Dear policy makers,

As a not-so casual observer, I'd like to record my opinion here too. But first, I would like to recount more or less what happened in the staff lounge.

I implemented revoting, with basic functionality, many moons past, about two months ago, if not a bit longer. It's been so long that I've forgotten. It seemed like a feature that our userbase has been demanding for a long time, and I know that until someone goes out and does things, they'll never get done, no matter how much they get talked about. I know that I am not enabled in any capacity to influence directly the policy changes around here, but I did want to nudge the eds and admins towards approving some policy change, whichever decision they might choose. Showing them an implementation was a first step towards enabling that decision.

There was lots of debate between the eds and admins about what to do with revoting, which is the main reason this took so long. Some are in favour of a very laissez-faire revoting policy, others in favour of tightening the laws one way or another. After it seemed to me that debate had run its course, and because I was afraid that this idea would stagnate again for who knows how many years (strike while the iron is hot, I say), I tried to nudge the editors again by calling an informal poll on what the revoting policy should be. Full disclosure, the options I polled them about were

  1. Allow revoting both ways, XP neutral
  2. Allow revoting both ways, XP tracking
  3. Allow limited revoting both ways, XP neutral
  4. Allow limited revoting both ways, XP tracking,
  5. Allow only revoting up, not down, XP tracking.

These were almost all the options that were discussed during the debate. There was also an Option 0: postpone debate and think more about this, which personally scared me a little. Here "XP neutral" means that a revote doesn't affect anyone's XP and "XP tracking" means that a revote upwards gives one XP to the votee and and a revote downwards takes it away. Option #5 was the last one suggested as a compromise, since it's a partial implementation of revoting, and seems to avoid the largest qualms people had with revoting: that someone for personal reasons would serially revote someone else down without consideration of the quality of the writing, only the perceived moral quality of the revotee.

Options 2 and 5 came out very close to each other, with option 2 winning by a few votes, but not by much. In the end, the executive decision came, and I was ordered to disable revoting downwards and bringing my revoting code live, which I cheerfully did, because I was glad that at least something was happening, and the eds and admins didn't decide to postpone this feature for who knows how much longer.

If you consider the choices, you'll see that Option 5 is the most conservative of them all, changing very little policy-wise. It doesn't change the meaning of an upvote, since it tracks XP (so that your XP can still be directly calculated from number of writeups, upvotes, and chings). It doesn't break the "never lose XP" model that was part of the latest XP changes. It doesn't allow serial revoting down. In fact, it barely allows revoting at all. As a first foray into revoting, Option 5 seems sane in order to at least test the waters with a new feature that changes much about how E2 has worked since voting was first introduced.

Nevertheless, I agree with the apparent majority from what I've heard in the catbox that the option that should have been implemented was Option 2, not 5. In fact, my code evolved from Option 1, which seemed like the first favourite, then to Option 2, and finally to Option 5, which roughly indicates my order of preference. Options 1 and 2 allow the most freedom to the users, and well, I believe that the more liberty you give users to make up their own choices, even if it's a bad choice, well, all the better. Option 5 seems like unnecessary nannying and not giving users the full range of freedom that they deserve.

Thankfully, except for ecore, nothing here is set in stone (and even ecore can be sculpted, with some difficulty). I am quite happy that this much-needed change happened, at least partially. I think that you, policy makers, would do well to discard the last of your reservations and give the freedom to your users for which they clamour.

Yours,

Swap