About 24 hours ago, we announced our plans to make the post voting system more consistent. Today we'll discuss what we heard from you and our plans going forward. If you would like to view our original plans and the original discussion, you can view it here: donutteam.com/forum/topic/1952/.
We also disabled our A/B testing where some posts did not have a downvote ability. All posts have returned to the normal upvote/downvote system.
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I want to review the things we announced and why we're standing by them or why we're now ditching them:
Votes will be hidden for the first thirty minutes of a post's existence. You can still vote on the post, though we will not be showing the result until 30 minutes after its initial post.
We're keeping this enabled for now as we believe it's important for a post to have a short time to be viewed without being judged immediately by a vote. Other services implement this same limitation. It does not prevent voting, just the ability to view downvote bombs. They become visible about 30 minutes after it's post.
Locked topics will no longer allow voting once the topic has been locked.
We considered this a bug and this is now fixed. Once a topic is locked, we would like to maintain it in the state that it was when it was locked.
We're planning to add individual feature bans that will allow us to disable voting automatically if you're misusing it.
This was announced because of information that was given to us that showed that a few users were misusing the feature. While we know that a small portion of users are misusing the feature, it only takes a few users to dilute the entire experience.
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I want to address some comments shared by our community:
I said this in the original thread, but the main concern is this:]I have a suggestion for this Karma feature. Could you also make so that you can see who is giving you Karma? For example you either click on the points on your post or you just highlight over the text and it will show you the people who rated your post up or down. This could be visible either for everyone's posts or only per own's account (example I can only see the ones who voted over my posts, not everyone else's posts). Of course it should be hidden for guests since there is no point in them seeing who voted who.
The reason why I'm suggesting this feature is that you should be able to identify the people who like and dislike you and those that abuse the reputation system (if there are people who abuse the system anyway).
- There's a chance someone will misuse it to harass users who downvoted them.
- There's a chance it will cause people to avoid the downvote button in fear of retaliation.
We have no plans on removing the system, as it is helpful to convey opinions and give praise to users who go the extra mile. The concerns raised originally were shared by a group of users who reported to us another group's plans to mass downvote. We expect these issues to continue going forward and will be paying attention to trends to mitigate issues.It's just too simple to moderate. There isn't anything to base from other than patterns. Patterns alone aren't enough because you can't find a motive.
Just scrap ratings all together. A star system might be better, but it doesn't really work in a forum.
We love hearing your feedback and appreciate it greatly. This A/B test was used to see how people react to the options given. Beyond that, we've undone this change and put it back to the way it was before (plus adding a short window before the vote tally is shown).If I see a post I don't like/agree with and it has downvotes disabled, there is nothing I can do and my opinion will never be heard. So in this case, if I want my opinion shared, I need to end up writing an essay of a message (Because apparently I can't do anything but essays) which really wouldn't have been necessary had the downvotes just been enabled on the post. In this case I disagree with Jake's post announcing this feature, and because of pure luck I can't do anything about it. I'm sure this won't be the only time it happens either, and I can't be the only person having issues with this.
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We will be listening to your feedback regarding this issue on this thread and for now leaving the system as it is in it's current state. The next time we have plans about updating this system, we will discuss them with you ahead of time.
Sincerely,
Jake Andreøli