What if we got rid of votes entirely?
There are no downvotes (which is a very good idea) and we are sorting by activity anyway. So what if we took the next logical step and got rid of the entire voting system? Please hear me out! :)
(1) Up-voting does not encourage quality postings (see, for instance, https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/data-mining-reveals-how-the-down-vote-leads-to-a-vicious-circle-of-negative-feedback-aad9d49da238 ; yes the article also covers the up-vote).
(2) Anecdotally, up-voting discourages quality postings. I have often been frustrated because well-thought-out comments (by me or by others) got one hundredth of the up-votes of a strategically placed "lol" or something similarly trivial. People upvote things that evoke an emotional response, not things that make them think. (Source lost, unfortunately.)
(3) Up-votes are time-critial. Being the first one to comment often assures getting the most up-votes, which can lead to (2), to "first" posts, and to quick posts instead of well though-out comments.
(4) (Edit!) Up-voting can create an echo-chamber, because quality if measured by popularity.
All in all, voting is just a social media habit without any benefit and with the possibility of a large detrimental effect on posting quality. Old-school Web fora and Usenet worked fine without it and quality was (arguably) superior.
Would you really miss the option to vote? Is it worth the detrimental effects?
Please discuss!
Edit: fixed the link to the article. Thanks!
I think voting does, or can work to help find quality content, what I would be more in favour of looking at (and may we be the case, as I see no method of recording it so far) is having no record of your own 'karma' or whatever it gets called.
Karma is designed to make people feel more inclined to post, to get the joy of fake internet points, but it has led to karma farming and a culture of getting the 'funniest', lowest common denominator material out as quickly as possible.
A quick and funny post will get much more karma than a well thought out detailed post that comes later but people make those jokes because they want to grow their own karma. You see it all the time in places like the Lounge or MegaLounges, people posting about how they reached 5k, 10k or 50k karma, as if it's an achievement, but you look and all they've done is to repost gifs.
Will people post as much? I'm not sure, but I feel like it would encourage people to think more about what they post, as you'll be trying to add to community by making a quality post that gets attention and rises, but it only benefits the community, not you.
Is there something we could use instead? Some other way to track a users posts and show if they are a high or low effort user? There I am stuck and don't have an answer.
I totally agree, karma or reputation should not be public. I'd go further (I'll probably open a thread about this later) and say that users history should not be public.
I don't think you should judge anyone by either their karma or their comment history, but by the actual contribution you are reading at that moment.
Regarding alternatives to karma, maybe something like a color code could work. For example, there could be a series of colors assigned according to account age and comment votes (possible not submission votes). Newbies get blue, and then by some combination of the above they keep going through different colors (green, yellow, orange red, purple, whatever). That way people don't obsess with numbers and you can get an idea of their contribution level. If someone's comments are often tagged as trolling, flame or even noise, for example, this could reduce their color scale.
Just thinking out loud here.
This is so true, so many terrible things have been done in the name of useless internet points.
But in fairness, name a point system that isn't meaningless! Score of an NFL game? Ultimately who cares!
I think this is why we didn't want to call it 'votes' - I've been leaning towards 'merit' as in 'give merit' - because in a way that's what you're actually doing, in a literal strict sense... validating content. You think it should be seen by more people. We don't need to make that a visible points-based game. I'd like to get rid of karma numbers and replace it with a more old-school forum-scale system, like levels. The merits you get participating are one of the things that pushes you up the trust system - in the most general, aggregate sense of the word.
We talked about wiping out all vote history after a thread is 30 days old. The thread locks like reddit's 'archive mode' (and maybe, there's a way to reactivate it, with the old thread archived and a new one attached). That way, we don't have to worry about it and track it - not keeping score is a win for privacy. I kinda like this idea.
For quality we also have the 'exemplary upvote' so people will have a way to shine a spotlight once in a while. Think reddit gold but you don't pay for it, and everyone only gets a limited, scarce amount at the same rate, like 1 a day, and you can save up to three.
Hey, first comment (woo). I really like your last idea of an exemplary upvote, I think it's a great idea, especially with the cap otherwise people could wreak havoc.
I do think however that these special votes should be visible (also much like Reddit Gold) so it's clearly visible some people think highly of it. It's also probable that these special votes would bump it up the thread a bit further.
Maybe this could also benefit the original comment OP in some way, perhaps increasing their trust more than what Karma does (e.g make it worth 10 Karma for the sole purpose of trust).
(Edit) If it also benefits the user's comment then maybe people may be more inclined to post more quality content.
