upvote/downvote

Hey guys any plans to add a upvote/downvote option to posts in the future similar to digg and reddit? I'm not sure how well it would work in a community of this size. However, everytime I see "500ft inverted wooden aquatrax" I want do downvote it so deep even screamscape won't touch it.

That's not possible. There is no limit to how deep screamscape would sink to touch something useless.

Don't those usually just turn into popularity contests anyway?

That, and agenda-pushing contests.

While I agree with the concept, I don't think it would work on a site like this. It would probably actually have the opposite result - the 500' Aquatrax dueler would get voted up right now, because there's a greater quantity of people behind that sort of thing, while those opposed to such nonsense are in the minority.

Of course, that'll change once school starts. :)

Only another week in Michigan! :)

One of my pet peeves about the English language is the maddening habit of its speakers -- particularly we Americans -- to slam words together almost randomly. Upvote. Downsize. 'Biggiesize'. The mush coming out of our mouths is almost worthy of Orwell's 1984.

*Gets off soapbox and disappears back into crowd.*

You think we're bad? Learn German! :)

Ach, du lieber! Sieg heil! Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles!

The +/- system certainly grew out of good intentions, but if you've followed Digg over the years, you can see how it's flawed.

The problem is that most people are apparently incapable of distinguishing between low quality conversation and conversation they simply don't agree with. The former is bad, the latter is actually good. In fact, a forum would be boring without disagreement. So someone could write a well thought out position on an issue, that no one really agrees with, and people would vote it down because they don't agree. The result is one-dimensional noise. See any Digg comment thread.

There probably aren't a lot of programmer types reading here, but a site we like to use called Stack Overflow. Where it differs is that they use more of a reputation system. You can vote down a bad answer to a question, but doing so comes at the cost of your reputation score. In that case, just because you think you have an awesome answer, you can't go kicking the others down without harming yourself.

I've thought a little about doing something in that realm at some point. Of course, as you might suspect, rewriting the forum for the ninth time is not high on my agenda. :)