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Comments on Suggestion for allowing to mark answers as "accepted", "outdated" or "dangerous"
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Suggestion for allowing to mark answers as "accepted", "outdated" or "dangerous"
Currently, it is possible to upvote and downvote answers. That's likely enough in most situations, but there are some cases where you might want to have more than one way to react to a post.
For example, imagine you are on Software Development and an answer suggests a solution that drastically impedes your system's security. Or you are on Electrical Engineering and the answer suggests something that might electrocute you. In these cases, a downvote might not be enough of a signal to warn users of such possible dangers.
Another possible situation is "accepting answers", a concept that exists on most common Q&A sites. Unlike other sites, we decided quite early that a single vote from the asker shouldn't impact answer sort order.
And yet another feature suggested and strongly advocated for by some users is the option of "signed votes", mostly seen as a way for experts or highly reputable community members to give more weight to their votes by publicly endorsing (or refuting) a specific answer.
I think I've got a solution, one that might provide a framework for commmunities to solve all these use cases. We discussed this in chat and tossed some ideas around, and I must say that I absolutely love the current proposal:
Communities will be able to define a small set of "reactions", which can be applied to posts. Default (or recommended) reactions would likely be:
- ☑ This post works for me (= accepting an answer, but not only by OP)
- ⏳ This post is outdated
- ⚠ This post is dangerous
However, communities might want to have different reactions. For example, Cooking might want to have
- 😋 This is tasty
- 🤮 This doesn't taste good
Once applied to answers, there would be a little box/badge above the answer, which contains the selected reaction and a list of users who have chosen that reaction. I used the developer tools in my browser to simulate what this might look like. Imagin, that the tooltip on the first badge says the names of the users choosing that reaction.
Users will be able to choose reactions from a modal that can be opened from a button below the voting buttons. When choosing a reaction, users will be encouraged to add comments, giving details to their vote. This is especially neccessary for marking a post as "dangerous", because other users need to know what exactly is dangerous.
Here are two mockups for how the reactions modal might be presented:
Additionally, when entering a comment into the comment box in the modal, a comment will be posted on the user's behalf, which contains the chosen reaction and comment. (Also seen in the screenshots.)
What do you think of this suggested feature? Do you have any other use cases we should consider if we chose to implement this suggestion?
How should we handle possibly-outdated reactions? No, not by reactions to reactions. An edit to a post made after re …
3y ago
I would like this functionality to extend to 'questions' as well as answers. This was influenced by the post I canno …
3y ago
I was part of that conversation, so my input is mostly reflected in this proposal already. I want to add one thing, abo …
3y ago
Proposal: Integrate the voting system into the reactions feature. Let users react with "this is a good post" or "this is …
3y ago
I kind of like the idea, especially for outdated/obsolete technology. But I'm concerned over how subjective a "dangerous …
3y ago
I like the idea because these have been known issues in other places for some time. However, is it really needed? …
11mo ago
I think reaction might useful in some categories for "question". Here's a category (recipes), since no can answer on tha …
2y ago
There is another aspect that I don't see discussed; accepting answers has the side-effect of helping to optimize/minimiz …
3y ago
I will never use any negative reactions that require my name next to them for the same reason I never explain downvotes, …
3y ago
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I kind of like the idea, especially for outdated/obsolete technology. But I'm concerned over how subjective a "dangerous" mark might end up.
For example when it comes to programming, I work with safety-critical embedded systems. The concerns I might have for what makes a program dangerous are not at all the same as someone working with network security programming. Not to mention the broad masses that program non-critical software.
So if I were to apply my quality standards on the average desktop program, I will come across as very pedantic. If a truck control system firmware divides by zero, it might cause physical harm to people, damage buildings or machinery etc. If a desktop program does the same, you get a little evil message box saying "bug", annoying but not dangerous.
Meaning that in order to label something dangerous, I would need to understand the end product, something that is very often not clear by the question.
As for electronics, there's a strong trend that quacks or fresh graduates use hobbyist board computers like Arduino for commercial products. This is dangerous because that was never the intention of those boards - there are serious safety concerns both in terms of software and EMC. Are we to label everything tagged Arduino as dangerous then? Professional engineers will agree - hobbyists and students will get furious if we do.
One would need to give this some serious thought before implementing it.
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