Take the 2-minute tour ×
User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. It's 100% free, no registration required.

The Stackexchange network arranges replies according to votes (rating). Facebook doesn't care how many likes a comment has. Youtube picks the 2 highest rated comments and place them on the top.

Which system will be more pleasant for users in a forum-like websites, were there are replies and they are rated but there are not best answers?

What kind of replies would the user be interested to see first?

share|improve this question

4 Answers 4

up vote 5 down vote accepted

It depends.

If you have a conversation you have to use chronological order - otherwise people won't be able to read it with highly rated replies appearing before the text they are replying to.

If every comment is standalone it's probably better to sort by rating so your reader don't have to read all the boring junk to get to the good comments.

If you take stack exchange as an example - the answers are sorted by rating - the entire concept wouldn't work if they were sorted chronologically, yet comments are sorted chronologically because they wouldn't be understandable if they were sorted by rating.

share|improve this answer

You might consider using tabs so by default order your posts are oredered by rating, then allow users to switch to chronological order by clicking on the 'order by date' tab

share|improve this answer

What StackExchange shows is that users expect chronological order, yet can be trained to accept otherwise.

Besides SO heavily promoting non-chronological order as key selling point, it took not just me a while to get acquainted to, and still newcomers will reply as if order were chronological.

Changing expectations and behavior worked well for SO, because it was built around the idea of a strong, active group of regulars.

For a site that expects more "drive-by traffic", i.e. infrequent users, users working with different alternatives, etc. this might be a more permanent problem.

share|improve this answer

Your analysis of the StackExchange arrangement is not quite complete.

Arrangement according to voting only happens when there are more comments than will be displayed initially, in other words when there is a "show more comments" link.

When all comments are shown initially, they are always arranged in chronological order. When you click a "show more comments" link, the list is then also rearranged in chronological order.

So I would say that chronological order is the preferred method on StackExchange. It is also the most logical way as many comments are response to earlier comments and would not make sense if you (have to) read them in a non-chronological order.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.
{"cc_re__cc_re__cc_by_sa_3_0": ["sites in the Stack Exchange network\">Area 51</a></li>\r\n                        <li><a href=\"//careers.stackoverflow.com?utm_source=stackoverflow.com&amp;utm_medium=site-ui&amp;utm_campaign=footerlink\">Stack Overflow Careers</a></li>\r\n                    \r\n                </ol>\r\n            </td>\r\n    </tr>\r\n</table>\r\n                </div>\r\n            </div>\r\n\r\n            <div id=\"copyright\">\r\n                site design / logo &#169; 2014 stack exchange inc; user contributions licensed under <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\" rel=\"license\">cc by-sa 3.0</a>                   with <a href=\"http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/\" rel=\"license\">attribution required</a>\r\n            </div>\r\n            <div id=\"svnrev\">\r\n                rev 2014.10.19.1955\r\n            </div>\r\n            \r\n        </div>\r\n    </div>\r\n    <noscript>\r\n        <div id=\"noscript-warning\">User Experience Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled<img src=\"http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc.gif\" alt=\"\" class=\"dno\">"], "copyright__copyright__copyright": ["rranged in chronological order.\n\nSo I would say that chronological order is the preferred method on StackExchange. It is also the most logical way as many comments are response to earlier comments and would not make sense if you (have to) read them in a non-chronological order.\n\nshare|improve this answer\n\nYour Answer\n\n\u00a0\ndiscard\n\nBy posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.\n\nNot the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question."]}