If I have some criticism to offer on a node, then I offer it and I (usually) don't downvote it. That would be "adding injury to insult". I also don't downvote nodes just because they contain a mistake unless the mistake has already been pointed out and/or the node is listed higher (by rep) than a "better" node.

Previous "/msg me when you downvote my node" suggestions usually made me wonder how many people would continue to want that if the /msg was frank. Are you really better off with a downvote and a "/msg Jenda Your node sucks" (or similar) than just a downvote? (:

But I recall someone reporting that they tried the idea of "send a /msg with every downvote" and mostly got angry responses or retaliation downvoting. That really doesn't surprise me. If you tell me that I made a mistake, then I might thank you. If you tell me that I made a mistake and then "punch" me, then I'm going to have a much harder time taking the criticism well.

But I think a "send /msg to author" link on nodes would be a nice convenience. I'm not sure I like a text field per node -- associating it with vote button makes it too easy (I don't really want to deal with a flood of "++ on '...': great node", though the occasional one when someone feels strongly enough to go to the extra effort is great) and takes up enough space that it prevents some hoped-for improvements in vote button placement. Putting it anywhere else doesn't work well since you can't really have nested forms (and all nodes are contained in a "vote" form).

Brainstorming, I don't think a text field in the nodelets is a good idea because it would lead to a lot of response messages being mistakenly sent to the author of a parent node.

The "/msg author" link could take you to message inbox with the author filled in (message inbox still needs a spot to fill in an arbitrary monk's name so you can send /msgs w/o fear of mistyping "/msg" etc.) and a link to the node pre-loaded into the message text box (and probably not listing any messages). We'd need to be smart about not sending a message when someone mistakenly submits that page w/o adding anything to the message text. Maybe don't reuse message inbox...

I'd be less opposed to a text box per node if it only showed if the node author requested "receive easy feedback" in user settings. I'd probably require the reader to reqest "send easy feedback" too (in part to allow caveats to be displayed that the feature might go away)...

                - tye

In reply to Re: /msg me the reason of -- (frank) by tye
in thread /msg me the reason of -- by Jenda

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