The nice thing about karma/voting sites like this one is that they provide an efficient and socially acceptable mechanism for signaling agreement: just hit the upmod button. Nobody wants to read or listen to page after page of “me too”; forcing people to tolerate this would be bad enough to negate the advantage of making agreement visible. Voting accomplishes the same visibility without the irritating side-effects.
There’s a bit of noise, as I sometimes vote up someone I disagree with if they raise an interesting point, and I very, very rarely vote someone down just because I disagree with them.
This “bit of noise” becomes significant on sites with a small number of subscribers, as a +/-2 vote is a “big deal”.
I think that’s a feature, not a bug. What an upvote expresses is nearer to “you should listen to this guy” than to “I agree with this guy”, but I think the former is more useful information.
There should be an emotional display of how many upvotes a post got.
Numbers are, well, too numbery for that.
Either a smile with ever growing smile.
or a ballon that grows bigger and bigger (for posts that really get way too upvoted, the ballon could explode into colorfull bright carnival paper, or candy, or Brad Pitt, or Russian Redheads...)
I like the idea, but they seem kind of gimmicky. (thinking of LW’s comments section, it would be hard to give another icon the kind of prominence we want, without making it too big). How about a green/red bar, like the one on YouTube?
The nice thing about karma/voting sites like this one is that they provide an efficient and socially acceptable mechanism for signaling agreement: just hit the upmod button. Nobody wants to read or listen to page after page of “me too”; forcing people to tolerate this would be bad enough to negate the advantage of making agreement visible. Voting accomplishes the same visibility without the irritating side-effects.
There’s a bit of noise, as I sometimes vote up someone I disagree with if they raise an interesting point, and I very, very rarely vote someone down just because I disagree with them.
This “bit of noise” becomes significant on sites with a small number of subscribers, as a +/-2 vote is a “big deal”.
I think that’s a feature, not a bug. What an upvote expresses is nearer to “you should listen to this guy” than to “I agree with this guy”, but I think the former is more useful information.
There should be an emotional display of how many upvotes a post got.
Numbers are, well, too numbery for that.
Either a smile with ever growing smile.
or a ballon that grows bigger and bigger (for posts that really get way too upvoted, the ballon could explode into colorfull bright carnival paper, or candy, or Brad Pitt, or Russian Redheads...)
Ok, ballon or smile, who is with me?
I like the idea, but they seem kind of gimmicky. (thinking of LW’s comments section, it would be hard to give another icon the kind of prominence we want, without making it too big). How about a green/red bar, like the one on YouTube?