When I look at the latest topics, I see a sea of “0 votes”. Clearly this isn’t really being helpful. Therefore, I’m going to turn it off, and all of the customizations related to that.
Any objections or comments?
I guess the main thing I’d like feedback on is:
Turn off site-wide
Turn off for Q&A categories, but leave on for Site Feedback
Turn off for Q&A categories, but leave on for Common Issues
Sorry, I’m new here and voted thinking this was about voting in polls. I’m honestly not sure that voting on topics is useful. I’ve been doing it occasionally, but I never look at it otherwise and don’t see how it’s generally useful as a regular user. If it’s not useful for site metrics, then I won’t shed a tear over it.
I think it would be very useful if people used it constantly. The hope was we could use it to get a sense of the overall most useful topics in a category. But… if people only vote occasionally, which is the case in practice, it’s just more noise. We’ve got plenty of other indicators for metrics — including reactions to the posts themselves.
Heck, and I just voted on something earlier today! I agree with Matt, if it isn’t frequently used, it becomes of no value. There are some (rare) topics that (if I were voting frequently) I’d upvote, usually related to driver or configuration issues. But, not having run into such issues myself, I’ve a poor sense of whether the topic and solution were truly of value to others seeking solutions. So my votes have been rare, and collectively of little use.
It’s admittedly an after-thought for me. I’ve been trying to do it more often. As someone who isn’t a normal Discourse user in general, I don’t fully connect to the “why” of it. If I better understood “the power of the click”, I’d be more inclined to do it more consistently.
From what I have seen voting is not used much and it doesn’t get us anywhere. Questions are not answered earlier or with higher-quality answers if there is more votes on the topic.
As I noted earlier in the discussion about enabling voting.
The vote is at the very beginning of the thread.
Often topics will have several (or many) posts before the realistic solution or work-around is posted, and that means the person voting must then scroll all the way to the beginning of the thread to enter their vote. Doing so is inconvenient at best.
I feel the voting/likes on the individual posts is more realistic than votes on the thread and that is the way I have been marking things.
As per the pretty overwhelmingly no-votes-please sentiment, topic voting is now off. Of course, you can still use and other topic reactions ( and so on [1]) to “vote” for an individual post. Or, add a poll, for that kind of voting. But no more topic votes.
I’m afraid that if you don’t like these, you’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead fingers. Being FPL has to have some perqs, right? ↩︎
and other topic reactions (
and so on