April 01, 2021
On 01.04.21 17:38, Q. Schroll wrote:
> cost–risk–benefit analysis.

@Vladimir, I think something went wrong with the rich text thingy. This message shows "–" in Thunderbird.

@Q. Schroll, I think I accidentally sent this to your email before. Sorry about that. Thunderbird switched the buttons around.
April 01, 2021

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

>

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 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 โ€” 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".

I don't think we disagree, you just got me wrong. People's votes aren't perfect, everyone knows that.
I experienced it myself that not the accepted/highest-score answer, but the answer with the second or third highest score was most helpful to me. I never said SO's voting system is the best voting system there is, I said that SO has a voting system and SO (not its voting system) is generally considered the best resource for programming questions, which is an indication that a voting system on a programming forum might not be as harmful as people here expect.

I have no idea what HN stands for.

April 01, 2021
On 01.04.21 14:36, user1234 wrote:
> 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.

Fair point, though I think it's a bit better there because an upvote usually expresses agreement with all the points in the post, while a downvote may be due to disagreement with any of possibly multiple points in the post.

And then there's also the possibility that a vote is based on some misunderstanding, which affects downvotes more than upvotes.
April 01, 2021
On 01.04.21 16:33, 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.

You are shifting the goal posts. His point was about voting on individual posts that are part of some debate.
April 01, 2021
On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 08:05:29 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
> What I get from this is that voting can be also good or bad depending on how we use it.

The problem is that it's extremely difficult to establish and enforce a healthy voting culture.

Many websites have "rules" like "Don't downvote just because you disagree," "Upvote content that contributes to the discussion," "No brigading," and "No ballot stuffing." But, the breaking of these rules still ends up dominating the results.

Individual misuse of the voting system is much harder to detect than abuse of the right to comment, and so bad actors tend to stick around. Eventually they take over entirely, as voting begins to influence meta discussions like this one.

> IMHO having an upvote/downvote scheme could be beneficial
> in some situations if it is implemented properly.

I think forum voting systems are beneficial in some circumstances, but not specifically for the big technical debates that people are suggesting we use them for.
April 01, 2021

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 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 โ€” and I'd claim it is because of their voting system and not in spite of it.

Forum voting tends to works OK when an issue is reasonably clear, objective, and testable, or low-stakes, or when there is no need nor intention to force the majority's opinion on the minority.

If someone disagrees with the highest voted answer on a Stack Overflow question, they can just use a different one, or make up their own. By contrast, if someone disagrees with how their national government is run, they generally can't just go start a new one. Hence, people tend to be much more aggressive or manipulative in their use of voting in political discussions.

Threads in D's "Learn" forum, most bug reports, and most pull requests are mostly the former sort of content, where voting isn't a problem.

However, the long debates in the D's "General" forum concerning the future direction of the language are sometimes closer to the latter sort of content, where anyone who wants or needs to participate in the ecosystem just has to live with the consequences of whatever decision is ultimately made. Hence, passions run higher, and the risk of abusive voting is much higher.

April 02, 2021
On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 15:56:23 UTC, ag0aep6g wrote:
> On 01.04.21 17:38, Q. Schroll wrote:
>> cost–risk–benefit analysis.
>
> @Vladimir, I think something went wrong with the rich text thingy. This message shows "–" in Thunderbird.

They are that way because the author typed them that way. It is probably the easiest way to type those characters on many systems.

I added a lint rule which warns on HTML entities, and offers to fix it (by converting them into Unicode characters).

April 02, 2021
On Thursday, 1 April 2021 at 14:25:09 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> ...

It seems that we already have some sort of voting system in these forums, just look at all of these +1 replies, it is just not being used by web interface, to provide some useful insight.

I think it is possible to have a voting system, based on +1 emails which people tend to reply when they see a message or a section of that message that they agree on, and simply have nothing more to say.

Usually such messages start with an excerpt from previous message, followed by a +1 and optionally some text that expresses users opinion on that message (by enforcing or complementing it).

If we do implement it based on such kind of emails, the NNTP clients would see them as another bunch of emails, however the web interface would be able to parse them, and then highlight original message with how many up-votes or down-votes (if any) that section of message has. It may even optionally show list of replies that up-voted/down-voted that section.

The advantage of using +1 emails, is that user doesn't just up-vote or down-vote a message, he has to specify which part of message he up-votes/down-votes.

The web interface may introduce also some restrictions to down-vote capability requiring user to type some reason to down-vote, otherwise it would not be counted.

As for users who down-vote/up-vote ignoring restrictions found in web interface, web interface should just ignore them, and hide from any insight it may provide.

Best regards,
Alexandru.


April 02, 2021
On 4/2/2021 12:58 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> @Vladimir, I think something went wrong with the rich text thingy. This message shows "–" in Thunderbird.
> 
> They are that way because the author typed them that way. It is probably the easiest way to type those characters on many systems.

I cast about for a long time on the easiest way to add Unicode characters in microEmacs. I finally settled on placing the cursor over a character, and hitting ^X-U. It will scroll through related symbols. Put it over an a, and it will scroll through รค, etc. You don't need to remember anything but "it looks like an a".

Of course this doesn't remotely handle all Unicode characters, but it gets the most used ones.
April 02, 2021
On Friday, 2 April 2021 at 10:07:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/2/2021 12:58 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>>> @Vladimir, I think something went wrong with the rich text thingy. This message shows "–" in Thunderbird.
>> 
>> They are that way because the author typed them that way. It is probably the easiest way to type those characters on many systems.
>
> I cast about for a long time on the easiest way to add Unicode characters in microEmacs. I finally settled on placing the cursor over a character, and hitting ^X-U. It will scroll through related symbols. Put it over an a, and it will scroll through รค, etc. You don't need to remember anything but "it looks like an a".
>
> Of course this doesn't remotely handle all Unicode characters, but it gets the most used ones.

Here is how I do it:

https://dump.cy.md/de83f239e276fa30d882c736f8fba7f3/2021-04-02%2010%3A09%3A45.mp4

๐Ÿ˜ƒ