On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 12:18:33 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> that would not have helped you understand why.

Honestly people who get upvoted dont understand why either but they're just happy.

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 08:40:10 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>
> - The only way I can think of to translate the votes to the NNTP/email medium is either converting them to messages which have nothing but a +1 (which is very spammy), or not doing it at all. Neither is ideal.

Every time a new feature for the newsgroup comes up, and it gets shot down because it wouldn't work for people using email, I immediately think of https://xkcd.com/1782.

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 12:18:33 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 01.04.21 10:05, RazvanN wrote:

> Most of them with additional text.
>
> If we had a voting system, your comment would have been voted
>
> The post that got so much support _literally_ said that a voting system would be a bad idea, and why.
>

Yes, people that wanted to understand the flow of the conversation without going through all of the messages would have seen the initial comment which would have been voted by a lot of people and maybe my comment which may have been supported by people who agree with me. This way you read 2 comments and you understand the general debate. If you want to zoom in to the details, you can just select the normal, currently used, algorithm where votes don't count. I see it as an optional feature which you can use if you want to.

>
> If that's a problem for web interface users, improve the web interface.
>
I don't see how the interface would solve the verbosity problem.
If you have 200+ messages in a thread, how can the interface help
you without having some filters?
>
> Downvotes are worse than useless. Just upvote the rebuttal instead; at least it will be clear what you voted for. E.g., if I just downvoted your post, that would not have helped you understand why.

I am not fixated on a specific proposal, I was just stating that
a voting scheme, however we choose to implement it may bring some
benefit. I agree that downvoting isn't very useful, but upvoting
could be used as a mean to find the comments that were mostly
appreciated by people. If you don't care about that, you can just
use the old interface where posts are presented in a chronological order.

On 4/1/21 4:40 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:26:48 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> I wonder how difficult it would be to add a voting system for forum messages. Votes wouldn't be available in the NNTP interface but would be accessible in the Web interface and would allow sorting and filtering by votes.
>>
>> cc Vladimir :o)
> 
> This idea did come up before, and is controversial as others have pointed out. My personal thoughts about this today are:
> 
> - Downvotes are not nice to receive and in general carry bad vibes.
> 
> - Sorting or filtering by votes creates unhealthy incentives - there is now a system which would be advantageous to "game".
> 
> - Having a way to publicly communicate agreement or appreciation with a post without all the bulky noise associated with a reply might be nice. Good vibes only!
> 
> - The only way I can think of to translate the votes to the NNTP/email medium is either converting them to messages which have nothing but a +1 (which is very spammy), or not doing it at all. Neither is ideal.
> 
> - Different people engage with the community with different attitudes and expectations. I'm not sure how much sense it would make to flatten this to a single number.
> 
> - In any case, at the moment we seem to be doing okay, at least as far as people intentionally participating in unconstructive ways.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. And also your recent work on post formatting is just amazing. Great stuff!

I appreciate your nuanced take as I was a bit taken aback by the blanket statement that voting is bad, which I find anachronistic in a "don't use cars because accidents" way. Proposal got downvoted as it were :o).

I agree that an upvote-only system similar to Twitter and Facebook would be nice to signal content that people find valuable. (Anecdote: A "dislike" button has been the top requested feature for Facebook for years. And not only casually by the users; entire business propositions have been made based on that. I'm glad they were not accepted.)

As to the NNTP integration, I was thinking the voting could be a web-only feature. Which is nice because it encourages people to swap to the modern web interface (he wrote, typing furiously in his Thunderbird window). Perhaps do the converse instead, if a post is just a +1 with no other added content, convert it to a vote.

No filtering or sorting by popularity would be needed, probably for years. Just a little heart out there with the number of votes would add great value.

Thanks for engaging.

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 03:32:49 UTC, Clint E. wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 00:55:14 UTC, 12345swordy wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:26:48 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> I wonder how difficult it would be to add a voting system for forum messages. Votes wouldn't be available in the NNTP interface but would be accessible in the Web interface and would allow sorting and filtering by votes.
>>>
>>> cc Vladimir :o)
>>
>> Here is an better idea: Why not allow us to edit our post to correct typos?
>>
>> -Alex
>
> The Non-editable feature is one of the best of this forum.
>
> I hope they keep that way. When you are able to edit, people say things reckless and times later they change their mind and edit, causing confusion most of time, and this happens a lot on reddit for example.
>
> We already have this great power to think before posting.
>
> Clint E.

This isn't reddit though.

-Alex

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 13:37:01 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 08:40:10 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>>
>> - The only way I can think of to translate the votes to the NNTP/email medium is either converting them to messages which have nothing but a +1 (which is very spammy), or not doing it at all. Neither is ideal.
>
> Every time a new feature for the newsgroup comes up, and it gets shot down because it wouldn't work for people using email, I immediately think of https://xkcd.com/1782.

+1

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 14:33:43 UTC, Q. Schroll wrote:
> On Wednesday, 31 March 2021 at 21:40:15 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> Online voting is emotionally toxic and logically fallacious.
>
> You're wrong, like really wrong. If that were true, [SO](https://stackoverflow.com) should be the pinnacle of emotionally toxic and logically fallacious posts when it comes to programming topics, but it's exactly the contrary: SO is one of the best if not *the* best resource for programming questions — and I'd claim it is because of their voting system and not in spite of it.

Well I don't agree with this, SO voting system isn't that good at all. It was already debatable on HN and in different medias too.

For example, it's common to see that in different cases the most up voted answer is "not" the "best answer".

Matheus.

On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 14:59:44 UTC, matheus wrote:
> ...

By the way about SO there is another problem, they lock a topic/question after sometime, and now the most up voted answer remains as solution.

But what is/was best in one point of time, may not be suitable in the future, but when looking for the problem, the old solution will show on top of the search engines.

For me SO popularity may be connected with laziness too.

Where I work I already saw people just copying and pasting source direct from there, I know that because the language (I'm foreigner) and the code had English text, so looking over I hit that site.

Matheus.