here's my guess: when you click up, for example, javascript is triggered to send an AJAX message to the server with the particulars (who clicked?, on what?). If the event handling code is changed so that it queries for the current selection if any, and adds that information to the message it sends the server, and if the server logs that additional information in its database, then the biggest part is already implemented.
To make this useful the information needs to come back out somehow, and making a nice shiny implementation of that involves more work, I admit. A bare bones implementation would be an additional icon on a comment (next to permalink, say). Click the icon and it gives you details about comments on the post. E.g. it dumps the time ordered (anonymous?) list of up's and down's together with anything that was selected at the time.
Edit: maybe you just meant "can you tell me how that would function as a social dynamic?" Sorry if so; let me know. see also my rant
Considering the ample number of both upvotes and noncommittal comments on your post, it seems that many would like this feature implemented but are unable/unwilling to do it themselves. Personally submitting a patch is probably the only way this is going to get implemented in the near future, and I'm sure this would be appreciated by many (including me). You might want to look at this page on the Less Wrong GitHub wiki.
I feel like there were more off-hand comments about this, but this is likely the highest-voted post on this topic.
Thanks. To really do it, I'll probably need a test server. I'll see what I can do and report back by next weekend, hopefully, unless somebody has something like that sitting around.