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Categorical or criterion-based voting
I am starting to strongly lean towards that votes should pretty much always come with explanations. I wonder if it is not such a radical change in system design to replace the universal or generic upvote/downvote with a category-based reaction system. In its simplest iteration, it could focus on a small, tight set of criteria that the Codidact admin consider fundamental to Codidact content. For example,
- Is it answerable / Does it answer the question?
- Is it emotionally kind, neutral, or unkind?
- Is it clear, edited, polished, and succinct, or “needs work”, messy, turbid, unfocused, etc.?
- Is it accurate, and is its accuracy verifiable in some way? (Citations, or simply sound argumentation.)
These can be summarized in four simple terms: precision, accuracy, neutrality, clarity = CNAP, pronounced “snap”, as in “keep it snappy”.
Here is a question for an example:
Is Kant's categorical imperative applicable to Q&A sites like Codidact?
I don’t want to simply upvote or downvote this question. My initial reaction is that I like the general intention behind the question, yet immediately am also struck by that it is not as “answerable” as it could be. The easiest way to engage with it would be to react with, “not sufficiently answerable”. The user would then see that as a form of constructive feedback. They - or anyone - could try to refine the question. Then, I could come back and it would be easier for me to answer.
We could still have a numerical score for questions based on the criteria, as a weighted sum.
The format could be similar to how people nowadays react with emoji to GitHub Issues or Discord messages. You can choose to react with a certain badge, essentially - one of a few ones offered.
1 answer
This use case is already covered by reactions.
The set of reactions available is community-specific, and I think is also per category. If you feel a reaction is missing but would be useful, bring that up in the community's Meta category, which is where community decisions are discussed.
If a post isn't as clear as it would need to be in an ideal world, then leave a comment and request clarification.
Votes should remain low-friction. If people have to go through a convoluted process just to express their opinion about a post, we would almost certainly have much less voting, resulting in correspondingly less content curation.
Yes, plain votes are somewhat subjective; and that's a good thing. On the whole, it tends to even out and voting coalesces into some kind of numerical quality metric for the post.
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