Does it make sense that LW voting arrows are arranged the way they are? This is how they look right now:
username 12h ▾ 1 ▴ ✘ 5 ✔
My intuition protests, and I think I know why. Upvote and downvote arrows are usually stacked vertically, with the upvote arrow on top. When you translate vertical to left-to-right text, you get what was above to the left and what was below to the right. It means the following horizontal arrangement:
Hmm, I think I might be sold that that order would have been better. Unfortunately at this point the switching costs are reasonably high, so probably not worth thinking that much more about?
The reason for this orientation is that voting buttons used to be oriented horizontally. I.e. downvotes going left, and upvotes going right, on comments. We did this because we wanted to keep comments more dense and hadn’t figured out a way to make the big arrows associated with strong-votes not make the vote buttons extend too far into the content area.
In that context, you IMO clearly want the vote buttons facing away from the number, and at least my intuition says that an arrow facing right feels more like an upvote, and an arrow facing left feels more like a downvote.
When we figured out how to orient the buttons vertically, we preserved the old order of downvote left, upvote right. Hence this order. I think I agree with you that when thinking from first principles, the order you suggests is better.
Lol, I thought you did the counterintuitive thing on purpose in order to emphasize downvotes/disagree-votes, because you think people are too averse to using them.
The arrows used to be left- and right-pointing triangles, and I was incapable of remembering which one was upvoting. I’d just click one, and change it if it turned red.
Does it make sense that LW voting arrows are arranged the way they are? This is how they look right now:
My intuition protests, and I think I know why. Upvote and downvote arrows are usually stacked vertically, with the upvote arrow on top. When you translate vertical to left-to-right text, you get what was above to the left and what was below to the right. It means the following horizontal arrangement:
Hmm, I think I might be sold that that order would have been better. Unfortunately at this point the switching costs are reasonably high, so probably not worth thinking that much more about?
The reason for this orientation is that voting buttons used to be oriented horizontally. I.e. downvotes going left, and upvotes going right, on comments. We did this because we wanted to keep comments more dense and hadn’t figured out a way to make the big arrows associated with strong-votes not make the vote buttons extend too far into the content area.
In that context, you IMO clearly want the vote buttons facing away from the number, and at least my intuition says that an arrow facing right feels more like an upvote, and an arrow facing left feels more like a downvote.
When we figured out how to orient the buttons vertically, we preserved the old order of downvote left, upvote right. Hence this order. I think I agree with you that when thinking from first principles, the order you suggests is better.
Lol, I thought you did the counterintuitive thing on purpose in order to emphasize downvotes/disagree-votes, because you think people are too averse to using them.
Usually lower numbers go on the left and bigger numbers go on the right (1, 2, 3,…) so seems reasonable to have it this way.
The arrows used to be left- and right-pointing triangles, and I was incapable of remembering which one was upvoting. I’d just click one, and change it if it turned red.
Interesting. I think left/right arrows or triangles would be my most preferred/intuitive of the options.