Red star, gray star, green star...these make little sense.
- 0 + ... these make great sense.
I like LaC's suggestions. They allow for keeping - 0 + and solve the "tiny character, difficult to click" problem.
Posted under General
albert said:
I know moe.imouto doesn't allow for down votes. If it simplifies implementation, I'm willing to make a similar change on Danbooru.
That's partially what the min/max is for. Currently, moe will use min=0.
For anyone who doesn't know, the rationale is to make score closer to "the number of people who like a post"--since who seriously cares how many people don't like a post? It just makes the scoring meaningless. I couldn't care less if a hundred people dislike a post, if twenty like it.
But, the only functional reason I could see for removing it is to eliminate an icon, if you wanted to go "0 +1 +2" or "0 +1 +favorite", which is definitely clearer than "-1 0 +1 +2".
petopeto said: For anyone who doesn't know, the rationale is to make score closer to "the number of people who like a post"--since who seriously cares how many people don't like a post? It just makes the scoring meaningless. I couldn't care less if a hundred people dislike a post, if twenty like it.
I disagree with that thinking in just about every way possible. Definitely voting that proposal down.
The more this goes on the more I'm convinced we're trying to fix something that wasn't broken, and breaking it in the process.
petopeto, that's what favorites are for. Voting is exactly a measurement of both how many people like something and how many people don't like it. Maybe "voting" isn't even a good term - it's more like "rating". In your model, a post which 30 people liked and 30 people disliked would be ranked lower than a post which 3000 people liked and 3000 people disliked. This doesn't make any sense, and doesn't reflect what a "score" should be.
While it is nice that we can now opt-in for a record of what we've voted up, and that we now have slightly stricter controls on voting, the idea of turning scores into just another favorites mechanism doesn't sit that well with me.
It makes perfect sense. If lots of people like a post, lots of other people disliking it don't diminish that at all. With the current system, if 3000 people like a post and 3000 people hate it, the post will be ranked lower than a post which 3 people like and nobody hates--and *that* makes absolutely no sense.
That said, I really don't care if Danbooru has negative votes or not; that's why it's configurable, and that's why the schemes I came up with retained it as an option.
petopeto said:
For anyone who doesn't know, the rationale is to make score closer to "the number of people who like a post"--since who seriously cares how many people don't like a post? It just makes the scoring meaningless. I couldn't care less if a hundred people dislike a post, if twenty like it.
But a post that has been seen by 20 people and liked by 15 is probably better than one that has been seen by 10000 people and only liked by 20, while the rest hated it. Voting down lets you distinguish them.
Also, unlike on moe, we do get some unambiguously bad posts. Negative scores help us find them.
Also, it feels good to vote down a crap post. If the ability were removed, we might even see a surge of "this sux" comments.
petopeto said:
Unless you're going to say *why* you disagree, you're not adding anything useful to the discussion.
He's a big user of this site. Even if he can't or doesn't want to explain the rationale, his opinion still has weight.
petopeto said:
Unless you're going to say *why* you disagree, you're not adding anything useful to the discussion.
On the contrary, unless you explain *why* we should change a perfectly workable and proven system into some kind of complex, counter-intuitive monster only you seem to like so far, you're contributing very little to discussion. So far I hate every single one of your proposals, so I'll address each of them here:
1) Multi-star rating system -- why? It's precisely what I hate on all sites I visit where I bother to rate at all; what's the purpose of having this illusionary granularity, when all it does is lessen the impact of your opinion? All that matters is whether I liked, disliked or didn't care about the post, "liked it 47.4%" is anti-information. You can express the score however, with stars or maybe little dancing opposa, but the mechanics stay the same: Yea / Nay / Meh.
