Thank you System

One of the big disadvantages of the Slant approach is that people don’t get direct feedback for their contributions like you do via upvotes on answers on Stackoverflow.

A lot of the time it feels like you’re contributing into a vacuum and no-one really appreciates your efforts.

@tim has been talking about a thank you system for awhile now, and I think we have an approach to make it work. It would involve grouping the activity on the question page by person, then making it more prominent and then allowing people to thank a contributor for that activity. Something like:

Thoughts?

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Looking at the mock-up I am wondering how this system works. I can see that Sarah added an option, 3 pro/cons and had 4 edits, but can I actually get to see what those specifically were? Like if I click on “Sarah added” can I get to a more detailed area of what specifically she did? At a glance it looks nice, but how can I actually judge what Sarah contributed to know whether her contributions were worth thanking? To me it just seems that if that info will be unavailable in detail, thanking will just become somewhat of a useless task as I don’t really know what I am thanking for and will most likely not bother.

Again, I really like the idea, i am just wondering what the specific implementation will be.

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Sure, we can add that feature in. Clicking the timestamp might activate a modal with all the details.

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In some ways, this seems analogous to Stack’s reputation system. Any thoughts on taking that similarity further? The two things that seem particularly worth consideration are unlocking site privileges – I’m not sure we really have any need for that, but it’s there if we do – and, far more interesting IMO, the bounty system.

Also seems worth digging up something I mentioned a while back: the Unity Feedback system has a really nice way of minimizing brigading. There, each user has a fixed number of votes for endorsing feature requests. You can put all of them on one feature, split them across several, or hold on to some; and you can shift them around any time you want. I don’t think the Thank You system should be limited that way, but it seems like a good model for a “kudos” system where individuals can be recognized for great contributions across the site. Rather than a fixed number, users could earn the right to give these based on their own contributions (e.g. one at 1000 karma, one for getting 10 thank yous, etc.) and while they wouldn’t have any inherent meaning attached, it seems like a really good way for a community to identify its own experts.

This would better enable us to do something like that, but IMO that’s a separate discussion.

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I really like that it’s front and center.

Don’'t know what’s the intended behavior when clicking “see all”, but it would be nice if it didn’t take users to another page. A slide-out perhaps?

Yeah I was thinking a modal or something.

I would remove the thank [person] part. Leave just the heart, like it is here in discourse. :slight_smile:

I believe that is uservoice, which came after getsatisfaction. And both rock! :smiley:

A fixed number of kudos is indeed a nice approach which brings other benefits as well. When you have such a low countdown, for voting in this case, you’re kind of incentivized of going all way through. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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