[minor] Separate Upvotes and Downvotes Implimented

Awesome! That was one of the most asked-for feature!

And it is implemented on comments too, as a title text: Mousover the karma score of a post or comment and a little popup will give you the percentage of positive votes!

(a side effect of this is that if we see a comment at 0, we can't immediatly differentiate 1 upvote and 1 downvote from 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes, but that's pretty minor)

Many thanks to the trike apps people, and whatever volunteers helped implement, test and deploy this!

Edit: This specific fix appears to be thanks to Wesley Moore.

This is a great new feature. Thanks!

I will note, though, that the implementation of this feature seems to have artificially inflated my karma score. It has gone up by about 200 points over the last couple of days, and I don't see any sudden increase in actual upvotes to account for this. Also, my karma over the last 30 days doesn't display a commensurate increase.

Here's my hypothesis about what happened: I had a post that I moved from Discussion to Main after it had already accrued a number of upvotes. The upvotes it got while in Discussion only gave me 1 karma point each, but I suspect something about this new feature has retroactively scored those upvotes as if they were for an article in Main, so I got an additional 9 points for each of them.

I'm not complaining, of course. Just a heads up about what seems like an unintentional side effect.

I noticed today that hovering over a user's total karma score displays the percentage of positive votes; didn't realize it was in fact a new feature until I saw this post. It came as something of a surprise to me to learn that my karma of 53 is in fact 56% positive, which implies a total of around 440 votes. I wasn't aware of being this controversial.

I wonder if displaying the total positive and negative votes instead wouldn't be more intuitive, though; especially with comments. As Emile pointed out, it would also convey more information.

Edit: I thought there might be something fishy about this...

It appears to me that 30 day karma has switched back to votes received in the past 30 days from votes on material posted in the past 30 days. Why? The original switch was very soon after the introduction of the feature.

I noticed this because people who haven't posted in months have 30 day karma. I then tested it by voting on an old comment.

Trike Apps is also working on a solution for the LW wiki spam, since captchas have not been sufficient.

This may have been a minor feature on your end, but it's certainly not a minor feature to the community!

Another recently implemented feature (in the same batch as the positive+negative separation) is users can now have a profile page which is loaded from the wiki (it seems to just be via connecting accounts with the same name).

As an example, gwern and matt.

Woot.

A thought: Now one might be able to find the most-controversial LW posts, (measured as max(up+down-abs(up-down), perhaps) in the same manner that Top gives us the most-popular. It might be interesting to see empirically what topics LW treats as controversial.

This is actually a bug, not a feature. Some major changes to how karma is stored and passed around the application were made in order to implement the percentage tooltips. Scores are now passed around as an array containing the number of up votes and down votes, where previously it was the difference of the two. It appears the this array is being incorrectly rendered in the side bar, instead of the calculated score.

I'm sitting at 87% positive karma, and looking at recent comments and posts, apparently that's actually pretty low!

Almost all the users I looked at had at least that much positive; I saw one or two out of a dozen with less.

I'm a little surprised but I'm not sure how surprised I should actually be, since I already knew that we have a great community that keeps people around who post good things.