8 years ago from Simon Goetz, Partner at Milkshake | Mountain man at heart
Just trying to see if people think down voting would be useful. I sometimes see posts at the top which I think aren't as good as ones below and wish I could down vote. Thoughts?
I downvote by not upvoting. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
I wish it would work like that. Lately I've seen posts from some agencies popping up, where probably all of their employees upvote the post to get on the top.
Especially on weekends when it's relatively quiet, posts stay on the top.
Scroll down.
I agree it is a problem. But the small problem isn't large enough to justify deploying a downvote.
I'm neither in favour nor in objection to a downvote, but I think it's quite a large concern that it's easy for companies to game the system to get their content posted. I hate seeing low-quality articles get upvoted which have little substance.
Personally, I love DN as a community for high quality content which filters out the bullshit ones written by companies as part of their marketing strategy rather than as part of their will want to share quality works of writing. I'd hate to see DN turn into an outlet for companies to share their articles as part of their marketing/growth strategy.
I'd suggest a Flag button
Haha, I saw exactly the same. Some post from Zurb had like 14 karma within 5 minutes.
Completely agree. My thought about this is: If you don't have anything good to say about something/someone, then simply save it if it's not constructive feedback. There is a lot of negative energy that comes attached with a down vote. Most popular ones will always be the ones with more up votes anyway.
I wish I could downvote this...
No, I don't think we need downvotes.
What we do need is a "Report spam" button for the occasional spam comment that makes it through onto here. We're a small community that has been mostly spam-free, but the occasional bit of crap does make it onto DN and it'd be nice for the users to have some official way to alert the staff.
I agree with this idea, at least on its surface. Perhaps some automation features to remove a comment after it gets marked x number of times, then perhaps locking an account after x number of comments are marked, etc.
But it sounds like a lot of code for something that hasn't been too annoying for me yet; while I have seen spam on here, it just hasn't been that much.
And I am also against a down voting feature, unless perhaps it is similar to Stack Overflow's, which again is quite complex and would be a good bit of code.
We are a relatively small community, and while these features may be nice, I'd rather see efforts towards making a search feature that actually works, because there's so much great content in these archives that I have trouble finding without the Google site:designernews.co method.
Obviously an automated system would be ideal, but as you say...
sounds like a lot of code
I would just like us to have a "Report Spam" button next to the Reply button. All it needs to do is bring the comment to the attention of staff once enough people click the Report Spam button. Maybe 5? I dunno. That'd be up to them.
I agree that we need a better way to Report Spam.
Agree 100%. This is a much better solution to the problem.
While I dont want a downvote button on DN, I would downvote this if given the ability.
lol
I'd rather time be spent on adjusting Karma - more specifically how it's awarded - as has been promised for many, many months now. It's absolutely crazy how you can answer someone's question, get a crap-ton of likes and help the person out, but not get karma for that.
One of the reasons we see spam is because karma is awarded to those who post topics and get upvotes... which honestly, has nothing to do with what "karma" really is.
I made a cheesy joke once about H&Co Gotham/Batman that got around 80 likes. Still waiting for that karma boost...
But what is the use of karma anyway? and why do we need have it awarded? You know if you have a good karma or not, I don't see what it brings to the game. But I'm curious.
Honestly, it's nice to have colors.
Provided people don't abuse it, perhaps people could mark comments as something along the lines of "thoughtful","helpful" or "insightful," and get a special type of comment karma awarded there. We could have a threshold which limits this kind of upvoting to persons who have been on the site for x months or by karma.
I also think (ideally, now) it could be an indication of credibility. I also think it's a nice token of appreciation. If I asked a question or needed help... and someone came through, it's be nice to give them a Karma "token" as a way of saying "thanks, you helped me out". It seems cheesy, but having that full feedback loop is huge. It would ideally get people trying to help more and allows those who were helped the opportunity to +1 the user.
On another board I'm on... each user has a point they can give a day. You don't have to if you don't want to, but you have one "super +1" you can toss at someone... whether you think the post is great, the response was great... whatever...
Maybe something similar could work here?
I'm giving you my virtual token for this answer :) Great idea. I believe it would make the whole experience more useful for participants.
While a nice idea, it seems that this encourages shitposting one-liners and manifests the popularity contest phenomenon à la Reddit.
Hmm... I think just upvoting is fine tbh.
I think it's fine how it is :)
Down voting is inherently negative.
that is the point
No, please continue to encourage constructive feedback!
-1 to downvote. +1 to flag.
The reason DN works so well is its simplicity. You can already find dozens of design forums with complicated profiles, sorting and rating systems, signatures, hundreds of threads, sub threads and posts each with their own replies and quotes.
I don't see a reason for a down-vote button, if you don't like something, just scroll past it - DN doesn't get such a high volume of posts for this to be a problem.
My thoughts are that this function will not only complicate DN, but also change the general atmosphere: it would be easier to hate on people, posts or comments you dislike and discourage participation.
I wouldn't want down voting. Giving posts a tug-of-war between points directs more attention onto the medium rather than the content.
No, but I do agree a report button would be great. Also, slightly unrelated, @designernewsbot should only post once a post has ~5 upvotes.
Yes. It would be interesting to see how many 0 comments/low upvote articles appear in the front-page after that.
Nope
Depends if you think the average Designer News member follows community guidelines.
In the ideal world, downvoting is a strong signal someone's post or comment is out of line with community protocol. Unfortunately, there will be those who won't use it as such, opting instead to downvote content they disagree with (see Hacker News). That's kind of a problem when you want to foster meaningful discussion in a civil manner.
Anyway as a possible side note, I see way fewer flame wars occurring here than other discussion forums where downvoting is permitted. Then again, correlation does not always imply causation.
I'm in only to get -100 Karma Points :D
Not really. The only time I've ever wanted to downvote something (on any forum) is immediately after I upvoted it by mistake (e.g. errant mouse click). I don't think downvoting is polite or helpful.
No, down-vote func wouldn't solve the problem—which IMO is not too critical anyway.
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