2) Merging favs and voting into a single function -- Why, God, WHY!? All I can say about it is http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html. Making favs count as vote is perfectly clear and intuitive, not to mention more flexible (you can assign, +1, +2 or +10 to a fav, in fact, I'd like favs to count as even more than +1, at least for me faving a pic is a *very* strong statement about my like for it), and needs only one-time discovery after which it's crystal clear. I always loved that. OTOH, your system is some kind of grand unification scheme that serves no discernible purpose, and makes the underlying mechanism horribly confusing. Kinda like Copernican vs. Ptolemean mechanics, both can be used to explain the observed movements of planets, but good luck visualising the Ptolemean system.
3) No negative votes -- I hate it with passion. I honestly don't care about some deranged loonies with weird fetishes liking a pic if everyone else hates it because it's crap (unless they are my fetishes, of course, but then I have favs and pools and whatever). With your system we lose the distinction, in the worst case making the crap fare *better*, because ordinary-but-not-exciting pics will likely stay where they are, but the deranged crap will attract the maniac voice of loonies that would normally be far outweighed by the majority disliking it.
The bottom line being: we have a good, working and proven system. You step in and propose gutting it completely for unspecified reasons, and somehow the onus of proving the merit is on us who liked the tried and true thing. I dislike that attitude a whole lot. It bothers me greatly, not in the least because of your tendency to implement things hastily before thinking them out completely or, dunno, testing in the context of the actual site usage, as opposed to only a vaguely related site you happen to be running with the same(*) software.
Oh, and an unrelated issue -- why exactly are you highlighting all stars less or equal to the vote I gave? If I voted a pic +1, then it means I gave it a +1 vote, not -1, 0 and +1, so I don't understand why you highlight those.
(*) the same meaning "mostly similar, yet essentially a fork only periodically synced to mainline" here. So not really the same.
petopeto said: Unless you're going to say *why* you disagree, you're not adding anything useful to the discussion.
It *really* needs to be spelled out? You're saying you don't care if 100 people dislike an image and 20 like it, and that the image should have a +20 score rather than a -80. I say that's completely absurd and renders scoring meaningless.
I don't give a shit if three people like some random dickshitting loli futa rape porn. It's much more telling that 50 other people don't. You say a +3000/-3000 post being '0' makes no sense. I say it's the ONLY way to go about it that makes sense.
Can we please just leave voting alone? I understand if you're defensive about something you spent so much time working on, but it's just *not* an improvement beyond the ability to undo your votes, which I only need once in a blue moon.
Oh, and I just realised one things that sucks about the new system (stars, in particular): in the old one I could just type-ahead "up" or "down" and vote on stuff without touching the mouse, which greatly speeds up mass browsing. With those stars it's impossible. So I'd *really* like to revert to something I can easily type and match unambiguously. "Up" and "down" worked very well for that, with the exception of an occasional tag clash (and hookedup's username, *grumble*)
Most of the discussion so far has been about the interface. A more important question is whether the backend is a worthwhile effort.
I like the idea of votes being stored in the database. There are occasions when I like a post but not enough to keep it as a favorite, but I still want the ability to query on voted posts. And there's a kind of conceptual elegance to merging votes and favorites. They're the same idea, the only difference is how much you value a post. However, it doesn't make much sense to aggregate values at that level of detail.
Personally I'd second LaC's suggestion of changing the respective characters for down/neutral/up to ▼■▲(or alternatively some form of images, but I guess you want to keep the general site layout text-only), and only highlight/change BG of the vote option that is currently selected.
But most importantly, the neutral option should be selected by default for any unvoted post, or else you might as well remove it from the UI to stop adding confusion.
While the -/0/+ thing is probably the most simple and logical option, I'd personally like to see something else because it isn't very pronounced or eyecatching, meaning average users would potentially be 'blind' to a feature that's right there in front of them (surely we want as many people as possible to use the system, right?)
Anyway, the current star system isn't really very inutative - given the way it's laid out currently you'd expect it to add a score of 1-3 depending on what you chose (since nothing is chosen by default), when in fact you'd actually decrease the score of a picture if you'd happen to give it 1 star, and not change things at all if you think it's worth 2 stars, which is rather illogical IMO.
