A lot of people have frustrations with the <3/</3 thread rating system. It's an effective system in SF because <3/</3 has an accepted premise of meaning "i (dis)like this idea", but everywhere else the rating system becomes ambiguous. Also a lot of people tend to perceive </3's/dislikes as social feedback rather than feedback about the threads people make themselves.
Over the past months complaints about the </3 system, or people wanting an option to disable </3 in their threads, have been constant:
2.9 days ago
7.1 days ago
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10.9 months ago
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I found these threads via using the search word "dislike" for thread titles...there are probably more out there.
The thing about the </3 system is that in SF it is particulary useful, so every time someone makes a thread about wanting </3 optional, of course the idea is going to get downvoted to hell, which I think gives passing staff the impression that people don't want it optional. But that's SF. That's not the rest of Gaia. The only time ya'll ever looked for feedback on the </3 system is when you guys made that one thread asking for input
before the rating system was pushed out...additionally, that feedback thread was, of course, placed in SF...where a <3/</3 system is useful.
But other forums areas on Gaia have held complaints about how other users are abusing the </3 system as a way to harass others. A lot of times, </3 is used as a way to vent against topic creators if people do not like the topic creator as a person...not because they dislike the topic itself. This has created a rather negative experience for people who make/create topics around Gaia.
QUESTION: Is there any way to get devs/staff to re-evaluate this rating system, taking into consideration feedback from other forums, not just Site Feedback (where in SF, </3 is particularly useful and even justified to have...everywhere else it is used rather crappily)?
The biggest suggestion going on out there is to make it an optional feature, where thread creators can opt in/opt out of allowing a thread rating to apply to their thread.
You guys may not know it but a sizable number your users are hypersensitive to social feedback/indicators social judgment. The </3 button is a real big issue when it comes to contributing to real
anxiety for making new topics around Gaia. Not everyone wants to see this type of thing in their daily forum experience. Not even facebook has a dislike button, and they seem adamant that one will never come to their social network website. Youtube allows it's video-makers to disable liking/disliking.
The <3/</3 dynamic does not have the same premise or interpretation in any one forum or any one thread, except in SF where it's universally accepted to mean "agree/disagree" (in most cases). In some threads, such as quest threads, the </3 button is even useless and IMO is only used by people to hate on other people's quests.
According to what staff has said in the past, people wanted the dislike button. However, that assumption was made
before <3/</3 was pushed out, and that assumption was made in a thread in SF where a dislike option is actually useful. Every time someone makes a complaint about the </3 button in SF,
of course the thread is going to get a lot of </3's because in that forum the feature is actually useful/doing it's job. However, clearly, via the steady/constant complaint threads that pop up by users about the <3/</3 system, not everyone wants the dislike button.
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