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Feedback ยท Move to a mechanism faster and simpler than points for endorsing profile options (needs discussion)

Profile option suggestions should be quick — they should stick around long enough to get adequate review (a couple of days), but no longer, and quickly become either implemented or declined, unless further discussion's needed, so we can get on with using them or get some closure. It should just let anyone who wants it endorse it (it does let them do that, in theory), but instead in practice they tend to sit around for weeks or months with no activity before suddenly going from 0 to 50 instantly one day and going in. Auto feedback also often gets implemented in waves with weeks between each wave, so it's like we just wait until someone actually feels like endorsing stuff, and stops being lazy for long enough to insta-implement a bunch of things all at once. It's a poor experience for us and it staying like this is not okay.

The way profile options feedback works right now is over-complicated and a deterrent that slows things down in a bad way. Endorsement only requires 1 person dump 50 points into it. Those 50 points either mean a lot, because anyone active probably has most of their points already invested in stuff, or very little, because I can just take 50 of those points out, implement an auto feedback, get an instant refund and repeat, then put those points right back where they were. Really this just means one person has to say "I want this" and jump through the right hoops. The real barrier is just whether you feel like doing all the jumping needed.

(Plus, endorsement points are for prioritising developer time. Automatic suggestions are deliberately set up to take no developer time, and shouldn't use points at all! It was okay to use points for profile options at first, they were already there and easy and quick to use here too, but we shouldn't keep using them for profile options.)

Let's cut the hoop acrobatics out: Instead of points, just present profile option suggestions with an "I want this" button. You can toggle whether you want it or not; that's your only endorsement interaction. You can say "I want this" to an unlimited number of profile option suggestions. Once 1-3 people confirm they want it, the thing gets added. No points! Requiring only 1 person click the button would equal our current system (minus the acrobatics, of course), but requiring 2 or 3 might make that feel like less of a huge responsibility and thus enable people to feel more comfortable doing it and speed things up.

meta info

endorsement points: 0

created: 25 November 15 at 02:56 PM (build: 10/1/2015 4:20 PM beta)

Samus

Development suggestion to make things easy, which uses the existing point system in a roundabout way:

The "I want this" should endorse the suggestion with 1 magic endorsement point that winks into existence right then, and has no interaction with a user's normal 100 points allocation. Automatic feedback requires 1-3 endorsement points. Once auto feedback's endorsed, or once you undo your "I want this" (if you can^) vote, the magic free endorsement point winks out of existence again. This comes with the added benefit that the feedback list will show how many people have voted "I want this" so far.

^ I suggest we should be able to undo our "I want this" vote. Discussion may turn up significant problems after the fact, and profile options can be edited.

Wrecked Avent Site Administrator

The only reason it uses endorsement points instead of a separate pool is it forces people to think about if they'll actually use something instead of just automatically saying "yup". The lower the barrier is to adding new profile options the more we need to lean on automatically pruning them when they're inactive.

Samus

Steam runs a Greenlight program that bases huge business decisions off people saying "yup." The reason it works is, people don't actually just say "yup" without thinking very often. Same goes for other systems. I suggest we should try this with 2-3 people, to see if a serious problem actually happens.

Litphoria should probably prefer expressiveness over caution, especially because we can remove stuff after the fact.

I'll point out though that since we have profile completion regularly pushing people to 100% out their stuff, there is very rarely such thing as an inactive profile option, and it's hard to tell what a genuine usage is and what just got thrown in because of pressure.

Candice Green

Those 50 points either mean a lot, because anyone active probably has most of their points already invested in stuff, or very little, because I can just take 50 of those points out, implement an auto feedback, get an instant refund and repeat, then put those points right back where they were. Really this just means one person has to say "I want this" and jump through the right hoops. The real barrier is just whether you feel like doing all the jumping needed.

I think this is the key thing here. If you can just get a refund instantly, the system is very much broken. This needs to be addressed either way, and it's actually a very big issue with the feedback system right now. Indeed, those things either sit at 0 points for the longest time just because nobody who managed to find that feedback ticket bothered to dump their points into it and eventually it just got forgotten, or it gets insta-endorsed by a single person. I mean I can understand the argument that if it just sits there, then people must not want it enough, but the second part is kind of absurd.

Further, I'm pretty sure I can adjust my current endorsements to refund myself 50 endorsement points, then insta-endorse all the things I want and then readjust endorsements to how they were before. Doesn't seem like it should be that way.

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