I noticed this while looking at themes for the Fedora Discussion reorg:
It’s a theme which makes votes more prominent on the topic lists, like this:
Should we use that for Ask Fedora?
0 voters
My only concern would be mobile where there is already limited screen real-estate in that view.
That being said, I don’t really understand the concept of topic voting as it applies to posts on this site which are primarily support related.
What does it mean to vote for a topic? I like your problem? Nice issue?
If the voting was applied to posts, it would make much more sense but I am guessing the plugin probably doesn’t support that.
I’ve been treating it as interesting problem and/or solution.
My hope is that votes will help us identify common problems — or clever solutions — and we can use them to semi-automatically create a FAQ.
However, I’m not convinced that it’s actually serving that purpose at this point, hence my interest in tweaks.
Right, there’s likes/reacts for that.
We talked about voting when the site first launched and revisited it a few months ago.
As that last post noted… we should revisit if it’s working. I’m on the fence — the Ask in English topic list sorted by votes seems somewhat useful, but the highest-voted post has just five votes. So I’d like to experiment with a few other things before we call it quits.
In the case that the votes are not serving that purpose, I would think this calls for rendering votes even more subtle.
I would argue, beyond that, that votes distract me from a substantive engagement with content. Votes introduce a competitive atmosphere, that distracts me from my own assessment of quality of posts/issues.
I am happy we can use the likes/reacts, which clearly indicate the subjective assessment of others in the “room”.
Okay, so, I enabled this — but for right now, just for this category, because it seems to have a side-effect of causing all of the topics to be indented in a way that I’m not happy with, so I’ll have to tweak that.
My proposal is to enable this for a month, and if it’s not helping (as measured by "top voted posts have dozens of votes, not five), turn off voting.
I have to agree with @ingli
Voting applies to the whole thread and a subjective vote requires a deliberate scroll back to the top after reading the entire thread before the vote can be cast. The likes, OTOH, apply to a single post within the thread and tend to indicate the value of the info in that post.
I am much more likely to ‘like’ a post than to vote for a thread.