Who would like a Digg style "bury/digg" feature for answers?

Well, we already have a mechanism for flagging an answer as “great” (as subjective as that is), but I think you couldn’t really use it for reordering answers because so many of them are dependent on answers that came before.

I’m new here, but I haven’t noticed any particularly stupid answers yet that I thought were a problem. It might be nice to have the ability to mark an answer as incorrect, but, then again, you can always just provide your own answer to any question explaining why a previous answer is incorrect.

I can’t imagine it would turn into a popularity contest, but it would be nice to have the answers ordered by “Great Answer,” especially on the questions that yield lots of answers and eventually end up with a conversation between two people. Those could be pushed to the bottom. I think that is an interesting and worthwhile suggestion, Spargett.

I don’t like the idea of reordering the answers, but it would be nice to have some visual indication of how “great” an answer is so that you could glance over the answers and quickly pick out the best ones.

Part of the problem with +/- user moderation is that it is often dependent sequence. The digg system hides negatively ranked comments after a certain number (like -5 or something) which can cause a user glaze over them. Comments can even be glazed over if they have a visual indication that they’re considered “bad” but aren’t hidden (for example, the title is grayed-out or turned red).

If the initial 5 people who see a comment don’t like it they can unfairly influence the subsequent possible votes. The same is true for positive votes but on a lesser scale (since they usually aren’t visually differentiated beyond the display of their score). I’ve talked to a handful of friends who frequent digg and they agree that when they read comments they scan the digg ranking of the comment as they scroll down. Now I know that isn’t exactly scientific but I think its relevant.

What might work is a silent, timed variation of digg/bury. Users could initially mod answers up or down but the results are never shown. After a given period of time, each ranking takes effect. The only noticeable difference would be that answers below the negative threshold would simply not appear (or maybe that would be optional).

Part of the reason I like fluther is that there isn’t this black and white control mechanism throughout, like digg. Marking an answer as “great” doesn’t necessarily imply that you agree with it. While it would be valid to argue that only being able “great” is akin to only being able to digg a comment up, it has a different contextual meaning. Maybe then it would be an idea to assign different attributes to an answer beyond just “great”. Or possibly breaking down the components of what makes an answer great and using them (eg. “informative”, “funny”, “poetic”, “logical” or whatever).

Reordering would require threading. I think the approach of the site’s builders is a good one. Go for something simple that meets 80% of people’s needs (at least). Anything more complicated would be harder for some users to grok.

I think that the idea of sorting answers with the highest ranking votes would be a great idea. Seeing as how people come here more for the answers than the commentary (which is cool to have, most would rather not have to scan through it all). Priority sorting based on user feedback would be very helpful.

I’ve noticed guesses posted too, which you have to scan through to get to the good information. So some sort of method to appropriatly display quality content would also act as incentive to provide well thought out and relevant answers.

This would all be for the greater good of Fluther. Its still a young site with plenty of potential to implement new features. This give a social community a voice on how they would prefer to see their community as a whole. The power of democracy.

I’ll use my democratic voice right now. Fluther’s fine. Leave it alone. (What’s a digg anyway?)

I’m w. breedmitch. Don’t overcomplicate things.

Keep it simple

I think a limited version of the Digg functionality is a good idea. But I think needs Fluther needs some sort of basic navigation first.