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Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

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Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#41

Post by DanielBMarkham »

alex_c wrote: post #40

Seems to me like Slashdot's comment system does two things that might address many of the problems you mention: - instead of "Up" or "Down", the voting is a bit more granular - "+1 Informative", "-1 Flamebait" etc. The UI isn't MUCH more complicated - instead of a "vote up / vote down" link you have a dropdown. - Voting points are a limited resource - assigned to "reliable users" randomly and expire after a few days.…

I'd like to see something like this tried instead of the yes/no button -- pick something with a little more meaning. Then at least the system has more information to present.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#42

Post by whacked_new »

reidman wrote: post #14

Since my YC app deals with this directly, I've been thinking about it a lot. My idea has to do with voting quotes up/down (kinda like Jyte, http://jyte.com ). In allowing people to vote up/down, I realized that there needed to be a separation between 'Yes this quote is accurate' and 'Yes I think this quote is important', since the two can be exclusive. In the end I decided to implement a two-step process. The first s…

My previous YC app dealt with this and I posted various comments already, but I still like this topic.

An introductory study into conversation theory will tell you how theoretically bad up/down is. It seems to me that the two-step process is still broken though, because "important" is not a well-defined word. The best system I have seen online, which actually does a decent job of utterance categorization, is Slashdot. Based on the Gricean Maxims and you can come up with some core cirteria for any given utterance, and /. actually covers them surprisingly well. Obviously it's still not a perfect implementation, but they have done a good balance between categorization, ease of categorization, and evaluation of categorization. They really need to grow out of the +5 limit though.

While /.'s criterion are good, they don't cover enough ground to become a universal system; it doesn't scale to other cultures. There's a lot more to this I think, but I'm just be rambling again.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#43

Post by [deleted] »

pg wrote: post #4

I think you must have arrived since the explanation of how we're going to avoid drift. http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html Vote weighting isn't turned on yet, but for the last couple weeks I've been thinking it was time to. Incidentally, the poll problem can easily be fixed by changing the frontpage ranking algorithm to treat poll votes as worth e.g. a third as much.

[deleted]

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#44

Post by sethjohn »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #6
pg wrote: post #4

I think you must have arrived since the explanation of how we're going to avoid drift. http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html Vote weighting isn't turned on yet, but for the last couple weeks I've been thinking it was time to. Incidentally, the poll problem can easily be fixed by changing the frontpage ranking algorithm to treat poll votes as worth e.g. a third as much.

Awesome! Color me skeptical about stopping drift, though. It'll be neat to be proven wrong. I wonder how you'd prevent the system from just emulating the editors, instead of the audience. Now with YC perhaps that's exactly how you'd like it, but for a more general purpose site I'd want more of a user-focus than an external-editor-focus. For the newer people, thank you for the link about what the appropriate topics ar…

It does seem like a "weighted" voting system defeats the purpose of having a voting system at all. What's the point of asking everyone to give their opinions if the only opinions that will matter are those that conform to the opinions of the editors!?

Of course, in truth I might be quite happy with this system. I've liked what the editors have let through so far (though last few days less so) and I would probably rather read what they suggest than what the "group" suggests.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#45

Post by whacked_new »

alex_c wrote: post #40

Seems to me like Slashdot's comment system does two things that might address many of the problems you mention: - instead of "Up" or "Down", the voting is a bit more granular - "+1 Informative", "-1 Flamebait" etc. The UI isn't MUCH more complicated - instead of a "vote up / vote down" link you have a dropdown. - Voting points are a limited resource - assigned to "reliable users" randomly and expire after a few days.…

Yay for mentioning Slashdot!

Slashdot has a good system, but for increased granuarity users actually need to think more about what they're voting, instead of what is possibly a subconscious, wholistic, instantaneous judgment, which seems pretty applicable for Digg. So there's a tradeoff for a system to be "easy to use" rather than "intelligent."

In this sense the UI becomes a bigger challenge than the data processing. See http://x-o-o.com/news.php?sort=new It's a dictionary-supported rating system with granular voting, in the sense that you can vote 10 or 0.1 if you choose to do so; it also supports weighted voting.