Also I understand that this may lead right back to the pissing contest of Karma if it was visible but it would be much less severe than traditional Karma.
I disagree. Gold was something that ended up causing more of an issue than Karma did, in a way. Sure, karma made things a pissing contest, but gold was basically dumping a full bucket of it on someone. Sure, people may have liked the golden shower, but it made others jealous, and a lot more divisive. I'm of the mind that if you want to support the site, donate regularly. Don't give a monetary reason for people to say something, even if it is a silly badge on their comment.
It tended to stifle discussion, imo. People would see someone gilded their comment and just assume, because someone spent money on it, they must be right. Then it added all the dumb edits about it.
If anything, and I know this might upset people, 4chan got it right. Comments were on their own. No votes, no names, just the merit of the comment itself. If it was a good comment, it would be replied to and there would be more discussion about it. Not only that, but people would end up actually taking the idea and spreading it, whatever it may be.
It would become a Meme, in the traditional, Dawkins sense. A passed on gene, just with an idea instead of a cell, or dna, or biology.
Do you completely disagree with special votes altogether or just them being visible?
I personally don't think comments should have no voting metric and just get ranked by comment count and comments that are currently popular.
I have on a few occasions seen comments on Reddit that have hundreds of upvotes (and are helpful/interesting comments) but either have no replies or have very little replies, which would mean that the parent comment wouldn't get seen were it not for the voting system.
Now that you have pointed it out, I do see that special comments, if seen, could lead to a massive pissing contest but they don't have to be seen at all.
If I were to be honest, I'd rather not have special votes at all. I find it easy to abuse in that regard, especially if they were invisible. Say they were weighted, who is going to stop someone from dropping a bunch of those votes on a comment to artificially inflate it's position? I'd prefer transparency over opacity, but I'd also prefer no special votes at all. Just too easy to abuse in one way or another.
That being said, you aren't wrong in the sense that there are comments with no discussion that are useful none-the-less. But that's why I'd rather have a system that would either be a blanket "contributes/is useful" or a sort of drop down list for why you're voting for it, a-la "Contributes to the conversation", "Is useful", "Interesting/insightful" and even more that I can't think of. Nothing silly like "Cool" because that's just kinda pointless imo, unless it's for a sub-thread or group that warrants it. As in a group called "Cool Pictures" or "Cool Facts". That being said, this site is a little too small for that just yet, so we will have to see!
I agree with you on the possibility of someone dropping a bunch on a comment, this could be slightly prevented by only allowing one user to post one at to any one comment or post and with the visibility of the special votes not being there it wouldn't push users to pile onto a comment in particular.
But yes, overall I do agree with you, there will be some weightedness in one way or another and I don't think there is a way to get away from that entirely.
Maybe someone should conduct some sort of poll to attempt to garner users opinion on this matter?
Thank you anyway for helping me see the cons to this, I appreciate it.
I like your idea of a reputation scale, with some ranges of reputation, instead of a number. For the colour-blind under us, you could add a letter instead (A through F, for example). The downside is that if there is a neutral / newbie rank, people will probably look down on those people (a bit like Stack Overflow's Reputation system). If you introduce a negative rank (for trolls, flames, etc), people might be able to just create a new account once the invitation system is gone.
However, I disagree on making everyone's history private. For example, if I like someone's content, and I am curious to see what else they've written about a specific topic, it'd be perfect to have a page where you can see what someone has written in which group. On the other hand, it also makes people with an opinion you don't like vulnerable to bullying, where one can tag all of their posts to damage the other person's reputation.
I disagree with the reputation ranges, as I don't think any implementation will lead to positive outcome for the site. You'll either get (as you mentioned), people looking down on newbies, or only responding to the "A" rank commenters, or some equivalent dichotomy, with people thinking that A ranks have more valid inputs in discussions.
I think you really need downvotes to root out low effort posts, as someone just commenting with things that don't contribute to the discussion ("lol", "this", "same", and the like) isn't really something you resolve with spam/reporting.
I second the need for public user history. One of my favorite things about Reddit is being able to find quality comments by people I trust such as /u/PoppinKream.
There are always trade-offs, but the usefulness of it outweighs them.
Sure, color, grades, whatever works.
Yeah, but I think it's better (or the same) than 0 reputation or totally new account.
Yes, that's why I think going down on the scale is better than tagging as troll or flamer.
I opened a new thread about it, we can discuss it there. I'll check back tomorrow.
