On the chopping block again… aka, use thumbs up/down responsibly.
Long time visitors will know that i have been debating whether to keep thumbs up/down feature for quite a while now. It works, and if i keep reminding people to use it -it works as it should. It gets the better deals noticed… at least some of the time. But i don’t like to constantly remind people to use them, hoping that it just becomes something that happens organically, and when i stop reminding – bullshit happens.
I rarely check the front page of the site, i usually work in the backend. Just checked it now, and there was a slew of deals downvoted. All were still live, prices were correct, etc. Just about all of them was from ERYONE. So basically, someone who happens not to like a specific brand took a dump all over my site….
If things organically worked as they should, other people’s upvotes would cancel out these downvotes, but that just doesn’t seem to happen, and post after post end up sitting with red negatives – ensuring people skip them.
This time i fixed 5 out of the 20 posts on the front page… that’s a quarter of what people usually see (most don’t bother even checking page 2, etc). So one person ensured that a quarter of what i have posted will be skipped by new visitors… all because they don’t like a specific brand.
So, let this serve as another reminder – please continue to use thumbs up/down, but do it responsibly. These ratings are not just for vanity. They determine which posts get kept in archives long term, and there is a lot of other logic that depends on these working as they should, etc.
What i saw today was bullshit, and i don’t like to deal with bullshit. If it continues, i will simply shut that feature off permanently, like i have been thinking of for a while now.
I will add I like this feature because if it has thumbs up it means that the deal is still alive to me and if it has thumbs down I assume the deal is no longer active. I do try to leave comments on ones that I find that are bad. It probably does not get said enough but I want to say THANK YOU for all you do to keep this site up and running. I check it all the time and I have saved a lot on filament and other things over the years coming here.