3 ms·

Why can't we have two comment voting buttons and two corresponding karma scores? The first button you click up if you agree or disagree with the view expressed

Why can't we have two comment voting buttons and two corresponding karma scores? The first button you click up if you agree or disagree with the view expressed. The second button you click up if you think the comment is well written, irrespective of your agreement with the content. One Karma metric will measure how much people agree with you, the other how much they respect your defense of those views. Clearly a lot of people want a means to show their opposition to a view. And clearly others want the vote up button to be used to judge the sophistication of the comment. Obviously - no matter how much it's argued over - people are going to do what they bloody well like with the button. Why not make everybody happy?

shadowsun7 16y ago
Because if you disagree with my comment, but you think it is well written, you should write a response. In my experience good content expressed in bad, offensive, or passive-aggressive writing isn't worth my time. Not as a reader, wanting to skim through the thread for the most cogent arguments, and certainly not as a commentator (these people are usually - well, not trolls per se, but close to the definition).
- grovulent 16y ago
  but you just exactly demonstrated my point. you can try to tell people how they should use the buttons, or you could accept the reality that people will ignore you and adapt the interface to suit their usage. isnt that what good design is all about?
  - shadowsun7 16y ago
    No it's not. Good design in social software is about what best serves the group, not the individual. (read Clay Shirky's seminal work on the issue, if you don't believe me http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html). Now I want you to consider a couple of issues: 1) You give the user the ability to disagree by vote. What you're doing is that you're giving people the ability to click a button instead of writing a counter-argument. How does that add to the discourse? This doesn't benefit a group now, does it? 2) You have two voting metrics. How would the ranking algorithm work? Why is populist agreement important to how the comments are arranged? Does that not make groupthink more prominent, not less? If so, why clutter the interface? 3) Is there anything wrong with a fuzzy definition of how voting is used? Sure, people have been downvoted before because other people disagreed with them, but by and large this is a rare occurrence. Oftentimes comments are downvoted and then upvoted again, when more readers stumble across the comment and think: 'say, this isn't right, this shouldn't be downvoted even though I don't agree with it'. It's happened to me before. Why does this happen sometimes, and not other times? I have a theory about that: good comments run the risk of being downvoted when a) they disagree with the prevailing groupthink on HN ... AND b) they are badly written. (badly here is defined as: unclear, or disorganized, or just plain bad). You rarely run the risk of being unfairly downvoted if you take the time to write your comment, and write it well. My experience at HN seems to support this, I'm not sure if the theory would hold true all the time, but I suspect that it does work, most of the time. I think ambiguity about how comments are used is okay, and there really isn't anything terrible or wrong with the current system. At least, nothing to justify the addition of another metric.

shadowsun7 16y ago

Because if you disagree with my comment, but you think it is well written, you should write a response. In my experience good content expressed in bad, offensive, or passive-aggressive writing isn't worth my time. Not as a reader, wanting to skim through the thread for the most cogent arguments, and certainly not as a commentator (these people are usually - well, not trolls per se, but close to the definition).

grovulent 16y ago
but you just exactly demonstrated my point. you can try to tell people how they should use the buttons, or you could accept the reality that people will ignore you and adapt the interface to suit their usage. isnt that what good design is all about?
- shadowsun7 16y ago
  No it's not. Good design in social software is about what best serves the group, not the individual. (read Clay Shirky's seminal work on the issue, if you don't believe me http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html). Now I want you to consider a couple of issues: 1) You give the user the ability to disagree by vote. What you're doing is that you're giving people the ability to click a button instead of writing a counter-argument. How does that add to the discourse? This doesn't benefit a group now, does it? 2) You have two voting metrics. How would the ranking algorithm work? Why is populist agreement important to how the comments are arranged? Does that not make groupthink more prominent, not less? If so, why clutter the interface? 3) Is there anything wrong with a fuzzy definition of how voting is used? Sure, people have been downvoted before because other people disagreed with them, but by and large this is a rare occurrence. Oftentimes comments are downvoted and then upvoted again, when more readers stumble across the comment and think: 'say, this isn't right, this shouldn't be downvoted even though I don't agree with it'. It's happened to me before. Why does this happen sometimes, and not other times? I have a theory about that: good comments run the risk of being downvoted when a) they disagree with the prevailing groupthink on HN ... AND b) they are badly written. (badly here is defined as: unclear, or disorganized, or just plain bad). You rarely run the risk of being unfairly downvoted if you take the time to write your comment, and write it well. My experience at HN seems to support this, I'm not sure if the theory would hold true all the time, but I suspect that it does work, most of the time. I think ambiguity about how comments are used is okay, and there really isn't anything terrible or wrong with the current system. At least, nothing to justify the addition of another metric.