Nero's thumb: now in comments

I expressed my dislike for this in ‘Tips and Notes”. What next, funny faces?
OK, the heat in Brisbane must be getting to me, but science is a numbers game, how many ‘thumbs down” does it take to make a ‘snip’ ?

You’ve just encouraged me to examine your website HTML and reject the most possible javascript includes in my proxy server. Too much eye candy that distracts from the content. And amazingly high school clique like.
Not to be a jackass, but this does not solve a problem I have.

I like the idea of giving a comment a like or dislike mark.
I hope everyone gives this comment a thumbs up. 😉

Interesting idea.
I just had a question. On one of your other posts http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/27/wuwt-voted-best-science-blog-in-the-2011-bloggies/
I noticed that nearly everybody had a least one Thumbs up and one Thumbs down.
Do they start off at 0/0 , or, has somebody already gone and ” Thumbs Down” every comment they didnt like?
Thanks 🙂
REPLY: They start at 0/0 somebody decided to press all the elevator buttons. -Anthony

I realize that you may not have much flexibility in modifying features that WordPress offers, however I would suggest just having a “Thumbs Up” and no down. That way people can spread kudos for well-thought out posts but avoids the problems that can arise with people piling on to diss posts. It puts in practice what my mother always said about “If you can’t say something nice…”

Elevator buttons are fun!
But I agree with the above posters, although I gave them all “thumbs down” out of spite. This reminds me of LGF.
Best let the discussions ride as is without possible “cheers and jeers” from the peanut gallery. Let the comments stand on their own merit, or lack thereof.

Perhaps in keeping with the Science Blog theme, one could instead have icons for the most common retorts, e.g. “strawman”, “circular”, “ad-hom”… and then a few positives, like “touché”, “well-reasoned”? Although personally, I find the voting buttons a distraction, and they are too often abused.

Science cannot – by voting – be labelled as good or bad science. I enjoy and like to think of WUWT as a science blog where being rigorous and objective is more important than being liked. I would prefer not to see likes or dislikes and try to make up my own mind.

Cue second tier moderation of the left v the right and the damping down of plurality of thought and expression.
These “fingers” are such a bad idea, I’m a little amazed you would even go there. But then again, you’ve made this blog into one of the most cherished on the interwebs, so maybe you do know best.

I think it works well at Jo Nova’s site, but there aren’t as many trolls there as here. It also has the added feature of having colour-coding and a rating.
Give it a go, but here I think it will be abused by trolls.

This is why I am all for this feature:
It keeps people (including myself) from posting a comment to show solidarity with another commenter. It can be an exercise in asninity (Bush made up words too, leave me alone) to post a comment just to reinforce the validity or ‘response worthiness’ of another’s position. This feature provides an easy way of eyeballing which noodles stick to the wall, proverbially speaking.

Is this a popularity contest? Personally, in certain cases I would be proud to get big thumbs down – when I’m right and everybody else is wrong! ;->
Go ahead and let people vote. I would caution using that info for anything. Some sites let people view the best rated posts. Some hide very negatively rated posts. Here, I think it’s best to just let people have their say no matter who agrees with them or not. Moderators can eliminate the nasty.
From an aesthetic perspective, the rating tool clutters the look. The old way is clean and elegant. Does rating posts really serve any purpose? Novelty wears off.
[VG post. IMHO. ~dbs, mod.]

I shouldn’t be too surprised, but blocking all the javascript files (*.js) has not cost any content of interest, but it did drop the page rendering time in half. I don’t agree with those who want something for nothing, though, so when I shut down a site’s revenue stream I go looking for the tip jar.
I’m always amazed at how the dynamics of the web works. A site adds a feature, visitors turn it off locally. It goes around and around. I’d read somewhere that the adblock add-on was written by a disgruntled Google employee who got fed up with the intrusion of web beacons, trackers, analytics, etc. That’s pretty much the way I feel about it, too.

I’m glad that you read my thoughts.
Thumb’s rating is good for the commentators to check what others think about them but also keep in track who’s bothering reading your comment.
I just wish they were positioned right of the title.

