Originally Posted by
tcook052
Lots of forums on FT beyond that one.
Certainly; it's just the one most often named where it will be "abused" or "gamed," including in one post further back of yours that I was responding to, which you responded by quibbling about "like" vs. "helpful."
I'm still trying to find an explanation for how this is going to be abused that doesn't boil down to "people might click 'helpful' on something that was factually incorrect, and then other people might misunderstand that to be authoritative."
Originally Posted by
halls120
That's the biggest problem with this proposal - grouping posts by the number of likes will gut the context of some really good discussions.
Nobody has proposed that, and at least a few of us who are in favor of the mechanism in general have actively disclaimed that.
The consensus here seems to me to favor:
1. A Helpful button that shows the total count for a given post.
2. Per-member totals of votes received are NOT viewable by the public.
3. Total of votes received are NOT viewable privately by the recipient.
4. Vote count has no effect on thread display. I.e., no filtering option.
Except for #3, that sounds about right; #3 is still, IMO, harmless but it also doesn't add a lot of value (I'm sure, as you noted above, it would be gamed, but I don't think that gaming for pure egoboo score is likely to come out in ways that are intrusive on others; if people with too much time on their hands really want to waste time liking one anothers' posts on Omni/Games, I don't see the harm in it, and that's definitely where they should be suggested to go if they feel the need.)
The next two functions are a trade-off between value and implementation cost, and I don't yet have any information on the latter. So these will take time to research:
5. The Helpful button should be able to be turned on and off by forum.
Nice to have if it's easy to accommodate, although who then gets to decide which forums it's turned on/off for?
6. Members should have the ability to disable all display of the new functionality.
IMO, also nice to have if it's easy to accommodate, although I think the way it was phrased up-thread ("opt out completely" -- e.g. to disable other people voting on your posts) is probably disruptive and confusing. If the main display is itself tasteful and not too obtrusive, I don't see an option to hide it as a necessity. If it's not tasteful, or it's huge, even those of us who like the feature are likely to be bothered by it.
Remaining questions to be discussed further here:
7. Should voters' handles be publicly viewable? I lean to Yes on this.
IMO, this is a good bit less valuable if they're not. It's probably still worth having as an engagement mechanism, but it no longer has an individualized signaling function.
8. Should per-member totals be viewable by moderators? (This might not be an issue within TalkBoard's scope, but there's no harm in talking about it here.)
I don't see any real utility or harm in this; if there were a down-voting mechanism and we were trying to do a full-on reputation system, this would be necessary, but as you've said, the consensus is strongly against that.