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Comments on Indicate stale reactions based on user activity

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Indicate stale reactions based on user activity

+2
−2

Reactions are currently used on CD to:

  • Confirm an answer worked (similar to accepting an answer on SO)
  • Show that an answer is dangerous
  • Indicate interest in participating in a proposed CD site

Some of these have enduring meaning. For example, if rm -rf * was dangerous 50 years ago, it is still dangerous now. Others go stale. For example, if I indicate that I would be a casual user of a proposal, and then forget CD exists for the next 3 years, that reaction is not as meaningful as a fresh one. Another example: A Python 2 answer may have been accepted in 2010, with the asking account now inactive, and basically it will never get corrected even though Python 2 is now obsolete - this became a significant occasional problem on SO after some years.

My solution:

  • Define a time horizon t_max for each reaction. This indicates the CD devs' best guess for how long that reaction is relevant for. t_max can be infinity.
  • When displaying reactions, check t_age: how long it's been since the user's last login.
  • If the t_age > t_max, display the reaction as "stale" or "old" and grey it out in the UI (halve the saturation?). Each stale reaction should also have mouse over text like "Reactions made by accounts which have not been active in over 30 days".

This is a live calculation, in that stale reactions can become fresh again when the user logs in after a long hiatus.

This system can be gamed by writing a script that logs in every day, to artificially keep your own reactions fresh indefinitely. I don't think anybody will bother for a long time.

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I'm pretty sure I've forgotten more of my reactions than I've ever placed, even though I'm more or le... (3 comments)
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Argument against

Quite simply, none of the available reactions has a clear and pressing need for such a marking.

"Works for me" can be directly contradicted

The only good reason to mark a "works for me" reaction as "stale" is because the solution is now obsolete - and there is already a reaction explicitly for indicating that. We don't have to predict a timeline for a hypothetical Python 4; if and when it happens, we can mark answers that are 3.x-specific after determining that they are 3.x-specific (while leaving alone answers that aren't affected by the version bump, but are just as old).

"outdated" and "dangerous" tags don't go bad

As already noted.

If a technique is outdated, it can't stop being outdated.

If a technique is dangerous, it is extremely unlikely to become safe automatically; even if new library support appears, the answer will probably have to be edited to take advantage. It would be incredibly poor practice on the part of e.g. a library maintainer to secure a fundamentally insecure technique, years later, and reuse all the same names for it.

Even if it did happen that version X of a library makes previously-unsafe technique Y safe, with no required alteration to the code, the answer is still in a sense outdated - because it doesn't account for the library version required for security (a version number that was unknowable at the time of writing).

If an answer is edited, years later, such that it goes from being outdated or dangerous to not being thus, then that in turn can be disputed by adding appropriate "Works for me" tags.

"interest" becoming stale isn't relevant

Either the site went live, in which case there's no reason to care about book-keeping on the process that got that far; or the proposal has been in discussion for so long that it's probably time to face reality and reject it (probably without prejudice); or else it's one specific user who has reconsidered the proposal and should be responsible for actively retracting the reaction.

Argument in favour

Because answers do get edited in ways that could immediately and directly invalidate a reaction, and because people do leave communities over time (and therefore could leave a reaction and then fail to see an edit that invalidates the reaction), and because sometimes people will just stubbornly disagree that their reaction is invalidated: I agree that we should at least be able to see the dates for reactions. Expecting a mouseover might be too much; I like OP's idea of reduced saturation for older reactions - but instead applied to reactions where all of the following apply:

  • the question has been edited;
  • the reaction was made before the most recent edit;
  • the most recent edit is older than some time threshold (either configurable by community, or dependent on the community's level of activity);
  • the reacting user has been relatively inactive since that edit.

Mouseover guidance would suggest something like: "it's possible that the reacting user hasn't fully considered edits made after making the reaction".

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1 comment thread

Unrelated, but I gotta say: (2 comments)
Unrelated, but I gotta say:
matthewsnyder‭ wrote 10 months ago · edited 10 months ago

That is some sick Markdown wizardry, man. I had no idea you could do that - really cool!

Karl Knechtel‭ wrote 10 months ago

Well, it's more to do with embedded HTML than the Markdown after all ;) I've been picking up these techniques from other posts and more or less just hoping they work properly together. I've filed a couple bugs along the way - in particular, the centering of the H2 titles is not intentional.