Hey there all. This is my first ever forum post of any sort, so I apologize if I've done anything wrong or if this is an inappropriate topic or anything like that. I may be young, rebellious, and often judgmentally weakened by testosterone, but I do try my hardest to follow the rules; I don't want no trouble, as they sometimes say. Or at least in movies they sometimes do, I think few people other than myself say that in real life. I also apologize if this gets long; I always set out trying to keep things succinct, but somehow they never end up that way by the time I'm done...
Anyways, I'm writing in regards to the layout of the quick feedback sections. I realize it's called the "'quick' feedback section" for a reason, as it's supposed to be relatively quick and simple, but to be honest I feel like the way the entire thing is formatted right now it's so messy and unorganized that it's incapable of serving any real purpose at all.
I personally believe the primary culprit is the lack of likes/dislikes or pluses/minuses or w/e, (it seems like it should be spelled "lusses", but my spellcheck disagrees) or a top comment section, as exemplified by other comparable sites such as Kongregate. Without those the feedback section quickly balloons into this unregulated, uncontrollable mass of inane little comments b/c rather than people being able to just like/plus a popular idea that they agree with, they instead feel that they have to write their own comment, which often just rehashes the exact same ideas as have been previously presented numerous times. Then, to make matters worse, b/c the section is already relatively small with having only 5 of the most recent comments, all those little comments quickly push anything significant anyone else has written off of the initial page, sometimes in mere seconds, which makes having even written anything at all feel totally pointless.
Of course in general the hope is for the developer to ultimately read one's comment. The issue with that is that not only does the present feedback section format make it difficult for commenters, but I'd think it would also make it difficult for developers who need to sift through all that feedback. Rather than being able to tell at a glance what ideas are the most popular they're instead forced to go through an overwhelming number of comments in an attempt to try to figure out what people have to say...or at least ostensibly that's what they're forced to do. I'm not a developer so I'm not sure exactly what it all looks like on their end.
Then there's the psychological aspect of it all, which imo is most important here; people like to feel engaged and like what they think is important. By allowing people to up/down vote comments and displaying the top ones, not only are you making people feel like their opinions are heard, but you're also encouraging good, constructive comments and discouraging poor, pointless ones. Sure, the status of one's comments may not truly mean anything, but anyone who's been online for any period of time knows that people go to shocking lengths to gain the approval of groups of anonymous strangers.
So basically I'm saying is that the present layout just seems totally inconvenient for everyone involved. I'm unaware of any plans to change the layout, but for all the above reasons I really truly think it would be extremely beneficial to do as so many sites have and update the feedback section to allow people to take a more active role in which ideas/comments are deemed important and worthy of being heard and which aren't. Keep in mind, the comment section is the link between a website and its users; if you want people to become attached to your site, you need to allow them to become engaged and feel like they as people have a say in what happens there.
