Maybe this really needs to be reconsidered. Allowing comment downvoting might be the simplest and most painless way to encourage a friendlier athmosphere on SO.
Like upvotes, comment downvotes could come with no rep change. That would eliminate the element of competition.
How about a downvoting...
if you think the idea could be viable, please consider voting up the original question out of its -7 abyss so it has a chance :)
Cool. I used to be indifferent to the feature request until now, but maybe it would be a good feature to improve the general athmosphere - without any deep changes to the system. Voting works for question and answers, so why not for comments?
Yeah, I remember seeing it before as well (I had neither upvoted nor downvoted). Considering the current push towards civility, though, I think that's a great possible solution.
Not a bad proposal. Though I'm a bit hesitant on the whole noise issue. I don't like the idea of seeing comments diverge into "why was my comment downvoted?" "your tone was snarky" "well.." blablabla
> The upvotes on comments mean approximately nothing. Let's have downvotes, too. The more dimensions of pointlessness this site adds, the sooner somebody dies from forgoing food and sleep while using it.
Many comments become noise over time. At the same time, some comments add valuable information to the question or answer and should be preserved permanently.
So far, all efforts to conceive a clean-up feature that makes it easy to distinguish worthy comments from noise have failed. When seeing a...
@Pekka Yeah. But I don't think there's much room for "education" here. In theory, you could have meta-comments - or threading - and get some sort of feedback that way. But that moves even further from the conceptually-simple model we're on now.
The best opportunity for education, IMHO, is leading by example - post as many good comments as you can, get rid of the worthless ones.
@Pekka Yeah. I need to run some queries on comment voting, to see if my impressions of how it works actually match up with reality. But my preference would be a much more subtle change: gradually hide comments that aren't getting votes. If something gets no votes, or 20 votes in the first day and nothing after, in a month they're both gone.
@Pekka Why the hesitation to flag though? Why not flag the crap out of snarky unconstructive comments and as Shog says, lead by example. If the remaining comments are positive (or at least neutral) and constructive, doesn't that provide enough of a message?
That's one of those areas where Jeff irritated the heck out of me - "comments are disposable" he'd say, "put stuff into answers". But then an up-voted comment stays pinned to the post for all eternity, while an edit can be rolled back. Not exactly the right motivation there.
It's one thing when it's your own answer and you can bring in the results of a discussion. But someone else's? That's tough. Really, you should be posting a competing answer if the author doesn't want to fix it. But so often, folks just leave a critical comment...
@Bart flagging stuff is, to me, tantamount to "OMG! How can you say such a thing! This needs to be removed RIGHT NOW!". A downvote would be more of a "don't be such a dick". A question of preference, I guess
@Shog9 but that's also because writing a good answer is work. If all you can contribute to the issue is the information that answer X is broken, then writing an answer feels frivolous. Comments definitely have a place there.
@Shog9 yeah, I try to do that quite a lot. And many others do, too.... but it's still just a handful of people vs. a vast sea of mediocre questions
@Bart oooh now I get what you mean by "used a comment of mine the second time", no, that was not intended, your comment just stood out so nicely there :)
@Pekka Yeah. If it's to work, it has to reach that critical mass where newcomers encounter good, really good comments much more frequently than bad ones, and follow in kind.
@Shog9 yeah. I still think negative feedback on comments might help give newcomers and onlookers some orientation as well, but it would add complexity...
On a support call one time, I had someone tell me "Why would I go to your computer? The problem is on my my computer" when I told them to open "My Computer".
Currently here, on meta.SO, retagging and addtag-request are synonyms to tags.
But [retagging] should be a synonym to retag-request, and [addtag-request] to tag-creation.
Just saw a notification for a not-yet-processed suggested edit on one of my posts, for the first time. It was satisfying to handle that myself, rather than leaving it to random reviewers -- I know exactly how the original author feels about it.
Anonymous
Though given the rate that the queue is processed these days, I had to hurry to make sure I actually got my vote in.
@jeremybanks Yeah... We'll have to see if this lasts - might almost make sense to delay suggested edits a bit to give active authors a chance to review them; at the same time, it's great just to have a mostly-empty queue most days.
Currently here, on meta.SO, retagging and addtag-request are synonyms to tags.
But [retagging] should be a synonym to retag-request, and [addtag-request] to tag-creation.
