litphoria

I would like to indicate that a particular play has provided a good example of an interest I like. This may involve rewarding the person who wrote this in some way, or just result in some kind of point aggregate system.

I like this, as long as the major focus of this feature is gathering good examples of interests. It would actually be really useful to be able to visit an interest I might not understand, and be able to look up plays that are a solid representation of it according to people who understand that thing.

I do not think it should be otherwise about the people involved in the roleplay, though the notion of points for this stuff is being covered in another feedback about 'litpoints'.

I think this is a bad idea and at odds with the ethos of the site so far (no viewcounts/bookmarks/etc).

It encourages elitism and the formation of cliques.

It is still possible to endorse things without directly encouraging things like elitism. Just a trivial counter, the total vote count might be hidden, so there would be no way to judge someone based on it.

But I think you can 'upvote' an RP without resulting in negative feedback like that. I like the OP mainly in the form of simply seeing thumbs-up or kudos that might not even be publicly view-able. Just a number of kudos, or private notification that so-and-so liked your RP. And the only way this might be publicly manifested is that you could sort RPs by 'likes', though you wouldn't necessarily be shown how many likes any RP got.

But I agree, and think everyone agrees that any form of negative feedback would be especially bad on an RP site.

I am not interested in downvotes on this site, only upvotes.

There was some discussion elsewhere that touched on a finished RP having Interest tags on it that basically didn't get 'used', like putting 'Aftercare' on an RP, but no 'Aftercare' ever occurred anywhere in the 'play'. In addition to possibly giving an RP a like or kudo, it seems that there is a need to also vote on the Interests that the RP is tagged with. This might be one place where you have a 'down-vote' in the sense that you could enter a 'negative' vote on a tagged Interests to indicate it was not really used or represented in the RP. You would also have a way to upvote Interests as well, maybe with a multi-star rating, not so much to say this RP has "great Aftercare," but as a means for a down-vote to easily be outvoted. This wouldn't be visible as some kind of judging system, but it would be used internally to influence searches and orderings so that a search for RPs tagged with 'Aftercare', for example, would put the ones that don't actually have any Aftercare at the bottom of the list, or even grey them out or something to indicate the likelihood that they don't have any Aftercare in them. Mainly, this is 'tagging' validation, not an RP judging, which might also allow for the voter to add other tags, as in the case that it ISN'T tagged with Aftercare, but there is lots of actual aftercare in the play.

Well, the Aftercare example was about how do you rate tag accuracy. It does kind of result in a ranking though, sort of, if people see an RP that has a tag, and they think there is no RP in the play that is representative of that tag. And that is why I mention more than one star for an upvote on the tag, so that a single person can out-vote a single down-vote on a tag. I have an RP idea where I put a huge amount of interests on it, and if I finish that RP sometime, I might forget to remove all the Interests that were never used in the RP. So that's where someone might 'accurately' rate the Interests on the RP to have it searched on more accurately. Keep in mind that for Interests, it could just be whether the RP is considered to contain Aftercare, not whether it is the best 'Aftercare' ever seen in an RP.

As far as up-votes goes, this is why I suggest they don't get shown. In a huge list of RPs I would guess most would have no upvotes, so not being in the top-ten wouldn't really be a negative on a given RP. At least, I don't think it would. And you wouldn't really be able to tell if the top ten had one vote each, or a thousand votes each. But in one type of sorting, you could see the ones that have been upvoted the most.

I agree. I'm pretty sure WA would definitely be careful about doing something that creates the negative effects. Personally, I just have a desire to send a positive thumbs-up without necessarily sending PMs to people.