zlacker

> This structure is fantastic for technical discussions just not amazing for politics

No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.

There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.

Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.

>>potato+(OP)
Interesting -- what other system could you possibly have, other than votes...? I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting. I guess traditional forum threads (sometimes with votes, a-la GitHub) are nice, but ultimately that's just trading "correct sounding" for "early commenter".

Otherwise, the only thing that comes to mind is StackOverflow functionality where OP can mark a single answer as "accepted" and push it to the top instantly (which obv. wouldn't translate well to general discussions).

>>bbor+c2
A more complicated system is too complicated, but if you could emoji react to a comment (from a very limited set of emoji), and then allow people to assign weights to each emoji, so someone who likes jokes could say :laughing-face: comments rank high up in the list but someone who was more dour could set their default view to be negative for them, then you'd have something a bit better than merely up or down. you could then set the default view to be heavily in favor of what you want the site's culture to be.

the four disagreements apply to a comment section as well: the comment is factually wrong, the comment lacks information, the comment. draws a different conclusion from the same set of information, or the comment is philosophically opposed to my viewpoint. For an online comment system, spam is another category.

>>fragme+gE1
Wow, that's a really solid idea. I promise I'll credit you in the footer of my Reddit clone someday ;)