I’ve just discovered LW has a “voting rate limit” (error message: “Voting rate limit exceeded: too many votes in one hour”). I understand why this is there, but suggest it’s probably too low / should scale with your own karma or something. As-is, I think it has some unintended distorting effects.
Concretely, I was reading Duncan’s Shoulder Advisors post which has a prolific comments section (currently 101 comments), and as I read the comments I upvoted ones I found valuable. And then at some point I could no longer vote on comments.
Consequences:
The comments are sorted by karma in descending order, so I ran out of votes precisely at the point when they would’ve been most impactful, i.e. to upvote valuable low-karma comments. Conversely, the high-karma comments which didn’t particularly need my upvote got it without a problem. EDIT: In fact, by running out of votes mid-way, my votes further widened the gap between the highly upvoted and less upvoted comments.
If I continue reading more on the site, I can’t vote on stuff until the rate limit ends.
There’s no clear indicator when the rate limit will end, and the experience of voting on something only to get a black bar at the bottom of the screen instead feels a bit annoying.
(To be clear, this is an exceedingly minor problem; it’s the first time it has happened to me on LW in 8+ years on the site; and I expect it could only really happen in posts which have tons of short comments; but conversely I also expect this problem is relatively easy to fix.)
EDIT: Another fix would be to rate-limit votes on posts more strictly than on comments.
I think we should somehow display these in the error message. In particular whether you hit the rate limit for the hour, or the day, or the per-user-per-day.
I do think I don’t want to make these rate limits much laxxer. They are currently a guard against someone having a massively undue effect on the ratings on the site by just voting on everything. And I think 100/day is something that normal voting behavior very rarely gets above (my guess is you ran into the hourly rate-limit).
Yeah, when it comes to voting on posts, these limits seem more than fine. And even for comments, this should usually be enough. So it seems I might have found the one edge case where a limit is maybe too strict (i.e. the hourly limit vs. a big comment thread of short comments).
Re: the current error messages, they already say e.g. “too many votes in one hour”, though I guess they could stand to contain the actual applicable limit.
If I continue reading more on the site, I can’t vote on stuff until the rate limit ends.
You can’t register a vote. The computational part—evaluation—can be done if you can read, and record your thoughts.
Caveats:
If you would want to change your voting if the context changes (surrounding or following comments).
If someone edits something (usually denoted somehow, like ETA), that might change your evaluation.
The fix for both is save.
EDIT: Another fix would be to rate-limit votes on posts more strictly than on comments.
Or have a separate voting system, and import later. This could enable prioritization of votes.
(As software, a separate voting system, something big) Benefits of this approach:
No rate limits.
Backups.
If used more broadly (say by a lot of people), you could experiment with different ranking/display options. Display upvotes and downvotes, switch between ‘votes weighted by karma’, and base ranking with users.
Right now there’s upvoting and strong upvoting. WIth an entirely different system, you’re free to experiment. (Should there be upvoting or downvoting? Should a thread of comments be ranked on the parent node’s rating, or also take into account the rating of child nodes?)
Being able to add more features. Like, bookmarking comments as well as posts.
I’ve just discovered LW has a “voting rate limit” (error message: “Voting rate limit exceeded: too many votes in one hour”). I understand why this is there, but suggest it’s probably too low / should scale with your own karma or something. As-is, I think it has some unintended distorting effects.
Concretely, I was reading Duncan’s Shoulder Advisors post which has a prolific comments section (currently 101 comments), and as I read the comments I upvoted ones I found valuable. And then at some point I could no longer vote on comments.
Consequences:
The comments are sorted by karma in descending order, so I ran out of votes precisely at the point when they would’ve been most impactful, i.e. to upvote valuable low-karma comments. Conversely, the high-karma comments which didn’t particularly need my upvote got it without a problem. EDIT: In fact, by running out of votes mid-way, my votes further widened the gap between the highly upvoted and less upvoted comments.
If I continue reading more on the site, I can’t vote on stuff until the rate limit ends.
There’s no clear indicator when the rate limit will end, and the experience of voting on something only to get a black bar at the bottom of the screen instead feels a bit annoying.
(To be clear, this is an exceedingly minor problem; it’s the first time it has happened to me on LW in 8+ years on the site; and I expect it could only really happen in posts which have tons of short comments; but conversely I also expect this problem is relatively easy to fix.)
EDIT: Another fix would be to rate-limit votes on posts more strictly than on comments.
Note, here are our current rate limits:
I think we should somehow display these in the error message. In particular whether you hit the rate limit for the hour, or the day, or the per-user-per-day.
I do think I don’t want to make these rate limits much laxxer. They are currently a guard against someone having a massively undue effect on the ratings on the site by just voting on everything. And I think 100/day is something that normal voting behavior very rarely gets above (my guess is you ran into the hourly rate-limit).
Yeah, when it comes to voting on posts, these limits seem more than fine. And even for comments, this should usually be enough. So it seems I might have found the one edge case where a limit is maybe too strict (i.e. the hourly limit vs. a big comment thread of short comments).
Re: the current error messages, they already say e.g. “too many votes in one hour”, though I guess they could stand to contain the actual applicable limit.
You can’t register a vote. The computational part—evaluation—can be done if you can read, and record your thoughts.
Caveats:
If you would want to change your voting if the context changes (surrounding or following comments).
If someone edits something (usually denoted somehow, like ETA), that might change your evaluation.
The fix for both is save.
Or have a separate voting system, and import later. This could enable prioritization of votes.
(As software, a separate voting system, something big) Benefits of this approach:
No rate limits.
Backups.
If used more broadly (say by a lot of people), you could experiment with different ranking/display options. Display upvotes and downvotes, switch between ‘votes weighted by karma’, and base ranking with users.
Right now there’s upvoting and strong upvoting. WIth an entirely different system, you’re free to experiment. (Should there be upvoting or downvoting? Should a thread of comments be ranked on the parent node’s rating, or also take into account the rating of child nodes?)
Being able to add more features. Like, bookmarking comments as well as posts.
Social bookmarking.