*1 RES had a color grade system for the more you tag someone they get lighter (or darker for downvotes), that would be an interesting design feature.
*2 To avoid new accounts 'starting' at zero, why not do what Reddit did, and use a 'score hidden' type feature for the first week of an account?
*3 Currently there's only votes in the upward direction, but why not have accounts get banned if they hit a certain negative threshold? Now, don't make this number known to the user, but having it be a firm (say -500 or whatever) number that automatically bans the account would show there's not really a tolerance policy towards trolling and divisive behavior. Have the ban need to be approved by a moderator before it's permanent wouldn't be a bad idea either, so you can see that the person isn't brigaded for downvotes you know?
*4 I'll post about the user history in your other thread.
we don't have downvotes so they couldn't lose karma if we had a system like that
I would want user history to be available because I want this to be a platform open to creators.
For a creator, a writer, artist and so forth, it's important to have a record that people can find, see and get access to other things they have produced.
As for judging people on their past interactions, I think that also has a place, as we want people to be good high quality users and for people to know that, we should be able to see what they've said before. Hiding the past will encourage trolls in my opinion "Me? No I never said that." The founders have said they'll possibly look at history when judging if they want to make a temp account a permanent one and I feel we should all be judged on the way we interact across the whole site.
I would almost rather go the other way and make it all open and don't let people delete posts without good reason.
As for colours, I like the idea, but I feel it would just be a new race to be 'top' colour. There will be sabotaging of others with malicious tagging and anger if you drop a colour.
The only way to avoid that 'must be popular' cycle, is to not have it at all in any way.
Makes sense. However, I'm all for choice. If you want your entire history to be public, that's ok with me. I just don't want mine to be public, at least not part of it. Not because that way I will be able to contradict myself or scam anyone, but because I don't want random people to know more about me than what I'm willing to offer. If I had a reason to have a public history, like the one you mentioned, I would just use an account for those types of posts. But for the rest, I would use an account that I could anonymize. I think it's reasonable to have to option, it doesn't need to be mandatory for everyone. Check the thread on anonymity I opened as well, we were discussing this further there.
To be honest, if that was the case, I would just not participate at all, or I would just keep creating throwaways... People will find ways to avoid disclosing too much information if they want, so the site would be better finding a way to provide them with the right tools to do so if they wish to. Otherwise (some) people might avoid participating, or they would find subterfuges to achieve it to some degree.
Yes, I actually think karma should not be public either. Only mods/admins should be able to see it and only for a limited amount of time
Instead of only having deletion as an option for the user, why not add an option to preserve but minimize the comment, such as a button to "whisper"?
You could even have such a button directly when submitting comments, making it easier to comment on orthogonal minutiae without drawing attention away from the main topic (such as grammar nazi comments).
Trolls abuse this to severely dilute sincere discussions by feigning ignorance and inserting bad information. If you don't know who they are, and can't see their history, you have no way of knowing if it's a sincere and attentive person who deserves the time and effort of an answer. You can make a reasonable argument that even a troll deserves a sincere answer; sure, the first time. But it wears people down to keep putting their energy into wasted replies, and eventually many of them will burn out and degrade to low-quality participation. In a community too large to recognize most people by username, you need to take steps to reduce the harm inflicted by trolls, and post histories help more than they harm.
Definitely agree about visible karma. The discussions absolutely need voting (if you eliminate voting, early comments get highest visibility automatically, without even the simple necessity of anybody liking them), but not with visible scores.
I understand your points. Please, check this other thread where we are discussing these issues: https://tildes.net/~tildes/qc/discussing_anonymity_on
I agree about history not being public, makes doxxing a hell of a lot harder too.
It would be more difficult nonetheless, so people wouldn't just be able to click on the username and make ad hominem attacks based on their other comments. That happens a lot on reddit, and ideally we want to make it harder to do that.
it's good to see others history so they can't lie about things
But people can lie anyway, and people can create throwaways, and people can delete their history... So I don't think having a public history helps that much, really. Check this other thread where we're discussing anonymity: https://tildes.net/~tildes/qc/discussing_anonymity_on
I, personally, always look at the titles and never at the votes when looking for interesting things. And then, online discussions have worked without any sort of rating system for a long time before they became ubiquitous.
Karma might encourage people to post more, but will it encourage them to post interesting links and articles? I doubt it. IMO, a follow-up to something you have posted is the biggest reward. It shows that people do something with it instead of just saying, "yeah, cool".
