(I already posted about this on the old forums, but can’t find the thread anymore )
I would really like to see a feature to downvote or dislike comments. I find the comment culture on trakt pretty awful, the vast majority of comments are one-liners like “this show is awful”, or “omg when will the next season come out”.
I would like users to put a bit more effort into their comments and see actual fruitful comments or even discussions here, that can help me decide whether or not to watch a movie or TV show.
Therefore, I think it would be great to have a reddit-like system, where people can not only like / upvote a comment, but also downvote it. Then pages could display the top comments.
I feel that a simple like/dislike system would be misused, a lot. There are always people who would dislike even great comments just because they don’t agree with them. Even if there was some kind of etiquette for voting, those some people always exist. Perhaps ‘was this comment helpful’ (up/down) voting system could work a little better.
One possibility could be comment reactions, allowing users to mark comments as helpful, funny, insightful… and allowing filtering based on reactions.
Comment reactions also sound like a good idea. Either way, I think the comments need a new algorithm or system, because it’s really annoying to see so many vastly unhelpful one-line comments on so many shows…
I am wondering if comments would benefit for a reddit-like system with upvotes/downvotes. It is, like @jonimettala wrote, a system that could be misused, but on the other hand Trakt community is not that big (or maybe is?) so we should be ok
Or maybe simple system with flags, that hides comments which brings nothing to discussion when they hit certain amount of flags? Of course they can be reveald by the user if necessary.
I like this idea. I can see that downvoting could be abused, but if there’s a flag specifically for marking a comment as unhelpful/not contributing anything meaningful to the discussion, that could be much better.
For that matter, it could also be like on Amazon’s reviews, at the bottom of each there is button to choose yes or no for whether you found a review helpful or not. I’m also a member of Ravelry, an online community for knitters and crocheters and on each person’s project notes page, you can indicate only if you found their notes helpful - nothing to mark them as unhelpful.
So there are three options: either flagging comments as unhelpful/not a meaningful contribution, or marking them as meaningful/helpful only, or an option to mark them either way.
I am a bit unsure on downvotes/dislikes as i have seen them miss used so many times, and other places i visit have removed them because of this
Say for an example i gave a movie an 8/10 rating and gave it a good review of 5 lines, someone else dislikes the movie, so they could flag my review as unhelpful
to me that would be a misuse of how it’s meant to work and it would be much better as it currently is and my review just got ignored in the above example
The idea is good in principle, i just have reservations on how it would work
There are a lot of good points in this thread and ultimately why we haven’t implemented something like this yet. The reactions idea is interesting, instead of only having the like option maybe it can be expanded with different feelings. we’ll keep thinking about this more on our side too.
Speaking of ravelry, on the ravelry forums there are also options for reacting to each individiual post. Currently the available reactions look like this:
I think an adapted version of that could make sense for trakt (as some others here already suggested), with reactions like “helpful”, “not helpful”, “funny”, “interesting”, “agree”, “disagree”, “like/love”. That gives haters an opportunity to agree / disagree, and a way to filter out helpful comments. Then a new display algorithm can be created to display only the most helpful comments, or the most controversial comments or something like that.
Steam also recently added reaction-like ‘awards’ to store reviews and users are finding creative use cases for it.
There will always be people who prefer posting not too insightful comments. There will also be people who use reactions for fun. Reactions are a great way to develop engagement to a completely different level. It’s a way to express feelings without typing something.
However, because it makes expressing feelings so easy, it’s critical to understand that it causes comment writer to experience feelings too. While reactions like “disagree” or “unhelpful” may curate the comment section, some personality types feel stronger negative emotions when receiving these than another. Many people like to know why people disagree with them, and negative reactions don’t really help people to understand the reason for disagreement.
A user throws a negative reaction and continues their life. Some comment writers dwell with a feeling why are they getting several negative reactions. In the worst case scenario they post another comment or edit the message “why is this getting so many dislikes?”. Or remove their comment, just because it was disagreed enough - even though the opinion was fine.
Facebook did great job with their reactions (like, love, haha, wow, sad, angry, care). They understood that reactions should aim to back up sympathetic feelings, not cause emotional conflicts.
Facebook knows very well that “likes” creates an addiction to users by making them feel better. So they expended the idea and they did that very well.
And you are right of course and I see it on Reddit whenever people want to know why they are being downvoted. I always hated this whole like/dislike thing. For me, one comment is worth more than a hundred likes but on the other side, times are different. In today’s world commenting on every single thing is almost impossible. So if I can agree or disagree with something by one click I take it. Although I am trying not to abuse it and still prefer to share my thoughts through words.
Also, I think that people tend to see “don’t agree” as something negative and for it’s just a different point of view of someone else. Not better, not worse. Just different.
but then you have the problem that a comment with 10 likes and possible 50 dislikes is ordered first when a comment with 8 dislikes and 0 dislikes is second.
most top comment are just there just because there were the first comment and got some upvotes not because they are great.
dislikes not need to be explicit. just add and substract and 0 could be the minimum.
I would be strongly against a downvote button. Someone could easily make a bot that creates accounts and then downvotes comments, and that would have a significant affect given the number of people who actively use the comment sections on films/shows.
the same for upvote, using the excuse of “this could be misused from someone bad” is not a good point to not implement basic things.
account that mass vote could be easily detected.
accounts that mass vote, sure. thousands of accounts with staggered join dates on thousands of different residential proxies to purposefully fuck someone’s review that one disagrees with, well, then it’s not so easy to tell real from fake, without looking for patterns, but someone with enough dislike for one’s opinion could code it to make the accounts seem as if they’re real. Botting downvotes on reviews is not really comparable to botting upvotes on this site I don’t think, because there is no real reward from upvotes, whereas with downvotes you can easily silence someone whose opinions you dislike.
And before you say, yes, I do realise this is a very extreme concept. I just dont like the downvote idea. I can already imagine Marvel and DC fans downvoting one another’s films’ reviews just because.
so a strong hypothetical scenario of someone downvoting a review that nobody really cares is a point to not have them. again the same in that case could be for mass voting your own reviews, so remove the upvote…
the ability of the mystical scenario than someone can be hurt as excuse to limit people expresion.
top reviews are usually garbage for people that think like you.
Thank you for your assessment of what I think of the typically most upvoted reviews. I can say that you’re wrong though. I quite like most of the top reviews I come across.
I like the current system. The top rated reviews I bump into are often well argued and interesting to read. I’m afraid a system allowing downvotes would incentivize reddit like situations where comments are downvoted because the author’s opinion is unpopular.
I think the only value would be to surface controversial comments receiving a substantial amount of both likes and downvotes but I don’t think it’s worth losing the positive attitude I’ve seen around here. I do think there’s a discoverability problem once a couple of reviews already occupy the top spots though.
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and on each person’s project notes page, you can indicate only if you found their notes helpful - nothing to mark them as unhelpful.
