I agree. While it is certainly true that prioritizing work based on how many noisy people are campaigning for it is not a good idea, I reject the notion that the only useful goal here is to prevent bugspam, as that implies that user input is worthless.

"me too"/+1 comments on bugs are clearly not the way to collect user input. Votes aren't a whole lot better. input.mozilla.org is good for certain things, but the SNR is too low to use it raw and the cost of meaningful processing is high.

If I were to handwave up a new mechanism to replace bug comments + voting, I'd probably want a feature/bug page with

- upvote/downvote counts (3 vs 100 is useful information, even if it doesn't decide anything on its own)
 - list of *distinct* reasons for wanting it
 - counterarguments and data (eg web compat info)
 - pointer to the appropriate discussion forum and threads

The idea is that if someone merely wants to support a feature request but doesn't have any new arguments for why, they can upvote it and be done. But if someone *does* have a novel argument, they can add it to the list. Or expand/clarify an existing reason instead of just appending.

Come to think of it, that sounds like a wiki talk page with a fixed format. Perhaps we could just throw up a template page on wiki.m.o and find a good namespace for these, and redirect voters there?

On 06/11/2015 10:22 AM, Michael Verdi wrote:
Here's something to consider. I've seen my friend Jen Simmons encourage
people to use voting as a way to tell us that it's important to them for
Firefox to support a particular html or css feature. Here's a recent
example https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/601184865732534272 - the bug
mentioned has 41 votes on it. I just did a little looking around and other
than adding a comment to the relevant bug the only other method of giving
us feedback seems to be to dump it in
https://input.mozilla.org/feedback/firefox

Maybe it's moot because we're not influenced by votes but if you're not a
mozilla insider how do express support for something without spamming the
bug?

- Michael

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Gervase Markham <g...@mozilla.org> wrote:

On 09/06/15 23:07, Mark Côté wrote:
I would ask, then, what the purpose of the feature is.  If we know it
isn't used to make decisions, why use it?  The only thing I can think of
is as a sort of "spam honeypot", to get people to not "+1" or "me too"
bugs, but this seems strange at best and actively misleading at worst.
It used to do this job extremely well; I have no information on how true
that is today, as developers seem rather free to say "actually, we
ignore votes"...

Gerv

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