The problem: At present, when a post has 0 reviews, there is an incentive against writing critical reviews. Writing such a review enables the post to enter the voting phase, which you don’t especially want to happen if you think the post is undeserving. This seems perverse: critical reviews are valuable, especially so if someone would write a positive review later, enabling the post to enter voting anyway. (In principle, you can “lie in ambush” until someone writes a positive review and only then write your negative review, but that requires annoying logistics.)
My suggestion: Allow flagging reviews as “critical” in the UI. (One option is to consider a review “critical” whenever your own vote for the post is negative, another is to have a separate checkbox.) Such reviews would not count for enabling the post to enter voting.
Somewhat related problem: a lot of the impact of writing a review is that it bumps the post into awareness on the frontpage which makes it more likely for people who liked it to see it and vote positively on it (whether this is good or bad from the perspective of a critical reviewer depends on whether you think you’re writing a takedown of something popular, or, just clarifying why something-isn’t-good that there was already rough mutual agreement wasn’t that good). I don’t know that that problem needs “solving” but wanted to acknowledge it and see if anyone had thoughts.
Here’s a feature proposal.
The problem: At present, when a post has 0 reviews, there is an incentive against writing critical reviews. Writing such a review enables the post to enter the voting phase, which you don’t especially want to happen if you think the post is undeserving. This seems perverse: critical reviews are valuable, especially so if someone would write a positive review later, enabling the post to enter voting anyway. (In principle, you can “lie in ambush” until someone writes a positive review and only then write your negative review, but that requires annoying logistics.)
My suggestion: Allow flagging reviews as “critical” in the UI. (One option is to consider a review “critical” whenever your own vote for the post is negative, another is to have a separate checkbox.) Such reviews would not count for enabling the post to enter voting.
Mmm.
Somewhat related problem: a lot of the impact of writing a review is that it bumps the post into awareness on the frontpage which makes it more likely for people who liked it to see it and vote positively on it (whether this is good or bad from the perspective of a critical reviewer depends on whether you think you’re writing a takedown of something popular, or, just clarifying why something-isn’t-good that there was already rough mutual agreement wasn’t that good). I don’t know that that problem needs “solving” but wanted to acknowledge it and see if anyone had thoughts.