We’re adding the ability to customize this in the upcoming release, but I’m wondering what people think would be a good default.
The 4 pieces of showable/hideable info are: Upvotes, Downvotes, Score, and Upvote %.
In Jerboa, I had a temporary default (until the next lemmy release), of Score + Upvote %
, but people seem to dislike this a lot.
I’ll check back on this in a few days to see the result.
I prefer seeing up vote and down vote counts separately and nothing else.
Intuitively, showing both the upvote and downvote count would display the full information. The total and the percentage can be derived from that (and yea humans are bad at maths but you’ll be able to estimate well enough probably).
I also like showing both counts separately so that a +50 -10 post doesn’t appear equivalent to a +100 -60 post.
Could you perhaps show some screenshots of how the different options would look? Preferably on both mobile and desktop. I think that would make it a lot easier to choose.
It’s also an easy way to show new users one basic front-facing feature on Lemmy that is different from Reddit - which is a good idea on its own, but especially because Reddit used to display upvotes/downvotes this way and then removed it entirely, probably for manipulative reasons.
It’s good to be able to customize, but better to have the default option be an improvement over the alternative. Even more-so when the change isn’t jarring.
I remember when reddit removed the simple upvote + downvote and added “vote-fuzzing” and upvote percentage. Everyone hated it, but there was no alternative to switch to.
Also when YouTube removed the dislike vote counter to protect against corporations being ratioed.
My vote goes to simple displaying of upvotes and downvotes separately, with no total or percentage.
Up+down. Can’t say I’m a fan of the %
Yeah, I was confused about what it was (I thought it was some indication of how fresh the comment was for sorting purposes). A percent isn’t interesting when most comments have like 5 votes or whatever, and it’s still not that interesting even if there are more.
Up + Down. That way you can’t use trolling/harassment to massage the perception of a post.
Put it this way: Do you want the nazis who downvote everything left of Hitler to have any sway over a conversation?
Personally I like upvotes/downvotes. Both are pretty useful information to have and those are the two numbers that my brain translates most cleanly into seeing what’s going on.
Also I want to put in my perennial pitch for the software to display a popup or something the first time you vote, saying hey warning your votes are not private on any federated software! Don’t vote with an expectation of privacy.
Up and down preferably, anything else is just worse.
Otherwise overridable by user preference would be great.
Even though we don’t use it on this instance, I do find the up vote and down vote counts the most interesting and transparent
Anything but upvote % as default, because many instances disable downvotes.
We’re still working on it, but we’ll add logic into the front ends to make sure these settings can’t conflict.
I think score, then in smaller less noticeable text, upvotes and downvotes. I don’t think upvote % adds much value as you have the information to calculate it already.
My original motivation was trying to limit information overload, and go from 3 pieces of score info, down to 2. This will all be configurable, but I’d like the default to be really simple.
I think it should display only the score. But when I hover with my mouse it should show the upvote and downvote count.
The same goes to the mobile version, but instead of hovering with a mouse I can hold my finger on the score and the app displays the upvote/downvote count.
I like a more simple and clean approach, I believe this helps bring less tech-savvy users to lemmy.
I voted (and I hope everyone else commenting here did as well, I guess comments alone won’t be aggregated into the results)
The way it is in lemmy-ui now is fine.
1)Big score with up/downvote at the side, and also the ability to see the votes for everyone.
Or
2)Big score and the ability to see the votes for everyone
i prefer to see the total score as a primary, with the up/down score as a secondary (on both posts and comments). percent is really only useful on posts and could be counterproductive on comments.
I don’t think you’ll ever get a concrete answer on this because different people treat even basic numbers differently none the less assigning value to them. I like upvoted/downvote view because I like being able to see what’s controversial. It means a comment is both important to show a dividing line but also might be misleading.
Edit: note of course, I’m saying this while on an instance that doesn’t even federate downvotes at the moment.