Then, in a sound community, I think (hope?) that benefiting the community and the poster would be the same thing. Interesting discussions benefit both the participants the initiator of the discussion equally. There is no need for any additional reward.
The point of voting is so that I don't have to read every last thing on the internet.
Also, if we got rid of voting, this would just be an old-fashioned forum, and that only works for small numbers of people. That's fine, but I don't think "just a forum" is what Tildes is going for.
I agree with this. I think the voting is necessary. Hopefully the problem of low effort posts and comments can be handled by a combination of the reputation system and site-wide culture and norms.
You don't have to. You read the headlines and then decide what's worth your time. This has worked for centuries.
Also, I think that "votes or just a small number of people" is a false dichotomy. I don't believe that many newcomers would miss votes.
Good luck reading all the headlines here: http://reddit.com/r/all/new
Having to read all the headlines only works as long as the content volume is low, which it is right now, but won't be if ~ grows.
Additionally, if you really want to avoid looking at votes in order to determine quality, just sort by
new. Later, when you can select your own default sorting, you can just set it tonewand forget about it. If you can select the default sort order of comments, too, then you could just selectorder posted.That's what groups are for. If Tildes grows, groups will still be manageable, as subreddits are today.
I suspect that, as the site grows, you would have to delve into more and more specific groups in order to avoid information overload (supposing you can even subdivide the information enough for each group to be digestible). But that's not what I want all the time - sometimes I might want to hear, for example, the biggest news from the day (regardless of sub-group it's in).
As an example, imagine Tildes existing during 9/11. The post about it might be properly posted into, say, ~news.usa.ny.nyc. However, I bet more people would want to hear about it than just those who are focused on New York City.
Things would still be ordered by activity:: clicks and follow-ups. Same as voting, only without voting, Has worked for decades before voting became fashionable.
I was thinking about something similar yet different, but instead of making a new post I'll add it to this discussion:
What if we limited the amount of votes per user per day?
There are also a drawback I can thing of:
a. To solve this, you could implement a system where a person would get an x amount of votes every x amount of minutes of activity. However, it's against our idea of privacy to track someone's activity, and it would need an unnecessary amount of JavaScript, which slows down the webpage and doesn't work on all browsers.
b. You could also implement a "get more votes" menu, where you can click a button to get more votes (which would be valid only for a limited amount of time), which refreshes every x hours. However, this can be a tedious process, and it will surely bug enough people, since it's not automatic. It will also attract automated processes, where someone installs a plugin to automatically increase their amount of votes. A Recaptcha-like check would fix this, but that only adds more third party libraries.
I find the idea of having limited amount of votes interesting but you're forgetting the timezones.
And if you think to relay this management on the frontend (so the js that run in the browser of the users) you're basically opening your doors to hacks.
I don't really like the second part of your comment, about binding the number of votes to the number of time you spend on the website or to a manual trigger to get more votes.
One of the main point of this platform is to not try and work the "engagement" angle that every social platform motivated by profit is working of course. We don't care if you stay 10 minutes of 2 hours a day. What's important is that you got some enrichment after you close this window and/or, even better, you left a meaningful insight for someone else to read :)
Why do timezones matter? Users could be limited to 'x' votes per 24 hours based on GMT or any arbitrary timezone. It doesn't matter if it resets at midnight or 10am, you still get the same number of votes every 24 hours. As long as you have an indicator, like a simple little bar-graph up next to our logged-in username top-right, showing how many votes you have left for this 24 hour period. Each person would get used to when their votes re-set just like people get used to what local-time an EVE Online downtime is, or a WoW downtime, or any other server-based event. You still know that you over-all get 'x' votes per day.
If people are online at the time of the reset, it could cause some significant fluctuations in activity around that time, especially if it happens at the same time for everyone.
Oh I agree it's not the solution, was just saying time zones are irrelevant.
It matters because if the timezone of the server is the opposite on your, you end up with X votes in a time span on few hours opposed to who is close to the timezone of the server and will have to spend those votes in a larger time window.
Then introduce rolling votes. You get x votes per 4 hours or whatever. Removes the mass drop and subsequent user activity spikes.
One could even do it continuously. One vote every (1 day / (x votes/day)) days. This would only need to be computed on-demand, so no additional continuous load on the server there.
Ah yeah, good old timezones. I completely forgot about those. Server time might work, but will probably cause some annoyance as well. An option for setting local time might solve that issue, but will only add to the complexity of the server side. (Especially with those 30-minute-off zones and summertime shivers)
I get that we don't aim to keep our users online as long as possible for marketing reasons, but I regularly find myself forgetting about this website (especially because it's currently not all that active), so having some form of a daily pattern might contribute to more active users, with more content, and a more lively discussion. I could totally get it if that's not what we're after though.
