Comment on Viewing votes
jadero@mander.xyz 4 months ago
I’ve long had concerns with up/down votes and like/dislike, especially the down/dislike. Nothing major, and I have no real solutions.
My concerns are only to do with the ambiguity. There are so many different reasons why someone might vote one way or the other or even just not vote at all that I think it’s kind of weird that compiling the votes into a score seems to mostly work pretty good. That ambiguity means that it’s difficult to derive meaning from any individual vote, which I think argues in favour of keeping it somewhat private. Just because a non-admin can jump through hoops to get someone’s voting history, doesn’t mean it should be deliberately made public.
As for keeping down votes, I’d be reluctant to mess with a system that works as well as it seems to. Personally, I very rarely downvote, as even that is more engagement than I’m willing to provide. In fact, one of the things I like about the client I use, Thunder, is that I have to long press a comment in order to vote. That little bit of friction means that I vote less often. When I vote, it’s because I really mean whatever I intend the vote to mean.
Sal@mander.xyz 4 months ago
Thank you for your input, it’s very appreciated!
There is a toggle in the admin settings to enable/disable downvotes, and several instances do disable them.
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This hides the button and the results from the UI - other instances can still vote, but it’s not displayed. This change would be easy to implement and revert messing up anything. Personally, I do think that having up/down votes is a useful metric more often than it is abused. Disabling down-votes might be a good match for an instance dedicated to, for example, sharing one’s own art, as users might feel more comfortable sharing in such a space.
jadero@mander.xyz 4 months ago
I didn’t realize that.
Strictly as a user, from what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be anything that resembles rampant abuse of downvotes. I’m glad that is what is visible at the admin level.
Carry on, you’re doing great work as a community builder/manager.
Sal@mander.xyz 4 months ago
Thanks!
This is a comparatively small instance, the problem is more prominent in the larger instances!
Also, I just found out that there is a user-level setting to turn off the visibility of all scores:
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