Anthony
This is a small nit pick but showing the Emperor Commodus (I think I got this right) as Nero is, er , waal, you know, though both were pretty odious characters. But yes, the thumb’s up/down is a polite way of us showing out agreement, not, without the need to write a a lengthy comment.
Brevity is the soul of wit?

Is there any chance to have the score kept secret? unless you requested an update? I don’t mind the up and down. I actually like that. I just don’t want to be persuaded by others votes.
The Other Jack

I have an average speed web connection, but for some reason WUWT is always slow to load. The thumbs-up system has increased the page-loading time so I don’t like it on those grounds. I also don’t feel it adds any benefit to the debate.

I went and made coffee and had a think about this. Then Hoser ^^ pretty much summed up what I thought.
Initially upon seeing the vote I voted yes. I stand by that vote however I don’t see any value in the ratings tool, here or in any website comment section. It’s simply too open to abuse.
Whilst there will be genuine readers, especially those who post infrequently or not at all, who believe that they may be adding in some way to the debate by agreeing with a certain comment’s content the majority of voting will be a simple popularity contest and there will be the usual ‘them and us’ doing the voting. Some may vote a comment down simply because of the author rather than the content and that will work for both sides of the coin. It’s just human nature.
Some people will even go so far as to be vexatious -yes, it would appear that even academics can be childish too – and remove the cookie set by the tool and make multiple votes on a comment to make it appear more or less popular than it might be.
That’s not to say that I disagree with the tool being there, it does offer some loose insight into the number of people reading and not posting, but to take anything of value from the results would be a mistake. They ( the results) are simply meaningless in terms of how persons actually feel about the actual content of the post.
If you were to use the information for an indication of anything I’d suspect that you would have to log the IP of a voter ( something I doubt that wordpress plugins allow you to do ) and determine which way that they vote in order to log those votes that would appear vexatious in order to exclude them from any result you are trying to acheive. I think you see the problem with the work involved.
Then, as Hoser points out too ( I swear I came up with this train of thought independently, honest injun 😉 ) it’s not very pretty and I find the repetitive thumbs a distraction from the erstwhile look.
By all means keep it but personally I think it’s just another tool for certain posters to show allegiance or disdain for other posters without being brave enough to have their head’s above the parapets and at the end of the day that’s a bit churlish. It’s not a survey and not controlled.
And thank you for having a post that does not contain a subject so far above my head that I’m afraid to speak out for fear of appearing to be a great buffoon 😉
( I added the last comment in order to generate the sympathy vote and more thumbs up 😉 )

It will just encourage the trolls to compete for maximum disapproval.

It’s 8:21 here in the UK. I had a late night and I’m barely one cup of coffee in. Please forgive the erroneous apostrophes which are the bane of my existence.

What value does this have? The whole point of this forum is to form your own opinion, it’s not a popularity contest, so the feature is irrelevant and distracting.

I like the option of the thumbs but less “in your face”.
The color format of the presentation “jumps off the page” in contrast to the black and white..
Can you hide the thumbs behind a button ?
Then I can ignore it unless I want to express myself, quietly.
When the tally is in my visual field I automatically read it even when I don’t want to.
Hiding it behind a button will fix that.
PS… Congratulations !

Sorry Anthony, this one gets the thumbs down
EO

I do not think this is a good idea. It is likely to discourage some people from posting here, and that is almost always a bad thing. A trivialising distraction, in my far from humble opinion.

I dislike clutter (one of the good things about this site usually) and prefer people to articulate why they agree or disagree with a post – voting is anti-science and relatively easy to game.
Have taken kadaka’s useful advice and blocked them.

I’m in two minds about the ‘thumbs’, on one hand, assuming they work the same as the ones on JoNova’s site, comments with too many ‘down thumbs’ get hidden not deleted, I’m happy given that it gives us a way to fold the more egregious trolls out of sight.
On the other hand if too many ‘down thumbs’ cause comments to be deleted then I would have to be against their use.
Above all the science should speak for itself.