There are other ways that could make this same idea work - some kind of exponential decay back to "max times you can upvote", so that you can't upvote more than so many times per hour, or a slightly larger amount per day. Or make it linear (max of X possible votes at any one time, regenerating at a fixed rate of N per hour, within 24 hours of no voting you are at your max).
Exponential decay can be nice for this kind of thing since it is very low overhead - only need to track when the last successful vote occurred, and the number of votes they had left at that time.
I don't think that's a very good idea. If I have free time and want to browse the site and see something interesting and I can't vote on it, it might discourage me, as it seems I can only participate by commenting, and maybe even repeating what someone else said. If I agree or value what someone says I should always be able to vote on it, instead of forcing users to comment to interact (which could result in lots of "This." comments, by the way).
I think comments like "This." would presumably get tagged as noise, which would discourage that sort of participation-by-commenting except when someone has something valuable to add to the conversation. If I've exhausted my votes for the day and I see something particularly impressive, maybe I would go back and unvote something I voted on earlier. Or maybe I could just read it and like it, internally in my own mind, without clicking a button. Although it occurs to me maybe a "save" button would be valuable in this case.
Yes, they would be tagged as noise. But that doesn't change anything (it might even be counterproductive, the article in OP actually says negative feedback encourages the poster to keep creating low quality content). The fact is of I can't vote and I like something, I might just add a comment saying "This." because I cannot upvote, not because I want to add noise.
I personally don't want to go back and unvote anything in order to vote something I like. Some people might have more interests than others, for example. And then participate in more groups, or have more time and read more posts, etc.
You can read something and internally like it, but you are not helping filter content that way, you are not giving feedback to that person that their content was good and your are not making it easier to others to identify the good content.
A save button should be totally implemented, but that serves a different function (to be able to go back to it easily).
I think a whisper feature would be nice. It's a normal comment, except intentionally collapsed by default and hidden from view. Intended for use with for example minor corrections, such as spelling and minor facts.
You mean for comments like "This."? I'm not sure I'm following.
I think spelling can be just edited on the original post and minor facts... I don't know, if they contribute something they should probably be expanded (I know if I'm following a conversation I will expand them just out of curiosity anyway), if they don't... maybe just don't post them?
I indeed haven't mentioned that, but the concept of unvoting other posts so only the real quality posts receive their scores might actually be what we're after. If you've upvoted a picture of a cat just because it's a cat ¹⁾, and a few minutes later you see actual quality content but you're out of votes, I'd like to encourage you to unvote the cat, and upvote the good content instead.
¹⁾ Bad example, but you get the idea
We're going for a both-worlds approach here. There's the regular voting - but then we're also planning for an 'exemplary vote' mechanic. Something similar-ish in visual style to reddit gold (maybe it puts a star in the vote box that gets bigger the more gold it gets). People will probably get one exemplary vote to hand out a day, and be able to save up to three total (or maybe a bit more, depending on trust level - we're not firm on the specifics yet).
When you use these, you don't 'vote' yourself - instead you multiply the votes of other people on that topic, giving it a small, but decent boost in the rankings. As others see it and decide it's worth the exemplary vote, they can do the same, and the multiplier effect grows stronger and stronger every time. That way, this whole process still takes a lot of coordinated effort from a decent group of users, preventing it from being abused.
That's the theory, anyway. Help select for quality rather than just raw score, using a limited-resource vote of some kind. It may work that way, it might be something else, but the idea has merit.
Out of curiosity, have you considered how that might work with the audit system? Presumably, an exemplary vote can be considered a "community leader" action of sorts, and as such, should the users who provided those votes be visible at any level?
On one hand, if tagging and removal are audited, maybe promoting should be too. On the other, if people are confronting each other about why they thought something was worth promoting, that could foster a hivemind.
I expect we're only going to give out access to the exemplary vote to users who've earned a specific trust level, probably a lowish one - and it'll only work for them in the communities where they earned that trust, so it should represent the group's culture. Maybe as they gain trust they get a little bit more of those votes to spread around, still not sure if that's the smart thing to do or not. When it bubbles up into the parent group, it's also going to be exposed to the users with exemplary votes there, and they might have a different culture than the smaller group.
