Design: Voting up or Down is Dead • Hacker News Board

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#61

Post by ijoshua » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 1:10 PM UTC

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.

"Most people aren't smart at all."

Very correct. In fact, nearly half of all the people you'll meet have a "below average" intelligence.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#62

Post by ijoshua » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 1:23 PM UTC

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.

PG, I'd be interested to know why you chose to implement a voting/rating system for stories on news.yc. That is, did you consider a "weightless" submission system like, for example, MetaFilter, where front-page postings are a privilege that every member has equally. I've been a member of MeFi for several years and the effect of "gaming" has never really been an issue there, because there is no reification of trustworthiness in the form of a "karma" score. Certain members there certainly have name-recognition based on their history, but this gains them nothing in terms of influence on the focus or direction of the site as a whole.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#63

Post by DanielBMarkham » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 1:23 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #59

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.

I have severe doubts about this kind of voting system, weighted by moderators or not. A post that was voted up by 100 people and down by 100 people (assuming equal weights) will look exactly the same as one that nobody ever touched. It ruins the effectiveness of voting as a ranking mechanism.

DZone, which is linked in the article, has up and down votes that they keep track of separately. That way, they don't cancel out. Instead, you get an idea of the total positive and negative sentiment.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#64

Post by apgwoz » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 1:26 PM UTC

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.…

The greatness of up/down is that recommendations are simpler, though arguably reddit's recommendation system doesn't work... so, I'm on board .Slashdot moderation!!

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#65

Post by DanielBMarkham » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 1:35 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #58

aston wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the best comparison. I don't see why a person would vote something up that they have no interest in personally. Altruism isn't all that common.

There's a difference between what people want to read and what they want other people to read. I know of no precise word for this. Altruism is too charitable, and hypocrisy too uncharitable. Imagine yourself inside the head of, say, an abortion rights advocate. A story appears with a headline saying that abortion is just as common where it's illegal. You don't read it; you already know that; but you upvote it as a wa…

Seems to me like we're confusing the users and the system. The users want to read the best material for them. The system only has two states: yes/no. If people are voting _knowing that their vote will influence what others read_, then they aren't working for the best interests of the users, only their own best interests. As you indicate, I don't think there's a word for that, but if there is a recommendation-consumption impedance mismatch (a gap between recommender interests and reader interests) then the system will always swing out of whack. That's true no matter how much it is weighted, because all you're doing is switching the impedance mismatch from a user-to-user scenario to a user-to-editor one.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#66

Post by kmt » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 1:37 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #7

dyu wrote: post #5

I think up/downs are to judge the worthiness of the link, and agreements should be expressed in the comments.

Would you vote up for a link to a story that you violently disagreed with? Be honest now. And if you would (I _think_ I would) do you really think that's the way others are voting?

I would. By voting up a link or a comment you improve their visibility. This should bring more people to the discussion and that's good if you are passionate about the topic (no matter if you agree or not, or not quite sure).

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#67

Post by kn0thing » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 2:34 PM UTC

To the argument about reddit suffering from "Vote up if..." syndrome, we've thought about building a "poll" submission type (like a self-post) that would create an actual poll on reddit as the submission. We'd like to see fewer of these polls on the front page, too, but still give worthwhile poll a chance -- they're just in the minority.

We figured this would make the poll have to earn the "up vote" instead of just sucking people into clicking up because they "want Bush in prison." It could even graph the results! Histograms are sexy.

Incidentally, newsvine has something like this. We're in the middle of getting new reddit online, so who knows when/if this would actually happen. Perhaps voting up/down will already be dead by then ;)

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#68

Post by Readmore » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 2:36 PM UTC

I had up and down ratings on http://www.klipboardz.com and then decided to switch them out for a system that just rates on number of times the story is read and the number of comments. I think it's a better system than most social sites. The only problem I expect is burying content, but that isn't a problem since the site is so small.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#69

Post by toisanji » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 7:52 PM UTC

whacked_new wrote: post #45

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…

Slashdot's commenting system is one of the best I've seen. One thing I wish they had though is the ability to filter out types of comments. You can already label comment as "funny","interesting", or whatever, but you can't filter by those labels. I want to be able to read at a threshold of 3+ and not funny.

Re: Design: Voting up or Down is Dead

#70

Post by sbraford » Mon, Oct 15, 2007, 8:11 PM UTC

almost wrote: post #56

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.

Please do! news.yc seems to be veering a little off track a bit lately and it'd be nice to see it come back. After all, if people want the full wisdom of the crouds/mob rule thing then there's always Reddit.

Not to nit, but communities like reddit aren't really following "wisdom of crowds" model anymore, as outlined in the book.

To truly obtain wisdom from the crowd, it has to be collected:

a) non-sequentially (i.e. all votes are cast independently of what everyone else cast)

b) taken from wide cross-section of the population.

Once a community has formed around particular topics (far left politics, atheism, xkcd, "vote up if ...") you may be collecting wisdom of _that_ crowd but not wisdom applicable to anyone beyond that select group.