Published on 12, July, 2020
The online community currently uses up/down voting for users to respond to posts and comments. If we are able to change this in future, would you like to keep the current up/down votes or have a different feature? Please vote in our online community poll below.
*Please log in to the online community to vote*
The other thing is the up/down vote is just a counter of who online and saw it could be bothered to go out of their way to click it (it's not a true measure of agreement or disagreement or how helpful a reply really is) and if the up or down vote comes from someone whose opinion you don't value anyway it just becomes a unreliable metric. Doubly unreliable because they don't tell you what they are up or downvoting in the post/reply specifically. This is why reactions are more meaningful and helpful to the community imo.
No voting, no reactions = no stress, no pressure, just reading...
I am very surprised at the popularity of the 'reactions' option, that's a lot of people who know how to react and respond to someone (assuming the correct interpretation has been made) - as well as being able to decipher bizarre symbols that can mean something totally different to what they actually look like.
I must be at the far end of the 'socially clueless' spectrum!
The flexibility of both, for good reasons already well covered above.
Keep the up/down voting buttons... but include the option for a reaction? This could explain why you voted up or down.
It would also be good if there was an option for doing both.
Introduce reactions
I think both up/down vote and reactions are useful. Often up/down voting something can be the only clear way for some of us to determine whether something we say is on the mark or way off it - where reaction emojis don’t do this, and can be interpreted in many different ways depending on context. For example, a laughing reaction can be given when something is funny and someone agrees, but also when it’s outrageous or inappropriate and someone is doing it in a mocking way or to express disbelief.
At the same time, it can be nice to be able to express a specific feeling as well as rating something good and bad, and also helpful to be able to do this simplistically, without having to work out how to put how you feel into words.
To this end, why not have both, and then people have a flexible range of options of how to respond to something, which should be more inclusive to different people across the spectrum.
That’s a great idea, I hope it’s brought in, thanks for the suggestion
My autistic son and I both would vote for the Reactions to become available - they are more specific to convey your thoughts
Reactions, but supportive reactions only, this forum is supposed to be a place for autism support so if anyone doesn't feel like being supportive of a post or user they can just not click to react and ignore it. If that isn't going to be implemented then just remove all voting because sometimes the Up/down vote just brings out the passive aggressive meaness in people, and others have been known to downvote simply out of spite.
No preference
Ironically it is such that at the moment I have to vote your comment up to "like" it.
Whatever you do, get rid of up/down voting. I like to follow conversations in the order they happened and not get confused by comments out of order and out of context
Get rid of the up down stuff, it’s a terrible feature, introducing reactions, I feel is the way to go. I certainly don’t feel I like I need anyone’s validation with a like or dislike.
Reactions are more expressive please
Introduce Reactions
Please include a 'thank you' if you go for the reactions.
There are times I do say thank you, but others where I just do a vote up, as I don't want people to waste their time going into a thread to read one word!
Thanks.
This first line made me smile :)