Indeed. I wonder if IE's PNG support is where it ought to be yet? (If not, can't we just assume users don't use IE?)

But even if they stay as .gifs, antialiasing against the dark background from the N810v2/Minimalist themes would be much less obtrusive against Classic than vice versa...

O boy, a project! Just the thing an unemployed IM guy needs.

However, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the current system is already essentially doing what Benson proposed:

Heart: get this on the front page!
No votes: Eh.
Thumbs down: completely inappropriate

So... can anyone answer if the prioritizing/filter is currently working that way? If so, maybe this is more of an educational opportunity...

The thumbs are bit... they're very judgemental, and with only 2 options to judge with...

Perhaps

<- Like (maybe with a thumb up with it)
<- Don't like
:| is the smiley for indifference. However, 2 hands in air, like "i don't know" might be better option.

By default, indifference is a null. That's why I'm pedantic about the no vote option (which means we really do have three states, so I was wrong)...

Oh, and the inbox is cleared.

Shout out to GA:

A cursory examination of Planet Maemo and the Maemo news page appears to bear out my suspicions: a neutral rating (no votes at all) is enough to keep an article off of the main page (as long as there are articles with hearts, but then, if there were none at all the point is moot anyway). I wanted to confirm that date/Time was not a prominently contributing factor and a post by Thoughtfix did confirm it.

So for now I would like to blog next about a best practice where voting is concerned, but I don't have enough info on the Maemo system's mechanics to say for sure that I'm correct. So... are you or someone you know able to provide that verification?

My goal here is to let people know this is actually a 3 state system and not just binary as I mistakenly said previously (I should have known better... I blame a headache).

I guess we only need an option for indifference if we want to count how many are indifferent to each post.

The neutral option records the numbers. However, if you are looking for metrics, that's a separate issue... but it's as easy to count nulls as it is values. I have not seen a visible stats reporting page for Maemo news but it would be nice to have!

And measuring indifference could be simple:

Total views - (hearts + thumbs downs)

However, I am not sure if the Maemo system is counting click-throughs in order to get the view count. Also, I see that some blogs are reproduced in their entirety (no click-through needed) whereas others are represented solely by excerpts (thus requiring a click-through).

...

gawd, I need a job...

Probably it would be enough (or even better) to only have an option to vote interesting/relevant posts up.

If it's true that the whole rating system is only meant to help a machine decide what's relevant and what's not (in order to make it visible on the front page or base karma calculations on the numbe rof relevant posts...), telling the machine that a post is relevant should be all that's needed.
I don't see the need for "not relevant" if "not voting" serves the same purpose much easier.

The downside of the current system (heart/thumbs down) is that with controversial posts, it makes people vote for or against the opinion expressed by the author rather than saying anything about how relevant it is for the community.


Example:
I have to admit I could never ever get myself to voting positively for a posting that suggests jPhone-like changes to the Maemo-UI; if I find somebody voted this down before, I will happily click 'thumbs down', too, only to express my negative feelings. The more votes there are in general, the more people will feel this is some kind of poll and they want to express their opinion, too.
Votes shouldn't be about opinions, though, and they certainly aren't polls. In this example, even if I still don't vote for this post, others will and thereby mark it as relevant (which it is, not matter what I think about it).

Benny that was very useful, thanks.