Otherwise, I think the idea of keeping track of votes is a good one, especially if it means you could do a lookup on it (on yourself, at the very least), or if it could be coupled with some form of potential "similar users/voters" -feature in the future.
And as a side note, personally I'd still like for favourites to count towards total vote score even with the new system.
The most basic suggestion is to add a 4th "star" (just calling them "stars", however it's actually displayed), which corresponds to "+2". Adding a favorite doesn't cause an implicit +1. Instead, it bumps your vote up by one (unless it's already maxed); if you remove a favorite, it's reduced by one.
This doesn't add any granularity, it just makes the current granularity more explicit.
What are the advantages? Your entire vote is displayed as your vote. If you've decided to only favorite a post and not +2 it, you see +1 as your vote, not 0. If you've decided to +2 a post, then it shows up as +2. The post will show up in your vote:1 list. If you want to see all posts you like (whether you've +1 or +2'd them), you can use "vote:name:>0".
albert said:
However, it doesn't make much sense to aggregate values at that level of detail.
It's nice to be able to get both a list of all posts I like (both +1's and favorites/+2s), and a list of posts I really like (favorites/+2's), if that's what you mean. This can be done with or without merging favorites into votes--the above doesn't do that.
Oh, and an unrelated issue -- why exactly are you highlighting all stars less or equal to the vote I gave?
It's cosmetic. It can be do it that way instead if wanted, I don't really prefer one or the other.
Sooner or later you're going to realize that favorites are really an ugly special-case duplication of pool functionality. With private pools, you can even have multiple collections, so that you can, for instance, separate the posts that you would have favorited because they're pretty from those that you would have favorited because they're funny. You can even have a pool of posts you especially loathe; I, for one, could use that.
Pool options could allow you to specify that your vote for a post should automatically be set to a given value when you add it to a given pool, so that adding to the "Favorites" pool would automatically vote +2, and adding to the "Crap" pool would automatically vote -1.
You could have the option of specifying the pools you use most often (both private and public). Instead of the fixed "Add to favorites" link that's currently in the sidebar, you'd have a list of "Add" (or remove) links for your most-used pools.
By default, a user would get a private "user's favorites" pool with the "auto +2 option", and set as one of his most-used pools; for existing users, it would be created and populated with the user's current favorites by a migration script.
This would result in the current behaviour being maintained by default, while making the underlying architecture much more elegant and allowing for vastly increased flexibility and customization possibilities.
Muey said:
Personally I'd second LaC's suggestion of [...] only highlight/change BG of the vote option that is currently selected.
I submitted a patch that does that, but I think albert decided to go into a different direction.
But most importantly, the neutral option should be selected by default for any unvoted post, or else you might as well remove it from the UI to stop adding confusion.
Indeed, I'm not sure there's any value in explicitly voting "0". All we needed were "up" and "down" buttons, as before. When you vote, the corresponding button becomes highlighted. Click it again to cancel your vote.
However, it seems that we're going towards greater vote granularity instead.
http://trac.donmai.us/changeset/1530 does nothing. AFAICS, there is no span with class "stars".
LaC is spot on about pools. That is a wonderful idea, and I'd support it in an instant. Albert, there IS a functionality of "favorites" that is distinct from scoring, and I think LaC put it rather succinctly. To vote on a post is just to express your opinion of it, but to add it to your favorites is to "collect" it, in some sense. Anyway, I hope we can implement some of LaC's ideas in the future. I haven't really been one to use pools that much, as they seem to be still in development, but they do seem like a promising idea :)
I just tried voting for a few pictures, and it didn't seem to register them at all?
Well, the score wasn't increased, the stars didn't remain highlighted, and if I go to my profile and do a search by vote the recent images aren't listed there.
Edit: It seems to be a browser issue - I'm using Opera 9.20 usually, and the voting worked normally in IE6.