I think this would be a really great thing overall and long term.
3 Likes
The counterpoint is it is gives a quick, informal, though obviously unscientific way of gauging interest/support for particular issues. Without it I think you risk lots of “me too” posts, and possibly actually more abusive ones. I would argue the abuse of the flag feature is a much bigger issue.
15 Likes
This’d be bad for all the non-flamewar posts. It’s easier to gauge whether a reply has technical merit with this in place, and it’s a nice form of communication that does not derail otherwise concise threads.
I don’t think it makes sense to optimize discourse around the twice-a-year hot topic. Those posts, while popular because anger always fosters engagement, are not really the primary purpose, or at least use case, of this forum in the first place.
I’m also not sure it really helps when those posts do happen, is the point just to make people feel less bad about their opinion being less poular than others’? It’s just going to result in more repetitive comments, less readable discussion, and more inflammatory posts, since now commenting is your only outlet if you want to weigh in on a topic, and more heated comments means higher likelihood of the type of comment we want to see less of.
20 Likes
An even more relevant implication as mentioned in the link is that Discourse basically breaks - they mentioned trust levels as an example.
I can only presume this suggestion is trolling, like 90% of this user’s posts, but here I am feeding anyway.
6 Likes
Yes, I did see that it broke Discourse which is a shame but maybe there’s some way to hide them or allow them to be hidden? I understand the concern about the “me too” comments but maybe natural selection (probably misusing that) would just win out and people would flag those posts and they’d just fade away?
I think removing likes and leaving us with only flags would be even more unhealthy. You ideally want to reward leaving good answers instead of punishing bad ones.
4 Likes
I mean what your personal reasoning behind wanting the change in the first place. Saying it would be good says nothing.
8 Likes