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My thoughts - why do likes accumulate to a user? You want likes to signal that the article/comment is interesting. But what value is it to assign the number of
by chadcmulligan 5y ago
My thoughts - why do likes accumulate to a user? You want likes to signal that the article/comment is interesting. But what value is it to assign the number of likes to the person who posts it? Like in stack overflow, I haven't used it for ages but my points are still there, they should die off after a while I feel. This would remove the karma chasing you get on reddit and would, perhaps, make things more reasonable. It's nice to get the serotonin kick when you accumulate thousands of points on a post - but its fundamentally meaningless and encourages weird behaviour.
- mtc010170 5y agoI think you might be onto something. What examples do we have of products that purely use likes or upvotes that benefit the thing shared without benefitting the user?
- chadcmulligan 5y agoFor the greater good? You probably wouldn't get many 12 year olds, but that is perhaps what you want. Getting points for comments isn't really anything anyway.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoComments on YouTube and ArsTechnica have vote counts, but the count is only attached to the comment, not the user. The votes are just used for sorting.
- luckylion 5y agoHow does the sorting work on Youtube? It's not by upvotes, it's not by date, it's not any obvious combination of the two (as newer comments with more upvotes can still be sorted after older comments with fewer upvotes). Them using a hidden total-like-count might be an explanation.
- frosted-flakes 5y agoIf you don't surface newer comments all the upvotes will skew towards older comments. I expect there's an element of randomness. Number of replies, whether the uploader put their badge on it or replied are probably also taken into account.
- emodendroket 5y agoThat would encourage people to answer throwaway “write my regex” questions instead of things that will be useful years later.