When a user clicks the “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down”, he is asked to give a reason. This is how Anki users write reviews for Anki decks and addons.
The “reason” shows up on the deck page like this:
But now this seems no longer necessary, as users can just send a thumbs up or down without writing anything:
As someone with ~55 decks shared and over ~1400 user reviews across all my decks, I think this looks soulless:
Just below these empty reviews, this looks way nicer:
So my suggestion is:
- Go back to making it mandatory to write a “reason” for your thumbs up or thumbs down.
Or, alternate solutions:
- Make those “empty” user ratings cound for the total number of thumbs ups and thumbs down… but make them hidden by default, only if the user wrote a “reason” then the thumbs up is shown in the “user ratings” section of the page.
Another solution, which I dislike, but still better than no-text user ratings:
- Make the text box with a default text: the words “Good” or “Bad” whether the user intends to give a thumbs up or down.
Maybe I did not elaborate enough on what is the problem exactly, so here it goes:
If people are not obligued to write a “reason” for their thumbs up or thumbs down, from this point onwards, it will be long and long empty rows of no-text user ratings, drowning out the user reviews of people who took the effort to write about what is good and what is bad about a certain deck/addon. This is why I’m proposing those solutions.