Comment ratings are critically valuable. There are frequently hundreds of comments on some topics. I rarely have the time or desire to read through them all. With ratings I can skim through and find some of the most valuable posts.
It is also often the case that I don’t make a comment because I figure too few people will see it at the bottom of hundreds of comments. If I thought I might get a high rating and be noticed by more people, I would be more likely to comment.
If you really want commenting to work well though, you need to have a more sophisticated system like Slashdot where there is more selectivity of moderators. Unfortunately Slashdot allows down mods which are sometimes used to bury climate skeptic comments.
Another great feature would be to bring a few of the best comments to the top. That would be a huge motivator to encourage quality comments. But for good discussion, be sure to bring comments from both sides to the top.

In our quest for the truth and accuracy on climate science, and other topics, we might as well be accurate as well on the history of the thumbs up and down.
I think that you will find that during the roman emperor days, there was no such thing as thumbs up, thumbs down. It was more a thumb extended, or thumb hidden.
“To close down the thumb (premere) was a sign of approbation: to extend it (vertere, convertere, polex infestus) a sign of disapprobation.”
http://bernd.wechner.info/Hitchhiking/Thumb/

I voted against the thumbs feature.
I think comments in works should be the way to express views.
WUWT is mostly an educational site. The thumbs feature has the appearance of a competition of popularity seeking. An idea that no one likes is just as educational as one everybody likes. I think The thumbs feature detract from the open educational aspect of WUWT.
Beta testing the thumbs feature is a good way to see if it supports the education at WUWT or not.
John

I voted in the poll (yes), and then read the comments – and changed my mind. Perhaps the post should advise readers to consider the comments before voting?

I said “yes” initially to the poll because I liked it at Jo Nova’s, it helped me to find my way around a less-visited site.
But following this thread right down, I find myself agreeing with the “no” comments more and more. I find it does not save me time here, to get to the meat of the issue with 200 comments.
One deft sentence can do better than 50 thumbs, I now think.

Any measuring of a consensus of opinion gives weight to the illusion that a consensus of opinion is worth noting.

Hey, this is all about science.
So, I have already analyzed this new feature and found the sum of the thumbs varies inversely with the distance of it’s distance from the top of the post and this directly infers that the early bird (Jeff’s bird) gets the worm!

The trolls will have a field day..

Anthony, assuming you’ve made no other changes to WUWT, the thumbs slow page-load time considerably, and that detracts from the site. If your stats all of a sudden show a decrease in page loads, I’d dump the thumbs.

I voted YES.
1. As I previously mentioned, the system is easily swept from away from view, thus I find it harmless.
2. I checked the poll results. While the comments suggest “No” the poll is saying “Yes.” This tells me others do find the new feature to have value.
3. I wouldn’t really care about the ratings anyway. I’m a skeptical person visiting a “climate skeptic” site, I already know I’m a bit of a non-conformist. I post comments here, in front of the unblinking gaze of the internet. While the nature of such commenting and this site can mask it, I am aware my words can potentially be read by millions, and by the readership of this site those words have at least as many readers as those of an average writer for a newspaper. Yet still I post, and know I don’t care much about what other people think about my words anyway, thus such ratings to me are basically meaningless.
4. Very few readers here actually comment, easily seen by the comment/readership ratios. For those too timid to comment themselves, and they are legion, they now can at least register their approval/disapproval of the comments of others.
For me, no difference. For others, positive difference. Thus I voted yes.

My feeling is that it is trivialising and open to abuse.
What purpose does it serve?
If it stays, a thank you to kadaka above.
Regards

Like Roger and Lucy I voted yes in the poll but have changed my mind since reading through the comments and giving it more reasoned consideration. After trawling through, I find it a distraction which offers no real evaluation of the actual qualities (or lack thereof) of the posts. It’s easy to imagine RC trolls coming here en masse to rubbish excellent opinions – that alone is enough to change my mind. Let people’s words stand for themselves.

This will probably get all the warmists that read this blog to autmatially click the thumbs down buttong.

Not a good idea, methinks, except when you need a voxpop like this.

