UPDATE: This feature has two undesirable side effects:
1) significantly increased load times for post pages
2) it puts thumbs up/down on all old posts, not just posts going forward, so not only does it add load times to those, it leaves them with conditions not known by the original commenters.
While it seems this experiment was popular, until wp.com can make it work without penalty to the blog overall speed and character, I’m going to disable it. Thanks for trying it out – Anthony
Chronically angry troll Jack Greer left some smarmy comment in the WUWT wins Bloggies Best Science Blog announcement. I didn’t see what it was, because some other moderator snipped it. I suppose Jack can’t help himself.
It did however, remind me that I’ve been meaning to get this new blog feature enabled to try out.
Now, when it comes to other commenters, if you wish, you can be Nero. You can rate comments with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If you don’t like playing emperor, you can always imagine yourself to be Siskell or Ebert. It looks like this:
Thanks to Jack for the prodding, he’s earned the first ever “thumbs down” vote on WUWT. Congratulations Jack!
You can also thumb your nose at certain comments, but we have no way to record that.
We’ll try this for awhile, and see how it is received. It may be popular, it may not. It may just be noise. But let’s find out. I’ll heed the poll results below:
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Oh my – each one of those rating things requires a connection and HTML fetch from polldaddy.com! This will do awful things to Tips & Notes load times. Time to see if I can change my vote above.
If you use the ratio of up to down votes to adjust the font color (easy with a bit of javascript) then we’ll know well quick from the font color if a response is popular or not, and can avoid reading the bad ones.
24 seconds to update this page after clicking “Post Comment”.
No thumbs Anthony.
It’s irrelevant for the discussions and a play tool for the trolls.
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.
I think it’s fine but only used judiciously.
Page loads for me are taking from 15 to 45 seconds.
I like Leif’s comments. (Roy or Bob Tisdale).
in contrast
I like Vukcevic’s comments. (Fedinand Engelbeen or Bill Illis).
and many other great commentators
In any case described above I do not think as a simple reader (like me) can decide a vote of approval or disapproval.
When it comes to politics.
Anything from RC with absolute certainty already has my vote of disapproval (pre-trial with historical basis. Of course, RC is not perfect, should eventually make a mistake). [sarc/]
___________________________
I voted yes.
After reading the comments. I come to the conclusion that it was a mistake.
Sorry
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 ?
Kate says:
February 28, 2011 at 12:23 am
“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.”
Quite agree Kate.
I then promptly gave your comment a thumb’s up.
QED.
I’m not sure whether to give a thumbs up to the thumb down idea,
or to give a thumb down to the thumb up idea.
I’m going to have to give this thumb thought.
Head’s UP:
The thumbs appear on OLD wuwt posts. Unacceptable, as that was not the context in which commenters volunteered their words.
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.
No thanks to the thumbs. This kind of gimmick has been a turn-off for me on blogs that have it.
dh
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!
Imo, this is needless.
People come here because of the articles and the data.
The comments are a sideshow and should stay that way.
Plus it demeans the gravitas of the site to add this Roman Circus touch.
I’d rather empower the editors to snip a bit more freely, it that is needed, which is however not apparent.
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
One way this could be used to frustrate the alarmists would be to only have a thumbs up. Or when click the thumbs down, it counts as a thumbs up. This would be scientifically accurate if you consider alarmist math. So if Warming = Cooling, then Tumbs down must = Thumbs up.
Do I like the thumbs up/thumbs down feature: succinctly, with respect, Anthony, no.
And for the reason others cite in this thread, so no need repeating them …
.
Like many of the others I voted before I read the comments – should be a no from me too. Also, using Opera some of the comments dont seem to have the voting option (every fifth comment is voteless) and when you do vote it says thank you for rating this and then immediately reverts back to where it was before you voted. Probably just a browser thing.
Thank you for disabling it.
Not a fan of them myself. I’ve been on other sites that use the thumbs up/down and it often does turn into a groupthink tank. If the idea is to “shame” the troublemakers, it isn’t going to work. What I’ve seen other places it the real troublemakers don’t care, but those who have honest questions that might not go over well will be the ones who are silenced.
Hey, where are my thumbs?
I will not miss the thumbs. Thank you for getting rid of them.
My actual comment on
would be that I like a ‘Recommend’ button better, similar to what is used in the NY Times blogs. This allows positive reinforcement without giving in to the urge to ‘negatively…’ [what’s the antonym of reinforce? Whatever it is, insert here 🙂 ].
As a commenter who desires to contribute to the conversation, receiving positive reinforcement when one’s comment is constructive and helpful (not necessarily agreeing or non-critical) tends to encourage thoughtful, careful writing, thus raising the level of the overall experience and moving forward the purpose of a blog like WUWT.
While I’m at it, I kinda like the ‘Highlight’ function at the NY Times as well. It is more positive reinforcement for the commenter, and allows the author/moderator to select certain comments that he thinks are the best supporting or critical contributions of the readers. Best when the actual author selects, and often replies, within the highlight. Admittedly, some NYT authors only highlight comments supporting their views and saying things they ‘like’. Others use the function for its intended purpose and highlight the most contributive comments.