Frequency does not equal importance
Kind of hate this vote up / vote down feature, because, like a lot of Zendesk and others input mechanisms. this equates frequency with importance. Not reality.
-
So what's your idea of a better system? I mean its fine to be a critic on a forum / improvement request system its actually kind of the point but stating a possible solution and explaining in more detail why you don't like it and how they might go about implementing a system to fix the issue would be a lot more useful. So can you elaborate?
-
Sure but the point of the request is to dispute the useful ness of "the only system we have to weed out useless posts". But saying "you suck" or "that's dumb" is not constructive. Does anyone have a method suggestion to replace it with for an attempt at making this a constructive conversation? I honestly, can't think of one off hand. However, I am not saying their is not a way.
-
I mean, frequency kind of is importance in this case. This is a tool built for people to use, it makes sense to prioritize items that more of those users say they want. Someone might really want something, but if they're the only one, it's just smart business to make that low priority.
Regardless, developers read through all suggestions (I believe), and if they saw something they felt would add to the service despite having very few upvotes, they'd still consider it.
-
I also think the voting mechanism is lacking, but I have a slightly different take than the OP. "Frequency", aka number of requesters is important, but the current mechanism gives I guess what I would call an 'overly compressed' view of the requesters' opinions. The current mechanism has, in my view, two problems. First, downvotes are worse than useless. The only circumstance that I can think of in which a downvote would be legitimate is when a requested feature would actually decrease the utility of the product, and in that case you really need a comment, not just that some random person thought that the feature would be 'bad' for some unknown reason. And if, as in the current mechanism, downvotes are aggregated with upvotes, they are worse than useless because they pollute the actually useful upvote information. A feature that is upvoted 100 times and downvoted 98 times is rarely going to be in any useful sense equivalent to a feature that is just upvoted 2 times.
Second, (ignoring downvotes for the moment), the voting system is essentially binary: either you upvote something or you don't. Combined with the facts that on the one hand each user can upvote as many features as they desire, and on the other most users probably don't go through the whole request list to make an active decision on each request, you wind up with very sketchy information about how important/desirable a feature is to the users. I can think of a couple of approaches that might yield better information, although I don't know of any way to prove that. One would be a "number of stars" rating, such as is used on many sites to rate products. That has, at least, the advantage of being familiar. Another, which I in some ways prefer, would be to add to the current mechanism an additional vote type with the property that the number of these votes per user was limited to some small number, such as three. Users would attach these "gold stars" (or "blue ribbons" or whatever) to the features that they really, really, really wanted. Neither of these would be perfect, by any means, but I do think they would probably give a significantly better sense of relative importance to go along with the sort of binary popularity that the current mechanism expresses.
It could be argued that the current mechanism, being essentially trinary (upvote, no vote, downvote) is (or could be) equivalent to a "number of stars" system in which the number of stars range from 1 to 3. The problems are 1) I'm extremely skeptical that very many users look at the system that way; and 2) the aggregation mechanic, as I noted, compresses out a significant portion of the information that you would have in an actual 1-to-3-star system.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
5 comments