Add a third type of section in addition to Pros/Cons

Feature Suggestions
1

Some viewpoints may be both Pro and Con, depending on your point of view or the context they’re in. For example, having a Q&A site aimed specifically at Technology questions means you have a more refined audience, but also limits your user base and what questions you can ask there. As a result, for the question “What’s the best Q&A site for subjective questions?”, this could currently be listed as both pro and con.

Side note:
In the absence of this feature my current approach is to list such items as Pros, leaving users to associate these reasonings with their votes when choosing their preferred options.
This also means you have to be careful in wording some viewpoints; “The site is only available in Russian” is worded negatively; so implies con; “The site is available in Russian” allows you to use this as a pro, and have a counterpart “The site is not available in English” as a con.

1 Like
2

@johnlbevan I see exactly what you mean, and from an information architecture perspective I agree 100% that a third option is required to properly structure the data.

Some unfiltered thoughts:

  • My concern is UI and cognitive complexity. Right now if I want to add something about an option, it’s usually a pretty clear choice between a pro or con. Adding the “contextual” choice would solve the use-case you described above, but I feel like the line is pretty blurry for new users to have to decide between the three. You would have to be pretty familiar with Slant to make the decision with no cognitive load.
  • I think you are correct that they are “contextual”, but I also think you could describe that data as objective. There is no doubt at all that we’re a tech focused site, it’s the sort of information that belongs in wikipedia.
  • It’s not as clean and tidy, but I guess the information could simply be expressed in both the positive and negative aspects. This has been my approach to date. In some respects if you split a contextual reason into a pro and con, they are coupled as a counter-point to each other. Maybe we could build something around a counterpoint concept.
  • Contextual/Objective data is perfect info to include by default when we implement answers in multiple locations, as it should be relevant irrespective of the context of the question.
1 Like