It is much harder to use than digg though so such a system probably will not reach popularity. But I think theory wise it is the best implementation.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#46

Post by bct »

aston wrote: post #12
waleedka wrote: post #9

It's not a voting problem, it's a scaling problem; I believe. Simply put: social news sites don't scale very well. As communities grow: 1. You and I can't get things on the home page any more. It becomes only for the well connected. 2. Subjects lose focus. 3. It becomes a gold mine for spammers. They'd do anything to game the system if they can get 234,000 visitors from one post [1]. The solution, I believe: Keep com…

At the same time, monetizing eyeballs requires lots of numbers. I guess the solution then is to make a site that feels like a ton of people are there, but still operates quality-wise as if there's a small community actually controlling the content.

If you decentralize you don't need to monetize. (It's good for everyone except entrepreneurs).

I've got plans in the back of my brain for combining linkblogs, the Atom Publishing Protocol and something like http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/09/03/MeMeme into a decentralized version of reddit/digg/news.yc, but I already have too many projects on the go.

The really nice thing about the idea is that it allows for a lot more experimentation with the best ways of aggregating and sorting through the massive quantities of URLs that are available. Right now only big players like Reddit and Digg and have big enough data sets to really experiment, and they're naturally reluctant to mess with a formula that's working for them.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#47

Post by mdemare »

alex_c wrote: post #40

Seems to me like Slashdot's comment system does two things that might address many of the problems you mention: - instead of "Up" or "Down", the voting is a bit more granular - "+1 Informative", "-1 Flamebait" etc. The UI isn't MUCH more complicated - instead of a "vote up / vote down" link you have a dropdown. - Voting points are a limited resource - assigned to "reliable users" randomly and expire after a few days.…

What I liked about Slashdot was that you could redefine +1 Funny as -1 Funny.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#48

Post by reidman »

waleedka wrote: post #27
reidman wrote: post #14

Since my YC app deals with this directly, I've been thinking about it a lot. My idea has to do with voting quotes up/down (kinda like Jyte, http://jyte.com ). In allowing people to vote up/down, I realized that there needed to be a separation between 'Yes this quote is accurate' and 'Yes I think this quote is important', since the two can be exclusive. In the end I decided to implement a two-step process. The first s…

By doing so, you make the UI complex. Only a small percentage of people vote in social news sites as it is, even with the simple one-click up/down.

I've designed it so that the user doesn't see the voting option for importance until after they've voted for the accuracy of the quote.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#49

Post by Xichekolas »

aston wrote: post #30
yters wrote: post #19

In my opinion, this is as strong AI problem, and only people have strong AI. Therefore, large social sites are always going to need human moderators to have a good signal to noise ratio.

That's a bit generous, I think. Most people aren't smart at all. And even the ones that are don't act objectively and without bias. Ever. Although I will admit that moderated solutions almost always come out better. See slashdot's complete lack of this problem.

Slashdot may not have the problem on a story/post level, but have you ever tried to read every comment on a story? A third are hate speech or spam, another third are repetitious or illogical, a sixth are insightful/funny, and the other sixth would be if they didn't happen to be against the wider political views of the people that had mod points that day.

I think the only real solution is to have a small community whose members are actually heavily invested in the topic... basically, experts.

If I try to go add to a discussion about some new Myspace feature, my thoughts are likely going to be off topic, misguided, or an outright waste of space... all because I don't have a Myspace account, and never have. For the same reason, if a bunch of Joe Sixpacks show up on Hacker News to discuss startups, they are probably going to bury any thoughts from actual startup founders or people involved in the 'scene' (whatever the scene is).

I'm not sure how you maintain that, short of making a community invite only. Even Hacker News is starting to show the pain of size. The front page often has pretty off topic stuff on it, when I, for one, came here originally to keep up on the startups funded by YC and the thoughts of the people involved in them.

Sure, PG still comments here regularly, but how long until this place grows and he becomes an absentee owner like CmdrTaco? He may not stop commenting, but there will be so much crap in the comments that few may notice what he says.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#50

Post by waleedka »

reidman wrote: post #48
waleedka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By doing so, you make the UI complex. Only a small percentage of people vote in social news sites as it is, even with the simple one-click up/down.

I've designed it so that the user doesn't see the voting option for importance until after they've voted for the accuracy of the quote.

I'm not sure this fixes it. Try to factor the human emotional side into the equation. For example, for an article that says "RoR sucks", what do you think Ruby enthusiasts will vote? Even if it's accurate, they'll still mark it as inaccurate, because they'd be hating it and wouldn't want it to go up on the home page. It's human nature.
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