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What good vote-driven threaded interaction looks like

RiotMontag·10/17/2013, 2:24:19 AM·4 votes·3,035 views

I've seen a lot of discussion about the potential for circle-jerkiness in a vote-driven threaded discussion system. You guys have valid concerns for why you don't want to see the LoL community devolve into quips, memes, and low-engagement stuff. You guys are craving meat, and I hear lots of you saying you're worried that vote-driven threaded discussions might take away from that.

I want to share with you guys what I think is a pretty good example of meaty discussion coming out of vote-driven threaded system. I'm sure you guys are familiar with the government shutdown issues being debated in Congress right now. Lots of people are obviously interested in this topic. There's a large thread on Reddit dedicated to talking about the issue broadly and tracking the events as they happen. The top comment at the moment asks a really good question about some specifics regarding timing and defaulting, and the resulting discussion is filled with great information. Here's a link to the comment and the discussion around it.

This shows off one of the advantages of a vote-driven threaded discussion system. Here's the question that opens that particular thread:

Is the actual deadline tonight at midnight? Also, how close are they to coming to a deal? I know yesterday there were a couple bills sent to the house and vice versa but they were all defeated, are both parties still not budging on the issue?

A series of comments follow that describe in some decent detail the exact default date (not exactly midnight, because the US has about $20 billion to work with), what the Treasury means when it says "extraordinary measures" (borrowing from itself), and what the real damage of defaulting would be for the nation (destroying national credit). They feel thorough and detailed. On the whole, the ones that accrue the greatest net upvotes tend to be the thorough and detailed ones, which means those are the ones contributors see first, which means those are the ones other contributors will emulate.

Part of the reason for this is that the discussion is happening within the Ask Reddit community, which tends to favor well-thought-out contributions because they call that out in their community rules and enforce it through votes.

When I think about how interaction will change within Community versus the current forums, I see this kind of detailed discourse happening where the best contributions float to the top. What do you guys think? Do you guys have any other examples of good conversations you'd like to see appear here?

29 Comments

LiftsLikeGaston10/17/2013, 2:38:14 AM8 votes

The problem with any vote driven discussions are just that, they're vote driven. It will inevitably silence any part of the community that isn't of the popular opinion. I've seen it happen before on your own current forums, and I can only imagine the new ones will make it worse. Could be wrong though, even if I am I don't see myself using this site much once the change is made to the new format.

Verandure10/17/2013, 2:34:01 AM4 votes

If you look at the quality of discussions going on, right now, most of them are well thought out and call for quality discourse. However; this is a subsection of your community that has found a venue, however transitory, to post in. Once this community becomes popular, can you honestly guarantee that the majority will still value quality discussions when, in GD, it's the same repetitive, unimaginative, trap-threads/echo-chambers day in and day out?

LVNsNASmurf10/17/2013, 3:21:34 AM2 votes

Problem one. Middle clicking your link opened this disussion in a new tab, instead of your link in a new tab. -1 useable points.

Reddits text is 33-50% wider in layout than yours and has less intrusive graphical bloat around the content. -1 points for you again. EDIT, i'm taking another -2 off you, cos frankly, they have their nested presentation down to an art, and yours is a bodge.

The entire first next thread is deemed worth of reading, and auto expanded. Looks horrible, guides me to the already popular, and does not give me the incentive to look at all the replies to a post. Better formatting would have the OP, then each 1st level response shown, and then the option of expanding 2nd level responses to 1st level responses, much like navigating a windows file system. -1 usability points.

And you know what? This is a singular comment and its spawn. Be honest here, how different is what you gave us from what is actually presented to a user upon entering this mess

Know whats the problem with the best stuff floating to the top? It's all a user will see, and it will cement itself.

Look, stop trying to push reddit on us. We have one. If we wanted it, we'd use it.

AlexWC10/17/2013, 2:28:53 AM2 votes

Can we continue that conversation here? My Congressman (and former soccer coach) is the whistle-blower on the rule change that is keeping the government shut down.

On more LoL-related note I think that questions are more important than answers. You can't even begin to comprehend solutions if you can't define the question/problem. So many threads on GD are "insert generic, completely one-sided statement" to start off "discussion threads" that don't go anywhere. What I said above about the government is an example of a bad way to start a discussion. ;)

Zoram10/17/2013, 5:13:32 AM2 votes

The thing I see though is that upvote downvotes are not good for anything in our community already. I still want a report button, and I still think downvoting makes things into a popularity contest. Sure maybe have a +1 to get good things noticed for the sake of that but eh, even then I think if you find something constructive, you would actually reply to it. To me, if you make a good post, others will post back to it because you can actually do something with what they said.

Think about all the great threads the LoL community has had. Did they ALL get tons of upvotes? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But they pretty much always have had a bazzillion pages of responses, back and forth talking, quotes, new people jumping in and providing more, and then you rioters would come in. We would talk with you, use the next riot post button, and we could all keep moving along because the topic was good.

If you actually thought that such a system was good to indicate validity, why then are so many riot posts locked from being voted on? I have seen plenty of unpopular things get downvoted even if they made good points. I've had threads downvoted to oblivion because of how people think of different people, so many threads on sexuality and LoL touting one side or the other, would randomly get upvoted to god tier, or downvoted and auto-closed.

Of course people are talking about the government shutdown it is a big deal. Just like when we made a massive thread about magnificent twisted fate being legendary, that was a big deal. But you know, nothing about upvotes and downvotes really made a difference about that topic in reddit. Infact finding a linear conversation on that particular comment is a nightmare, and voting doesn't make that matter much more. The earlier comments still get tons and tons of votes, and the later ones still get next to none and anything that is a good point later on, can and often IS left buried deep down.

At least with a linear conversation, we can talk about things in a fluid format. This way people just get hung up on the earliest development of the conversation and it becomes difficult as much as it ever has to get people to talk about things more recent in the conversation as it has evolved. However with this format, a lot of times it can be really really hard to find the time linear conversation and whom is responding to whom.

On that note, making things sort by recent first instead of popularity is probably a good idea for new good ideas to be seen more easily.

LxLegend10/17/2013, 4:19:50 AM1 votes

Are the links in the original post supposed to link us to reddit because if so the links aren't working for me. Got it to work by inspecting the element, don't know why it wan't working for me.

Anyway on topic.

Isn't it a bit unrealistic to expect that sort of thing here if this format goes live? Wouldn't this be more likely to end up the sprawling mess that Riot's Reddit AMAs become?

Let me give an example. In the last eCommerce AMA I asked a question. It was a quality question never got seen because it got no votes.

eCommerce AMA Comment

It was thoughtful, specific, relevant to the topic of the AMA, and buried. Now I'm not saying that things don't get buried in the current forums they absolutely do.

Can you really tell me that what happened to my post on reddit won't become the usual thing that happens on these boards once thousands of people start using them at once? But be even worse because now not only will threads be lost in the shuffle but post (replies) in threads will be lost in the shuffle.

silverbacon10/17/2013, 4:16:28 AM1 votes

We need a section where only lv 30 players can post and vote. Votes may actually help, but they won't do much if people are continuously allowed to post spam with their smurfs and up-vote a post because it contains a picture of an indecent woman. And people need to be held accountable for blatantly inappropriate behavior, not simply down-voted or having their threads closed. I would venture to guess a lot of people won't bring the GD to a place where they can actually lose forum privileges to an account that would take effort to recreate.