I believe that “like” and “dislike” are good choices, especially if you want people to make a lot of votes, without spending too much time thinking about it. Anything more complex, and most people will not use it; and if that means they cannot vote, then less people will vote (and the results of voting will represent a smaller set of people, mostly the compulsive voters). Time spent voting (not per one comment, but site-wide) is a limited resource.
I think that when websites try to measure more than one dimension, the usual outcome is that the answers correlate so much it was worthless to distinguish between them. No matter how precisely you specify the voting rules, when people like something, they will usually give it the highest rating in all dimensions (even completely irrelevant ones), and when they dislike something, they will give it the lowest rating in all dimensions. The ones who think deeper about it will be “less productive” voters than the ones who don’t.
So it should be like/dislike first, and then optionally a flavor next. (Different flavors for likes and dislikes, obviously.)
Perhaps adding a third option, “meh”, would still work okay. I mean, “meh” is neither an upvote nor a downvote; it means no strong reaction in either way, it doesn’t provide information for others, but it could be useful for you to distinguish between comments you already voted “meh” from the comments you haven’t voted yet. And, if we go the way of “vote + flavor”, there could be a collection of flavors with “meh” (probably with some overlap with the flavors for “like” and “dislike”).
Maybe it should be possible to write your own flavor text for a vote, and the most frequent choices (for the specific vote type: upvote/meh/downvote) should be offered as a menu. So you could choose between what other people mostly use, or write your own text.
This is precisely why I’m against adding a single additional voting system for “agree/disagree” – I think it will mostly be adding complexity without actually adding an additional stream of value.
But the way Facebook handles Reacts is much more about emotional expression than “+1/-1”. I think if Reacts are primarily about nuance rather than being at-all about “+1/-1″, they can serve a pretty different niche.
I believe that “like” and “dislike” are good choices, especially if you want people to make a lot of votes, without spending too much time thinking about it. Anything more complex, and most people will not use it; and if that means they cannot vote, then less people will vote (and the results of voting will represent a smaller set of people, mostly the compulsive voters). Time spent voting (not per one comment, but site-wide) is a limited resource.
I think that when websites try to measure more than one dimension, the usual outcome is that the answers correlate so much it was worthless to distinguish between them. No matter how precisely you specify the voting rules, when people like something, they will usually give it the highest rating in all dimensions (even completely irrelevant ones), and when they dislike something, they will give it the lowest rating in all dimensions. The ones who think deeper about it will be “less productive” voters than the ones who don’t.
So it should be like/dislike first, and then optionally a flavor next. (Different flavors for likes and dislikes, obviously.)
Perhaps adding a third option, “meh”, would still work okay. I mean, “meh” is neither an upvote nor a downvote; it means no strong reaction in either way, it doesn’t provide information for others, but it could be useful for you to distinguish between comments you already voted “meh” from the comments you haven’t voted yet. And, if we go the way of “vote + flavor”, there could be a collection of flavors with “meh” (probably with some overlap with the flavors for “like” and “dislike”).
Maybe it should be possible to write your own flavor text for a vote, and the most frequent choices (for the specific vote type: upvote/meh/downvote) should be offered as a menu. So you could choose between what other people mostly use, or write your own text.
This is precisely why I’m against adding a single additional voting system for “agree/disagree” – I think it will mostly be adding complexity without actually adding an additional stream of value.
But the way Facebook handles Reacts is much more about emotional expression than “+1/-1”. I think if Reacts are primarily about nuance rather than being at-all about “+1/-1″, they can serve a pretty different niche.