We could always make it public, but letting people see who voted on what is kinda against the privacy model. Votes are generally quite private. Community leaders are going to have other public ways of acting on behalf of their groups, like announcements, stickies, distinguished comments, group-wide polls and PMs that don't rely on votes to get noticed. The exemplary vote is a sort of every-man mechanic, not so much a mod tool. The AMA tag would be much more of a mod tool.
What if you realize it this way:
This would require that votes are not only counted but have a value, let's say between 0 (last vote less than 1 minute ago) and 1 (last vote at least 1hour ago). In the interface I'd show a rounded value.
It sounds like you're all reinventing an approximation of the "exemplary votes" that have been discussed before. In summary, votes remain free to give, but higher reputation users are given tokens for "exemplary votes", which act as vote multipliers instead of normal votes. That seems like a better solution to me than adjusting votes' weight by frequency, which seems prone to gaming to me. Here is one place I've read about the idea - I'd link a discussion on site if I had a way of finding one.
No, except that votes are weighted it's completely different. My suggestion doesn't differ been good and bad users, the votes of all users are worth the same. Why should the vote of one user be more worth than the vote of someone else? What would you think as a new user?
With the suggested time base rating you would not have to track the history of users or calculate a reputation value, which is IMHO against the privacy idea. It would also limit potential misuse/manipulation automatically - in my example, every user would have a variable number of votes with a maximum weight of 1.0 per hour. The votes of users who actually read a post, follow a link, take the time to think about it... are automatically rated higher than the votes of users who just do one vote after the other.
The votes of the users will adjust in each community to represent that user's contributions to those communities. The more you've done for ~music, the higher your rep, and your vote weight goes up to compensate - though not much. The key point being when you go to vote in ~sports, your weight there has nothing to do with your weight in ~music. Each community will give the most weight to the people who are most active in it - the people who live there and built it. It's their house. It's not based just on submissions or comments, either. Reading and lurking/voting/tagging are also very valid types of contribution.
There will also be a constant decay going on. If you're inactive for a long time, your rep will decrease to the point where you lose access to the expanded features and your vote weight will decrease back to the baseline. This is to prevent absentee-landlords who haven't been active from making a dramatic return and fucking things up, like what happens on reddit.
The weight you have won't matter when you make your own submissions. Everyone starts a zero, we don't want power-submitters like what happened on digg. Brigaders will have a hard time, because they aren't regular visitors - which means they have basic votes, and the actual community users have stronger ones, so they can withstand external manipulation and fight back against it.
It could also be possible to degrade vote weight when you vote a lot in a short period of time. Active voters could still express their preferences, but would not have a much greater influence than those who only vote a little.
(doing this on reddit would also likely have worked well against T_D's abuse of the voting mechanism)
Well, I recently made a suggestion to tie the number of votes a user gets to their Trust value. The more Trust you have the more you can vote. Also to relax the strictness of having a limit amount of votes, have these limits on a weekly basis as opposed to daily basis. It might take time but then users would ration their votes according to their schedule usage of Tildes.
I think my main problem with voting and karma is that they are idiotic, bush-league basic systems. We've been using them for years, and nobody every says, "Hey, what if we play around with this concept?" It's been my experience, at least on reddit, that those conversations get drowned out in a sea of "muh demahcracy" knee-jerk responses.
Everyone is just so horrified at the idea that someone, somewhere, might be better than them at something and deserving of a gold star. Democracy fails for the simple reason that my ignorance is not as good as your knowledge. Sure, we use it as a system of government, but only because we haven't got a better one yet. It's use doesn't mean it belongs on a pedestal, in fact it should merit more scrutiny.
That's where the meritocracy comes into play - the idea that you 'earn' your place above and beyond where you start. All men are created equal, but they don't remain that way. The democratic element is still present, but that's just the baseline, and it grows from there into something else - hopefully, something better... and hopefully without becoming an exclusive club or elitist wall of group-think, which are the biggest risks with meritocratic systems.
By hiding the karma scores, we're letting people forget they exist - and that means they won't waste time thinking about numbers or chasing silly leaderboards. At the same time, the 'vote' count still exists, because there is some value in knowing how many people voted on something, and it does provide a sense of accomplishment to the people contributing, letting them know they've reached a real audience. Removing the downvotes also removes the negative feedback and prevents abuse of the system - it's difficult to brigade if you can't actually accomplish anything by brigading.
Also by getting rid of the downvotes, we can get people to use something else instead when it's time to express their negativity - and that's where tagging and reporting come into play. Those systems get people to think about the 'what' and the 'why' of the negative feedback they provide. People will use these a lot more here precisely because there's no downvote, and while they use them, without even realizing it, they'll be learning a better way to give negative feedback.
