Update: this feature is now disabled
You can now say “seen it” to a caption without voting it up. It’s a neutral vote, and we’re calling it a meh.
- On a computer, each caption has a small meh face to its left.
- On a phone, swipe the caption to the left and a meh face appears beneath it.
Either way the caption vanishes from your view, with an Undo in case your finger slipped.
A meh has no impact on scores, and the author doesn’t get a popup notification, although the meh votes are listed on the caption page.
Once ten people have passed on a caption and nobody has voted it up, its voting is marked finished: it drops down the “hot” order and shows a small “Voting finished” note. The author stays hidden until the photo’s voting closes, as usual.
The captions you’ve hidden aren’t gone. Under the list there’s a count and a Show button.
There is a limit: 60 mehs an hour.
The site also compares your mehs with what other readers made of the same captions, once the photo’s voting has closed (so the verdict is final, not a snapshot). A meh on a caption that ended up with two or more up-votes counts as a disagreement; a meh on any other closed caption counts as agreement. Once five of your mehs have been judged, if the disagreements outnumber the agreements your limit drops to 5 mehs a day, and it goes back up as soon as they don’t. One up-vote on a caption you passed on is never held against you. Meh honestly and you’re unlikely to notice either limit.
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This sounds rather negative and rather complicated. What’s the supposed benefit?
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Three main drivers for this, from my PoV:
Handling Content Overload
At present caption lists on photos just grow and grow - there’s no upper bound. If we got a flurry of users, we’d potentially see very long and unwieldy pages.
One of the benefits of having more users, though, is that we’d have more voters. So the neutral vote will help us control the size of the page - we can file away “meh” captions in a collapsed section at the bottom of the page.
Neatness / OCD
If I see a caption I’m indifferent to, I want to hide it, in order that I can get a better view of other (newer) captions. I think the upshot of this is that I’ll probably give more upvotes, as newly-written captions won’t be buried among captions I don’t like.
Additional Signals for Analysis
The number of “mehs” helps optimise the sorting of captions on the page.
Also, when analysing data on the competition, upvotes only give one dimension on caption quality. I also want to be able to understand who’s writing disproportionate numbers of mediocre captions. This will help us tune rate limits / quotas / etc in future.
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Okidokee. Thanks for clarifying, Chris.
Thanks for the feedback. As always, I want to hear if you and others are concerned about new features - they can always be tweaked or removed altogether if people don’t like them.
I’d encourage everyone to review the upcoming features we’re planning to build and vote and/or comment on these (on the forum) to help shape how those features work, and raise any concerns before the features get built.
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I just did it on three captions by accident and can’t undo it completely. They now appear at the bottom of my list. I would like to turn this feature off for me.
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I’m not sure about this one.
The knee-jerk reaction is good captions will be missed, simply because people won’t get them on first reading. There’ve been many times I’ve missed a joke only to get it on a second reading. If the caption is hidden, this won’t be possible.
Similarly, when other people get the joke and vote, then the caption’s visibility is improved, but this won’t advantage captions that have been hidden.
As far as improving the caption display goes, we already have chronological ordering that provides views of the latest captions. Viewed captions can be largely ignored if that’s what people wish to do.
On handling overload, it probably makes sense, except, maybe, we’re not at the overload point at present.
On additional data, I’ve no argument. I just wonder if the benefits of that alone make the change a good one 
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I just looked at one of my accidental mehs and the caption lists me as one of the voters for it. I can confirm giving a real vote undoes the meh.
If someone edits their caption does that undo a meh as someone might improve their caption significantly?
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Yep, another good point, Steve.
There are also occasions when people totally re-write an earlier caption, effectively replacing it with a new one. That’s probably not the best practice anyway, but it would be even worse if the earlier one had been 'meh’ed.
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I had another read of the other two accidental mehs I cast and realised I’m happy to give real votes for them both. However the system is currently preventing me from voting for the third as it calls it a vote retraction and is telling me to slow down…
One observation on navigation on a Pixel phone. I now cannot resize the screen if only captions are on it and can only navigate up and down - lateral navigation moves only the caption touched. I find this personally a step back and a tad annoying. Not sure if anyone else has this or is it just a case of an old man whining about something that really is a non-issue 
Reading the room, I think we need to disable this feature pending a rethink (or total abandonment!)
That’s done now.
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I am not against the feature at all, it just hindered my navigation. I would not use it right now as I do like to revisit captions later just before voting closes and often find ones I’d not seen or appreciated before. However if we do suddenly get 100 captions per photo I would likely start using it. Also I do appreciate that you listen to feedback too - I came straight here as I noticed the navigation was back..
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If it is rethunk an alternative might be to relegate 'meh’ed captions to the bottom of the display order (regardless of which is selected), and/or grey them out. That would make them less visible, but not invisible.
By the way, I feel sorry for the muppet who posted this now incomprehensible caption 
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