I would like to be able to publicly say eg “hear hear” on a comment or post, without cluttering up the replies. Where the “like” button is absent eg on Livejournal, I sorely miss it. This is nothing to do with voting and should be wholly orthogonal; voting is anonymous and feeds into the ranking algorithm, where this is more like a comment that says very little and takes up minimal screen real estate, but allows people to get a quick feel for who thinks what about a comment.
Starting with “thumbs up” would be a big step forward, but I’d hope that other reactions would become available later, eg “disagree connotationally” or “haha” or “don’t like the tone” or “I want to help with this”. Each should be associated with a small graphic, with a hover-over to show the meaning as well as who applied the reaction. Like emoji in eg Discord and unlike Facebook, a single user can apply multiple reactions to the same comment, so I can say both “agree” and “don’t like the tone”.
I apologise for having buried this feature request in the depths of not one but two comment threads before putting it here :)
The main difficulty with these systems is finding the right balance of expressiveness and simplicity. I can definitely see some advantages of having a “dislike tone” option that is separate from down-voting. I don’t know if I’d want a whole bunch of options added though, as that might become too complex.
I disagree. I think this is anti-epistemic and tends to devolve easily into bad manners, politics, and harassment.
See, e.g., the Sufficient Velocity forum, where any reaction with a negative sentiment (including things as mild as ‘sarcasm’ and ‘Picard facepalm’, and ones that were only accessible in limited quantities to paid subscribers) were quickly discontinued because they were used for flaming and Internet Arguments.
Facebook-like reactions.
I would like to be able to publicly say eg “hear hear” on a comment or post, without cluttering up the replies. Where the “like” button is absent eg on Livejournal, I sorely miss it. This is nothing to do with voting and should be wholly orthogonal; voting is anonymous and feeds into the ranking algorithm, where this is more like a comment that says very little and takes up minimal screen real estate, but allows people to get a quick feel for who thinks what about a comment.
Starting with “thumbs up” would be a big step forward, but I’d hope that other reactions would become available later, eg “disagree connotationally” or “haha” or “don’t like the tone” or “I want to help with this”. Each should be associated with a small graphic, with a hover-over to show the meaning as well as who applied the reaction. Like emoji in eg Discord and unlike Facebook, a single user can apply multiple reactions to the same comment, so I can say both “agree” and “don’t like the tone”.
I apologise for having buried this feature request in the depths of not one but two comment threads before putting it here :)
The main difficulty with these systems is finding the right balance of expressiveness and simplicity. I can definitely see some advantages of having a “dislike tone” option that is separate from down-voting. I don’t know if I’d want a whole bunch of options added though, as that might become too complex.
I disagree. I think this is anti-epistemic and tends to devolve easily into bad manners, politics, and harassment.
See, e.g., the Sufficient Velocity forum, where any reaction with a negative sentiment (including things as mild as ‘sarcasm’ and ‘Picard facepalm’, and ones that were only accessible in limited quantities to paid subscribers) were quickly discontinued because they were used for flaming and Internet Arguments.