Why isn't there a way to sort responses by greatest answer?

It would be confusing to take them out of chronological order, since answers often build on previous posts. Some threads would be impossible to follow if the sequence were altered. One of the beauties of Fluther is the way we all chip in to construct a big, multi-faceted answer as a community. You kind of lose that beauty if you just rank them against each other.

Fluther is more a continuing conversation, with each response building on those that have come before it.

I agree, but that’s why it would be nice to have a “sort by” feature, rather than simply presenting the answers in order with greatest answer on top. Sometimes I want to just cut to the chase. Though clearly I’m new to the community, so perhaps I’ll get the hang of it soon enough and break free from our pervasive LIKE/DISLIKE culture.

Live with us a while and you will become enmeshed in our gelatinous culture.

I do it manually.

@coelacanth Glad you’re here. It does take some getting used to. You’ll find that a lot of measures have been taken to keep the whole “lurve points” thing from getting out of hand. If the number of “Great Answer” clicks an answer gets actually came to be seen as a ranking of merit, then things might quickly get more competitive, and nobody here wants that.

Also, “Great Answers” tend to acrue more quickly to early answers in a thread, when more people are checking it out. Later answers are often better, but get less attention.

@coelacanth Yeah, I think @thorninmud is right about the later answers get less attention, even though they could be better thing.
I will prove this by returning later on in the thread (say, as answerer number 65) with a brilliant respons.
You will witness that it will not gain any GA….

You should probably know now that programming changes are severely limited on this site.

There are many fine features that fluther doesn’t have because there are no programmers to make them happen. That seems like a fine feature to me. In my opinion, the customer is always right. If that’s what people want, that’s what fluther should provide. But as I said, fluther will be providing nothing more that continued access for the foreseeable future.

If we did that, people would probably only read the answers with the greatest number of GAs. However, the GA system is not perfect. It seems to me if you answer first or last you are more likely to attract GAs and while there may be good answers in the middle of a long stream of responses, they may not get the recognition they deserve.

Also, while I think most people try to be fair there are anomolies in terms of people who are very popular and attract many GAs and those who are less popular and even when they do write a great response don’t seem to attract the GAs that might be expected. So GAs are an indicator only. You may read a response that you think is fabulous but has barely any GAs. Others either don’t agree or it has slipped under the radar.

Sometimes I learn the most from the least liked answers

some people would read answers with the most GAs. Not all people. Many of us would read all the answers, or skim them or whatever we do now. I see no harm in letting people choose to interact with the material in the way they see fit.

I’ve never understood this preoccupation (which seems to be escalating) with “lurve”
Just silly little numbers attached to names, questions & answers.
Sure it’s a bit of fun & yet to some it means a whole lot more, or so it seems.

Like @thorninmud says, people would get much more competitive with trying to achieve the most GAs. I think you would lose the community feel of the site if you added things like this (down-rating another example). The General section generally doesn’t receive as many responses as Social anyway, so you could easily scroll down and find the greatest answers in no time.

@wundayatta In my opinion, the customer is always right. If that’s what people want, that’s what fluther should provide

@wundayatta Are you forgetting that Fluther is free? If we paid for the service we’d have a lot more room to complain about it’s shortcomings, but we don’t, so we….don’t.

I also get frustrated at times with the lack of improvements, but bottom line, it’s a FREE site.

F-R-E-E.