If you are showing words anyway, do you need the thumbs at all? How about just making the text clickable, and when you click it it becomes bold (like the current voting system) and the count updates.
I agree with Emile that showing thumbs seems like a bad idea, because (at least for me) “thumb up”/”thumb down” means “this is good”/”this is bad”. Indeed, the original meaning of “spare him”/”feed him to the lion” seems more like up/downvoting than like agree/disagreeing.
I think thumbs shouldn’t be used for agreement, since this is a more specific characterization than relevance/quality/yay! of Karma (and the purpose of agree/disagree is partially to make this component explicit where it’s well-defined), but +/- for agree/disagree will just be confusing.
My suggestion for agree/disagree are ‘==’ (equals) and ‘=/=’ (not equals) symbols drawn in sufficiently clear way, perhaps in circles.
My suggestion for agree/disagree are ‘==’ (equals) and ‘=/=’ (not equals) symbols drawn is sufficiently clear way, perhaps in circles.
So long as mouseover text (for example) makes it clear what on earth the == stuff means.
Mind you I suspect I will opt out of the agree/disagree feature via greasemonkey anyway. I tend to find that the judgement of humans is leaky and that the underlying cause of a negative judgement (be it disagreement with the comment, disagreement with other comments that are similar, disapproval of the subject or disapproval of the author) is something that must be inferred from the context. I suspect that I would find the behavioural patterns related to the agree/disagree feature slightly irritating to watch.
I think it is the honesty or straightforwardness of karma votes that appeals to me. “Trivial positive political action; trivial negative political action”. So when I see something that is obviously correct that gets downvoted heavily it just means that some folks had personal reasons to downvote. Fair enough. But if there were lots of ‘disagree’ votes then that really would mean that the thinking processes of the community was defective.
The above isn’t meant as an argument against or a complaint about the implementation of the new feature. I’m sure it’ll be great for those who are interested in that sort of thing. I just may personally filter it out of my awareness. :)
This might be too late to the discussion, but have you considered combining the vote systems into a grid below each comment, with the Y-axis as karma and the X-axis as agree/disgree? This would halve the number of clicks needed to vote.
We’ll show a total, and word choice for the total might solve that problem:
+5 agreevs-3 (disagree)If you are showing words anyway, do you need the thumbs at all? How about just making the text clickable, and when you click it it becomes bold (like the current voting system) and the count updates.
I agree with Emile that showing thumbs seems like a bad idea, because (at least for me) “thumb up”/”thumb down” means “this is good”/”this is bad”. Indeed, the original meaning of “spare him”/”feed him to the lion” seems more like up/downvoting than like agree/disagreeing.
How about showing:
With the 5 and 3 clickable.
I think I am convinced that thumbs should be used for karma, and +- for agree/disagree.
Maybe the most natural thing for agree/disagree is a green check mark and a red cross? Then karma could maybe stay +/-.
ETA: I see Emile’s example incorporates a check mark and cross also, though there the cross looks a little like it’s being used as a check mark.
I think thumbs shouldn’t be used for agreement, since this is a more specific characterization than relevance/quality/yay! of Karma (and the purpose of agree/disagree is partially to make this component explicit where it’s well-defined), but +/- for agree/disagree will just be confusing.
My suggestion for agree/disagree are ‘==’ (equals) and ‘=/=’ (not equals) symbols drawn in sufficiently clear way, perhaps in circles.
So long as mouseover text (for example) makes it clear what on earth the == stuff means.
Mind you I suspect I will opt out of the agree/disagree feature via greasemonkey anyway. I tend to find that the judgement of humans is leaky and that the underlying cause of a negative judgement (be it disagreement with the comment, disagreement with other comments that are similar, disapproval of the subject or disapproval of the author) is something that must be inferred from the context. I suspect that I would find the behavioural patterns related to the agree/disagree feature slightly irritating to watch.
I think it is the honesty or straightforwardness of karma votes that appeals to me. “Trivial positive political action; trivial negative political action”. So when I see something that is obviously correct that gets downvoted heavily it just means that some folks had personal reasons to downvote. Fair enough. But if there were lots of ‘disagree’ votes then that really would mean that the thinking processes of the community was defective.
The above isn’t meant as an argument against or a complaint about the implementation of the new feature. I’m sure it’ll be great for those who are interested in that sort of thing. I just may personally filter it out of my awareness. :)
This might be too late to the discussion, but have you considered combining the vote systems into a grid below each comment, with the Y-axis as karma and the X-axis as agree/disgree? This would halve the number of clicks needed to vote.
How about something like this? The agree / disagree info is nice and short at the bottom right, and you get an explanation in a tooltip.