The changes to the website a few weeks ago made the pages clear and easily read.
The thumbs are now a distraction, and I think add nothing to the site.

I am a south paw (left hander) and lived my life in a culture of non-enlightenment/non-Christian. Or variations of such.
The green shows a left hand with thumb up and the red shows a right hand with thumb down.
Too much noise for me. Like the PNS interpretation dialogue by Ravetz.
I’ll stick with the process of science. As I was taught in the enlightenment sciences by my good teachers and parents. And the excellent article(s) recently by Willis E, thank you Willis.
Jessie

Lot of valid pros and cons mentioned here. Fortunately it is harmless to try this system out and see what happens. I’m quite sure it will be easy enough to eliminate if it proves to be useless or merely distracting. I say we experiment and see what happens.

R.S.Brown says:
February 28, 2011 at 12:01 am
“If I really disagree with a comment, I can write
a comment of my own, using my actual name, stating my
particular point of disagreement.”
Agree with this comment. Thumbing is for those who are too lazy (or stupid) to actually think about and post a comment.

Well, since you’re asking, I would have to say that the voting line has more downside than up …
* Loading/Refreshing the page shows many new requests being sent out to PollDaddy.com, so there must be a speed/bandwidth hit to consider. (BTW: to see what happens on a page load or refresh on Opera, you make sure the status bar is enabled and also set the progress bar to ‘Popup at Bottom’. Anytime that a webpage is loading the requests are displayed which is nice for developers.)
* The voting line does add to vertical space usage within each post so consequently the ‘length’ of each page will grow (get taller).
* Aesthetically I would say that it is a negative, or perhaps they are simply too large in relation to all other page elements, particularly the fonts. Even small comments clock in at about 1.5 to 2 per screenful. WUWT on Opera looks good with page zoom at 80%.
* These things can become troll tools. You know that Eadler and others will low-ball certain posts and commenters. And imagine if Steve Goddard still had Sea-Ice posts here, dozens of those little insects would leave their hive and fly over here to make a point. Why leave thoughtful comments when they can just click on their enemies.

Seriously Anthony, you can already feel the childish games this would bring to a now great science site. A large number of the people who never participate here are voting at the top to include this voting system and clearly the commenters below seem to be more wary. Maybe the hidden voters want to degrade WUWT.
I too am afraid this would knock WUWT completely out of the realm of real science and cheapen it. I say no, keep it pure and simple. We are all adults and can chose which comment to like or dislike by the words within. And you know, I rarely view a comment as up or down, but if anything at all, relevant or not.
If you keep it maybe you can put words by those thumbs, being something like relevant and not relevant. That seems to make a whole lot more sense. Sometimes when in a hurry I wish I knew which comments were just on the posts topic. That way I could mark my own OT’s as ‘not relevant’ so they could be just skipped by others. ☺

I commend Anthony for being innovative, but I don’t think this is a good idea. As some have previously noted, it encourages groupthink, and reduces intellectual discussions to the blogging equivalent of blowing a raspberry.
On the other hand, those who have written something outstandingly good, deserve some recognition, so how about a thumbs up only button – a nice little pat on the back from fellow bloggers for an outstanding response.
BTW, the picture was Emporer Commodius from Gladiator.

I could do without thumbs up or down, but what I do want is the ability to look at all post by individuals. Leif Svalgaard’s thoughts and comments are not only brilliant but his abolute rejection of what he sees as shenanigan science has had me laughing out loud more than a few times. Unfortunately I cannot easily access his post. Am I missing something?
See now I am fearing the thumbs down for thread derailment!!

I don’t mind the comments, as long as you are going to do something with them, i.e. have the comment collapse when it reaches some level of negative reviews. Otherwise, it’s just noise.

And default setting without – some having problems re loading time.

I don’t like this at all…
People should be able to vote with their words….
…if you do or don’t like someone’s word, post and tell why
This is just distracting
Plus, it seems like it would lead to a gang mentality…..
Don’t like it………….don’t need it………..
Anthony, what happened to if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it………..

I am against ratings — “It’s about the science”, not popularity.

