it means there is no way to downvote trolls without starting flame wars.
Not if the mechanism for including a comment with your vote is separate from the usual commenting mechanism: e.g., you can enter up to 140 characters (or 80 or 72 or some other traditional number) to describe your reason for voting as you did, and then hovering over the upvote or downvote count shows a selection of these reasons. (All of them, if there aren’t too many.) No provision for replying to these, other than by editing the comment that was voted on or adding an extra comment.
I don’t know whether this would actually be a good thing on balance, but it doesn’t seem like it need lead to flame wars.
I can imagine a vote-tagging mechanism that doesn’t lead to interaction, but my intuition is that this requires that the vote-tags be standardized. The moment the tag becomes an actual comment expressing a novel thought by an individual, the usual conversational dynamics allow for interaction with the person addressed. (If the system makes this awkward by requiring it to be implemented as a comment that doesn’t obviously descend from the thing it’s replying to, that won’t stop people from responding to it, it will just make people annoyed by the awkwardness.)
The moment the tag becomes an actual comment expressing a novel thought by an individual, the usual conversational dynamics allow for interaction with the person addressed.
interesting point, but I’m unsure whether that makes it a bad thing.
Anyway, the basis my preference for just letting you highlight some text before you click (above) is that (1) it’s low effort which increases participation (2) it pinpoints the cause of the appreciation/disapproval (3) it’s more flexible than a fixed set of tags.
Not if the mechanism for including a comment with your vote is separate from the usual commenting mechanism: e.g., you can enter up to 140 characters (or 80 or 72 or some other traditional number) to describe your reason for voting as you did, and then hovering over the upvote or downvote count shows a selection of these reasons. (All of them, if there aren’t too many.) No provision for replying to these, other than by editing the comment that was voted on or adding an extra comment.
I don’t know whether this would actually be a good thing on balance, but it doesn’t seem like it need lead to flame wars.
I can imagine a vote-tagging mechanism that doesn’t lead to interaction, but my intuition is that this requires that the vote-tags be standardized. The moment the tag becomes an actual comment expressing a novel thought by an individual, the usual conversational dynamics allow for interaction with the person addressed. (If the system makes this awkward by requiring it to be implemented as a comment that doesn’t obviously descend from the thing it’s replying to, that won’t stop people from responding to it, it will just make people annoyed by the awkwardness.)
interesting point, but I’m unsure whether that makes it a bad thing.
Anyway, the basis my preference for just letting you highlight some text before you click (above) is that (1) it’s low effort which increases participation (2) it pinpoints the cause of the appreciation/disapproval (3) it’s more flexible than a fixed set of tags.