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Dusk Dreamer
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>>55392
> Improved Visibility of User Interest
Another good way to do this, which wouldn't fall through the cracks when people DON'T VOTE, is to implement a View Counter. Each time a thread is viewed (full, +50, etc), it increments the total views. Thus, a popular quest would have many views. It would act roughly the same as having many votes for (popular) decisions.
> Generic Counter-argument of Cynicism
While I would agree that it would potentially remove clutter, voting has a major down-side: Popularity.
If number of votes are not limited in a thread, someone can vote on every suggestion. This may be nice to increase the apparent "visibility" of a quest, but it can result in two scenarios:
1). People will rely on up-vote/down-vote rather than participation. More often than not, commenting seems to give way to just "Like"/"Dislike" banter in the form of Youtube buttons. (This may also increase levels of butthurt from those who see their ideas get down-voted to hell rather than simple ignored)
2). Stalemates and herd-mind will kick in as we've normally seen, and people will vote diametrically based on how others have voted.
Meaning in the long run, we're statistically more likely to end up with a bunch of the same things we see anyway, just with less stuff between each of the posts.
> What It Means
This is not to say these are the ONLY outcomes, but they are real world examples of the stuff. Moreover, to make sense of voting, we'd need the following requirements (this is where we get into the code-weeds):
1). Each IP/tripcode can only vote once per suggestion
2). Each suggestion must be clearly marked, or else non-suggestion posts deleted/hidden to prevent confusion during voting.
3). To prevent weird issues with Up/Down votes on old posts, there would need to be a way to "lock" them up to a certain point, essentially creating "voting cycles" under the administration of the quest author. This means that threads would require a mechanism for ownership, registered to an IP or tripcode.
> I Like Titles for Organization
On a completely unrelated note, while Up/Down voting is a good way for silent, non-post-oriented participation in a quest, a lot of this seems to come down to:
A). "I want to know that people are interested in my things", and
B). "I don't want to read a lot of posts saying the same suggestion"
While voting may improve the first, it essentially recreates the second, but it WILL incur one massive issue a poster in the thread had mentioned, but which no one seems to have thought of:
Reason.
So everyone decides the popular opinion is to use Suggestion#22. This is grand, but what happens is that no one goes to say "Yes, we should do the thing, but before that, we need to...."
That is the entire point of having posts. Banter and discussion are the LIFE BLOOD of a quest. Without Suggesters being able to offer opinion or changes to statements (without created a locked-in Yes/No scenario), Authors can't operate on meta-creativity.
Think of how many times a quest has suddenly changed direction or subtly integrated the speculation or reasoning of a suggestion. That's the power of posts. You don't get that with voting. You don't get that by skimming suggestions of trends. Think of what could have happened in some of our most popular quests if people were to have kept their wild speculations or candid rambling to themselves.
So no, I still think it's a bad idea.
> Another Approach
If people really want something to clean things up, make threaded posts. Replies (marked like a Spoiler Image, for example, to prevent auto-folding) immediately "fold into" their owner, rather than attaching at the end of a thread. This increases visibility of a popular talking point, organizes thoughts into discrete chains, and allows an author or reader to hide extra suggestions between posts by "folding" each sub-thread.
We'd also have a nice, cascading, and easy to read style for everything. To top it all off, it works exactly like voting: the more replies, likely a suggestion is a MAJOR POINT.
> Let's Review
Ways to pretend we're voting without voting!
1). Use a Thread View counter: this makes it so we know just how many people like to read your quest!
2). Implement a more structured, conversation-oriented style of threads and sub-threads, essentially facilitating the "logic" of voting without introducing a limitation of opinion, reason, and debate.
3). Just do what we've been doing, as while it's not as fancy as voting, it sure as hell has worked so far, and if people really are that concerned about clutter, there's /questdis/ for that.
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