I especially love how this is going to fuck up a troll's day. They live for a "+20 flame" tag, it's their badge of honor, their bragging rights on a troll forum. What they don't know is that as they keep collecting those badges of dis-merit, their account is losing power and access to all of the trust systems, effectively silencing them.
We could hide the 'votes' behind a screen of some kind (like a heat meter) - but don't we want to see the real number of people who thought something was interesting or worthwhile? Don't we want to know the size and scope of the audience the topic is reaching? I think there's a value in that.
You have a lot of valid concerns, though, about the lack of visibility - things with large vote totals do tend to dominate the pages. There's a workaround for that too - what we call the "knights of new" problem, named for the folks who hang out on the new queues all day and are the first ones to cast votes on good topics (and report spam, trolling, harassment). I'd like to find a way to distinguish and reward these people for their efforts - they are an overlooked, silent, but absolutely vital part of every community.
We can mix in new topics and comments along with the old ones in all of the views, so that we get 'more eyes' on fresh content - and the best part of this is, the more people we have, the better it tends to work. It's not very useful to do it here right now, but in a default like reddit's /r/music where there are 2000 posts a day, it's important to get eyes on all of those posts so we lessen the chance of losing something great in the noise.
I get heat for this, but I have another solution for the late-arriving great comments as well. If someone is posting a comment of "lol" or that's full of racist terms or l33t sp34k and not even written in proper language, I see no reason whatsoever we should even have to see it - computer systems can easily identify that kind of crap and slap it with a penalty to drag it to the bottom of any given thread... just as they can spot a five paragraph reply that's got a college writing level, and slap that with a bonus to bring it to the top. All of this before the votes come in, and then take over for these quiet ranking systems. The votes should have precedence in the end, of course - the automation is just to tip the weights a bit in favor of the quality over the quantity.
You put all of these things I've talked about together and suddenly, the vote system is working more like a merit-based quality approach rather than a like/dislike direct democratic approach. Is it perfect? Hell no. Is it better than reddit and all other similar forums? Hell yes. Better is all we need, and if we keep our eyes on it and gather feedback, work on the evolution of the system, over time it can grow into something better still, with fewer problems and more advantages. We might even uncover a better democratic model for governance in the process. All we have to do is keep it rigorous, keep it democratic in access, and meritocratic in long-term trust.
Yes, there might be value on that. However, a good "heat meter" serves basically the same purpose. How useful is it knowing that a post has 10k or 11k votes? Is there really a big difference? As long as the rank is proportional to the user base of a group at a given time, it would be representative of the quantity of attention. without the leaderboard effect.
Ok, I agree with the "lol" and "Nice" comments. They don't add anything (except maybe some memesque dynamics, which are rarely important and probably a byproduct not necessary). But poor grammar? Or short comments? I don't think any intervention should be done on those. First, I'm guessing you're hoping foreigners will use the site as well, and you can't expect perfect grammar or "proper" language (however you end up defining that). Abbreviations should be perfectly valid as they help save time and convey concepts and intertextuality, even. Second, length should not be in any case sinonymous with quality, I think. A long comment can be misleading, devious and actively creating distrust or FUD, for example, even if written in "proper" language. What I mean is that trolls can also be very articulate. This is also very apparent with SJWs and people pushing political agendas.
We can keep the stupidfilter focused on very low effort stuff. That's what it'll most likely be good at, anyway. The narrower the focus the more reliable the behavior tends to become.
Definitely. I think "You are totally right" or "that's not true" comments should be filtered out. If you agree or think something is useful just vote on it, if you don't, answer or ignore.
I was thinking, not sure if it makes sense, and I now there's a discussion already about votes naming, but maybe comment votes could be renamed to something like "deep!", meaning that something is meaningful and well thought... Maybe it's too much?
Fair enough!
In this case, can we please have a user option to turn off voting? So when I enable that options I will not see any votes and will not be able to vote?
a) Your link is 404 just remove the ; at the end of the URL to fix it.
b) How do you effectively define what is exactly "quality content" if there is no voting or scoring mechanism? This is actually my main concern in all discussion related to quality. All we want to do is to build a system which increases trust and quality content/discussion, therefore, we would like to solve a complex optimization problem, but we have no good metric what we want to optimize for which makes it hard to build rational around any decision.
c) The "old" web worked well without voting until you needed to find quality information about certain topics. Discovery is still a problem even with Google. Some cases voting helps you in the first step of the discovery. The problem is that we usually stop there.
d) Do you want to remove voting for topics only or for comments as well?
