Per-Post Ratings System

Like the website facepunch.com incorporates.

Basically, when you hover your cursor over a post, a few non-intrusive small icons show up in the bottom right, like so (using facepunch as an example):



Check mark for agree
X for disagree
Yellow face for funny
Medal for winner
Lightning bolt for zing
i for informative
Heart for friendly
Tool for useful
Rainbow for optimistic
Paint tool for artistic
Clock for old (like old news)
Box for dumb (maybe exclude this if it's too rude)

When you click on one, the icons disappear and are replaced with a fading "Rated!"

Then under each post, if people rated it, the rating totals are shown, like so:


(This was a sticky so people rated it to oblivion. It was a warning about a security problem, hence all the friendlies)

When you click on list:



Anyway, its a pretty neat idea and even just having a few of these would be excellent. What say you?

MacDawg said:

Personally?
I say UGH!!

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Explain.

-aggie- said:

He doesn't like it.

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I was asking why he doesn't like it.

stridemat said:

This would lead to all sorts of popularity contests. Also what does it achieve? (Apart form a list of the most annoying posters etc)

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Well, looking at the site I got it from, which I'm a member of, there are no popularity contest. There isn't an overall count that people can refer to. It's just on a per-post basis. It helps get an idea of what people think about something. The ratings aren't talked about, nor are they used in any competitions. It's just a background feature that everyone uses.

Jaffa Cake said:

What exactly would constitute a 'zing'? Is that one of those puzzling terms young people use on Facebook and stuff?

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A good argument or a comeback.

Doctor Q said:

Post-ratings with icons would be similar in spirit to thread-rating using tags, but MacRumors has chosen to allow only thread-starters to tag their threads, to avoid potential problems.

The facepunch forum have 168,455 users, so it's not a tiny site. I'm curious if they have trouble with abuse of the post-rating system and how often it starts arguments vs. how often it helps users find useful threads. That's the tradeoff.

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Being a member there for six years, I can tell you that there are no conflicts over the ratings system. It's used in a pretty honest way amongst the community there and is indeed helpful. It's used as a method to reward sense of mastery and social acceptance or to the contrary for trolls, etc. Occasionally (pretty rarely) somebody will make a follow up post asking why he was rated negatively. I think the ratings system pushes people in Facepunch to post a little better because of the potential reward of social acceptance.

One thing I forgot to mention is that the most common rating given to the OP will be displayed outside of the thread (only if it passes I think 30 times rated.) This is extremely useful for finding threads that are funny, informative, etc.

I realize that each community differs and the only proper way to see if it will fit in with one is to test it, but it's a pretty big risk seeing as it's potentially worth hours of work to get it implemented properly and in the end it may not end up being used.

Anyway, thanks for posting about your concerns; the first proper reply to the OP.



Extra: to feed some more potential curiosity-

This site was back in the day widely regarded as one of the harshest sites in terms of moderation. There used to be a system that rewarded proper typing skills called the Smartness system. Basically the user would start at 0. Every post he made with no dumb text (like u for You, lol XD, etc.) would reward him 10 points. Every thread he made without error would reward him 50, with the total points (positive or negative) showing under their name on the left. Whenever an error was made, it would highlight the error to them and give them the chance to edit their post to fix it. When they fixed it, the point reduction would reverse and they'd receive the regular 10 points for posting properly.

I can't begin to tell you how amazingly quickly this system worked. We went from having "lol hi guise howz it goin lolz" to "Hello, how's it going?" in a year. Full transformation. Eventually the smartness system was removed as part of a forum redesign, but the good writing skills stayed and are to this day enforced pretty well through use of the ratings system to punish people based on poor writing skills (not for not knowing the language, but for purposefully tiping like dis, lol.)


Then before the ratings system we had a simple Thanks! system. Number of times you were thanked showed up under your name on the left. It was more or less a reputation system but with a number instead of a graphical way of showing it.