Posts are linkable, comments to posts are not. (ERRATUM: they are also linkable)
Compounded with the fact that comment threading is limited to two levels and comments are loaded in small batches, making even the browser in-page search function useless, it makes following discussion with hundreds of comments impossible.
However, one of the things that Facebook does right and LW/Reddit does not, IMHO, is that votes on Facebook (well, there are only likes, actually) are public. Even if there were downvotes, making them public would make it socially harder to pull the mass downvoting sprees and other manipulations that plague LW and Reddit.
I think “plague” is too strong a word, on LW at least. Mass downvoting is an obnoxious nuisance but so far as I know there’s only one person (with, admittedly, at least three identities at different times) who’s done much of it. There are occasional reasons to suspect small-scale vote manipulation of other kinds (a few sockpuppets, a small voting ring) but not very often, not very severely, and so far as I know never to such an extent that there was a serious investigation, never mind anyone getting caught.
The obvious downside to public voting is that it increases the scope for downvoting to produce hostility and/or drama. Perhaps that just means an equilibrium where no one downvotes anything that isn’t clearly terrible. Would that be better or worse? I’m really not sure.
(Technically, how would it work out? Surely we shouldn’t retroactively make everyone’s historical votes publicly visible—they were made with the understanding that they weren’t going to be. But then we have a system with two kinds of votes in: old ones that aren’t publicly visible and new ones that are. That’s going to complicate things.)
True. But I suspect the polls are an extra thing that was added on with that feature already in place, whereas the voting mechanics are already there without provision for two kinds of vote. Modifying existing code in ways that break assumptions it may have made is always more painful than writing new code.
The existing code is likely a database that tells you whether people have voted for a specific post. Adding an additional column to that database for private/public votes shouldn’t be hard.
From my hazy memory of the LW codebase, you may be making unjustified assumptions about how it stores data. The database setup is … idiosyncratic.
(Here is an article—with a link to more details—about the Reddit DB architecture. LW is, I believe, forked from a version of Reddit a bit older than that article.)
I agree that public votes would likely improve the state of affairs. Public downvotes allow a person who doesn’t understand why they were downvoted to ask the person directly.
It also creates social accountability for the votes.
Posts are linkable, comments to posts are not. (ERRATUM: they are also linkable)
Compounded with the fact that comment threading is limited to two levels and comments are loaded in small batches, making even the browser in-page search function useless, it makes following discussion with hundreds of comments impossible.
However, one of the things that Facebook does right and LW/Reddit does not, IMHO, is that votes on Facebook (well, there are only likes, actually) are public. Even if there were downvotes, making them public would make it socially harder to pull the mass downvoting sprees and other manipulations that plague LW and Reddit.
I think “plague” is too strong a word, on LW at least. Mass downvoting is an obnoxious nuisance but so far as I know there’s only one person (with, admittedly, at least three identities at different times) who’s done much of it. There are occasional reasons to suspect small-scale vote manipulation of other kinds (a few sockpuppets, a small voting ring) but not very often, not very severely, and so far as I know never to such an extent that there was a serious investigation, never mind anyone getting caught.
The obvious downside to public voting is that it increases the scope for downvoting to produce hostility and/or drama. Perhaps that just means an equilibrium where no one downvotes anything that isn’t clearly terrible. Would that be better or worse? I’m really not sure.
(Technically, how would it work out? Surely we shouldn’t retroactively make everyone’s historical votes publicly visible—they were made with the understanding that they weren’t going to be. But then we have a system with two kinds of votes in: old ones that aren’t publicly visible and new ones that are. That’s going to complicate things.)
We already have such a system for the polls that allow you to vote annonymously and also to vote with your name.
True. But I suspect the polls are an extra thing that was added on with that feature already in place, whereas the voting mechanics are already there without provision for two kinds of vote. Modifying existing code in ways that break assumptions it may have made is always more painful than writing new code.
The existing code is likely a database that tells you whether people have voted for a specific post. Adding an additional column to that database for private/public votes shouldn’t be hard.
From my hazy memory of the LW codebase, you may be making unjustified assumptions about how it stores data. The database setup is … idiosyncratic.
(Here is an article—with a link to more details—about the Reddit DB architecture. LW is, I believe, forked from a version of Reddit a bit older than that article.)
You might want to read the comment you’re replying to again.
Right, my bad.
I agree that public votes would likely improve the state of affairs. Public downvotes allow a person who doesn’t understand why they were downvoted to ask the person directly. It also creates social accountability for the votes.