As stated above, rating comments suggests consensus science. This is the only time I have found anything to criticise in Anthony’s wonderful science blog! Of course it is your site to do with as you wish, Anthony.

Page loads for me are taking from 15 to 45 seconds.

If I’m reading several of the above comments correctly
some participants have voted twice !
They seem to have voted “Yes” at first, then reconsidered
and gone back and voted “No”.
Can we vote “No” more than once ? “Yes” more than once ?
Are there any controls or limits on how many votes can be
generated by a single user, or email address on the same comment ?

Many years ago I made the acquaintance of an attractive young lady with severe hearing loss who depended on signing for much of her communication. Made the mistake of using thumbs down once and got an unexpected reaction. Learned that it means “Go to h…”, at least in her circles. I don’t know if that is standard ASL or not.

I like the concept of giving non-commenters a quick means for leaving “a bit” of feedback, but a single bit (0/1) carries too little information to be useful to people who see it. “You didn’t like it? Why didn’t you like it?”
(Actually, I guess it’s three-valued – up, down, not provided. “You didn’t give feedback? Why didn’t you give feedback?”)
So it seems to me that its main value is as a toy for some, but not all, readers. Doesn’t seem worth the visual noise.
Oh … p.s. … I backed this comment out before commiting it and refreshed the page, and Chrome timed out. Now I’m a thumb alarmist. Thumbs must be stopped before the internet overheats!

A new record. 55 seconds to open this page.
Please turn off this feature.
REPLY: Yeah, it might be popular, but not worth the load time. – A

Thank you for disabling it.

I think thumbs work better as a concept if…
1) There’s a side-thumb for indifference
2) There’s a question-mark for when someone simply communicated badly but you don’t want to thumb-them-down. (this has the added benefit of encouraging posters to think about their posts before submitting)
3) The results are not presented numerically, but iconically.

Some comments are quite remarkable and informative, and excellent for newcomers.
If I saw at the beginning of the comments that 50 people thought comment # 27 was exceptionally noteworthy, I could jump to it and not miss it.
If posts could be numbered, a chart could be at the beginning of the comments with a tally I could click on to mark the numbered comment as “don’t miss reading this one.”
Or a “Best Comments/Most Informative Comments” identifier of some type.
As a site’s popularity grows, the comments become unreadable when they number in the hundreds or thousands. Individuals voting on the best ones makes thousands of comments “usable and practical”. I want to read those “most suggested” at the top of the comments and nothing at the comment itself.
A newcomer could go to older posts and quickly read the highest recommended best comments if they were identified as a summary after the article.
I envision a table with numbers at the top of the comments and if I think a post is very informative I click on a number on the table and the number changes in physical size. 10 clicks on a number and it swells to become obvious that people like it. A quick glance at the table gives me a visual cue as to which to read. I like this idea.

IMHO assigning a number to each post would be far more useful than ‘thumbs’.

A proposal was made, an experiment was conducted, the results were analyzed. This is science.
I wonder what results came from the computer models evaluating how good the new feature would work. Did they show it would be more or less popular after being in use for a hundred years? Did they evaluate how popular it would have been thirty years ago based on the demographics?

REPLY: Yeah, it might be popular, but not worth the load time. – A
Thanks, was crashing mine too on certain posts with many, many comments.

I am not much in favour of this idea. Too gimmicky.
You are a serious blog. Damn it, you have just been voted the best science blog. Lets remain adults and leave these trivial gimmicks to the children who believe everything they get out of the PSP3s (aka climate models).

I changed my mind. Warmists are organized. I remember commenting on a youtube video and my comments -and the comments of other skeptics received about 20 bad thumbs in a few seconds. They are organized to disrupt us, they will sabotage us, they often do not care about truth, they seek POWER & CONTROL at any price. I know them, I fought them big time in the past.

Kip Hansen:
what’s the antonym of reinforce?
“extinguish”?

Other commenters have mentioned it, but that is indeed not Nero; it is Commodus, the less than great son of the great philosopher and Emperor Marcus Aurelius.