So writing effort posts is hard work.
And then, responses are predominantly from people who've misunderstood or not read the article, quibbles about minor and mostly unimportant points, and so on.
If someone strongly agrees, you may see a few positive responses with a short quote followed by "<-this", or similar, but this doesn't scale well - to the point where I think most people will refrain from this most of the time, and certainly where it would be a repeated action.
Thus, there is an imbalance to the responses in a negative direction, which may be disheartening to some authors.
Some commenting systems allow rating of posts in one or more dimensions. Which shows a more balanced evaluation of the post's standing, but only as a whole.

Much less common on the web are annotation systems, which allow selective markup of a /section/ of a comment with a further comment, perhaps recursively. I think I saw this demonstrated on TV, but in practice I've never seen them live on the web; I think they're just too hard to manage in an active commenting system. Possibly hard to maintain, hard to learn to use, and perhaps in practice hard to read.
It may work well if a collaboration is curating a larger article; Microsoft Word has collaboration functions which does this semi-effectively, but again I don't think this works at scale.

I propose a hybrid system which combines the location- specificity of annotations with the ease and scalability of rating.
It is suitable for one or very few axes; I will discuss the case of a single bipolar axis, which I will assume is "agreement".

The gist is that the reader may select a portion of an article and rate it up or down, depending on whether they agree or disagree - at which point the highlighting of that section is varied in an incremental manner.
This means that sections with which everyone agrees will be strongly highlighted in the positive manner (typically, but not necessarily rendered as a coloured background), sections with which everyone disagrees will be strongly highlighted in the negative manner.
If, for example, a few users have agreed with a section, it would be weakly highlighted.

My initial thought on the granularity of this highlighting is that in general it could be the sentence. This would limit the computational costs of tracking, while allowing a good measure of expressivity.
I hesitate to define how the highlighting intensity should progress; some experimentation would be required. However, it may be that if someone selects a small part of an article, this should count for more than where someone has selected the entire thing. But perhaps not proportionately. An overall scaling could be applied dependent on the number of raters, their tendency to rate and the number of viewers.
-- Loris, Apr 26 2021

The part of Quora.com that looks like it is for making suggestions https://www.quora.c...quora%20suggestions
[beanangel, Apr 27 2021]

At my company we use Adobe Acrobat to mark up drawings which have been pdf'd for change. It is a horrendous program to use for markups and a horrendous process and so I don't recommend it.
-- RayfordSteele, Apr 26 2021


We are trying to encourage junior devs to buy into the whole github ethos, and there are some really good code-review* facilities in there around reviewing changes and edits - I'd like to see this level of scrutiny available at the commentary level though. We kind of do it here when replying to a specific aspect of a post using our // notation - but to formalise that into a proper working system would be a neat move.

* I think most workplace outputs benefit from code- review style workflows - and bore coworkers consistently about creating repos for the authoring of technical documentation.
-- zen_tom, Apr 26 2021


It just makes sense to me, is useful, and at social sites would even be fun. At Question and Answer sites like Quora it would distinctly improve things. Quora apparently has lots of money, or perhaps all your ideas are public domain like mine. Either way you could approach Quora with this as a prospective feature.

The lowest effort way to approach Quora about this is to find their "Do you have any suggestions for Quora?" question [link] and then copy and paste what you already wrote for the halfbakery. Quora logs in with Google so its fussless.
-- beanangel, Apr 27 2021



random, halfbakery