Dear policy makers,
As a not-so casual observer, I'd like to record my opinion here too.
But first, I would like to recount more or less what happened in the
staff lounge.
I implemented revoting, with basic functionality, many moons past,
about two months ago, if not a bit longer. It's been so long that I've
forgotten. It seemed like a feature that our userbase has been
demanding for a long time, and I know that until someone goes out and
does things, they'll never get done, no matter how much they get
talked about. I know that I am not enabled in any capacity to
influence directly the policy changes around here, but I did want to
nudge the eds and admins towards approving some policy
change, whichever decision they might choose. Showing them an
implementation was a first step towards enabling that decision.
There was lots of debate between the eds and admins about what to do
with revoting, which is the main reason this took so long. Some are in
favour of a very laissez-faire revoting policy, others
in favour of tightening the laws one way or another. After it seemed
to me that debate had run its course, and because I was afraid that
this idea would stagnate again for who knows how many years (strike
while the iron is hot, I say), I tried to nudge the editors again by
calling an informal poll on what the revoting policy should be. Full
disclosure, the options I polled them about were
- Allow revoting both ways, XP neutral
- Allow revoting both ways, XP tracking
- Allow limited revoting both ways, XP neutral
- Allow limited revoting both ways, XP tracking,
- Allow only revoting up, not down, XP tracking.
These were almost all the options that were discussed during the
debate. There was also an Option 0: postpone debate and think more
about this, which personally scared me a little. Here "XP neutral"
means that a revote doesn't affect anyone's XP and "XP tracking" means
that a revote upwards gives one XP to the votee and and a revote
downwards takes it away. Option #5 was the last one suggested as a
compromise, since it's a partial implementation of revoting,
and seems to avoid the largest qualms people had with revoting: that
someone for personal reasons would serially revote someone else down
without consideration of the quality of the writing, only the
perceived moral quality of the revotee.
Options 2 and 5 came out very close to each other, with option 2
winning by a few votes, but not by much. In the end, the executive
decision came, and I was ordered to disable revoting downwards and
bringing my revoting code live, which I cheerfully did, because I was
glad that at least something was happening, and the eds and admins
didn't decide to postpone this feature for who knows how much longer.
If you consider the choices, you'll see that Option 5 is the most
conservative of them all, changing very little policy-wise. It doesn't
change the meaning of an upvote, since it tracks XP (so that your XP
can still be directly calculated from number of writeups, upvotes, and
chings). It doesn't break the "never lose XP" model that was part of
the latest XP changes. It doesn't allow serial revoting down. In fact,
it barely allows revoting at all. As a first foray into revoting,
Option 5 seems sane in order to at least test the waters with a new
feature that changes much about how E2 has worked since voting was
first introduced.
Nevertheless, I agree with the apparent majority from what I've heard
in the catbox that the option that should have been implemented was
Option 2, not 5. In fact, my code evolved from Option 1, which seemed
like the first favourite, then to Option 2, and finally to Option 5,
which roughly indicates my order of preference. Options 1 and 2 allow
the most freedom to the users, and well, I believe that the more
liberty you give users to make up their own choices, even if it's a
bad choice, well, all the better. Option 5 seems like unnecessary
nannying and not giving users the full range of freedom that they
deserve.
Thankfully, except for ecore, nothing here is set
in stone (and even ecore can be sculpted, with some difficulty). I am
quite happy that this much-needed change happened, at least partially.
I think that you, policy makers, would do well to discard the last of
your reservations and give the freedom to your users for which they
clamour.
Yours,
Swap