The trust aspect is, of course, also important! No quick solution comes to mind, but this should definitely be considered! Back in the days, people where known for interesting contributions, but this is probably not feasible in a larger community. Although it might work in individual groups!
Finding information is easy in a news aggregator, I would say: just read the headlines in the subscribed groups and pick the things that interest you. Is is really better to let the community make the choice for you?
Yes, I would suggest to remove votes altogether, both from postings and comments.
Fixed the link, thanks!
Addressing your points:
1.The article actually says that no feedback encourages stopping participating! That's probably not what a community wants. And it's the opposite of what you propose.
3 & 4 I agree with this. But votes also allow to filter low quality content. Many top or best comments on reddit are actually pretty good, and if there was no indication of this they might get lost and you would need to read through hundreds of them until finding the insightful ones.
So, all in all I don't think doing away with upvotes is a very good idea.
However, what might be useful is maintaining the upvotes but not showing the count. Some other measurement could be used for the user to see. I mentioned color codes for karma above in another comment, and this might work for posts as well.
For example, a post could get a higher "grade" (or color) if it's in the top posts of its group at a given time.
Imagine this group has 100 users (so a max of 100 upvotes per submission). The closer it gets to that number the higher the grade/color (let's say, red). After a while, the color would be set and voting would not be allowed (I'm not sure if that is planned here, but j guess so) and it's color would remain intact. So six months later, when the user base of the group is 1000, posts will be assigned red only if they get close to 1000 votes.
This way, if you order a group by top posts, all time, you would get the top (red) submissions regardless of the current number of users, and based on the number of users at the time of posting.
What is the advantage of this? How is it different than showing a number? Well, my theory is that it would show the poster that their post has gotten attention and been appreciated while avoiding "number obsession". It keeps the current system, but makes it less dependent on specifics.
What do you think?
Regarding feedback: of course, writing into a vacuum discourages further postings very effectively. However, as I wrote in a different reply, a follow-up is the best feedback.
Then, there are certainly many ways to vote in such a way that the rating is not displayed numerically, like tags, coloring, etc. However, I would prefer to have no votes at all, because any kinds of rating involves (3) and (4).
Maybe I'm just a fossil, though.
This is what Hacker News does, and it seems to work pretty well.
I like this idea.
The colors is an interesting idea. When a post passes a vote threshold, it's upgraded to a different color tier. Maybe also have the option to sort posts by color as well? That way you can view well-established posts (red), up n' coming posts (yellow), and new/not so great posts (blue)...?
Umm, to be honest, I think sorting by "color" should not be available. Giving the user a list of "upcoming posts" I believe will discourage the sort by new crowd. I think an "activity" or "hot" sort with mixed colors would work better.
What if there were more options than just positive and negative, just up or down? Something a 1-5 star system rating. Or maybe a set of a few tags that can be applied ("insightful", "not sure about this one" etc etc, you know, stuff like that.)
Might make people think about it a bit more by making things a bit more nuanced than just YEAH HUH! or NUH UH!
Sorry for replying in a new comment but I suppose it's ok because I've something new to add and if I edit my post, nobody will notice "new comment"on the home page.
So, I was just looking at the home page listing and realized that I'm doing something completely different from what I was doing on Reddit.
On Reddit I usually glance over the title, then the thumbnail and finally sometimes the karma.
Literally the karma tells me nothing on Reddit.
Here, I checked a couple of topic before this that I really didn't partecipate but then noticed the votes.
In my mind, a topic with good votes here means "there are interesting discussions going on here".
So I opened them anyway and to be honest of the three topic, one of them brought me to comment a point of view that I wasn't seeing expressed.
Obviously this is just how I perceive the votes but if now that we are few, we set the unwritten rules like this... Votes becomes something that actually have meaning for the user, especially when the title fail to attract attention.
I think maybe it could work if you added an equivalent tag that meant the same thing. I.E. "votes" probably could be implemented as an "on-topic" or "good point" positive tag in the same way that downvotes are kind of replaced by "offtopic", "troll", etc negative tags.
How would anything be seen in the first place if there is no voting? I don't want to have to read through tons of low-quality posts before seeing something that anyone actually cares about.
As someone else has said, maybe tags would work better than votes. You can filter to find posts with the most "good point" tags or the most "on-topic" ones. Groups would be able to create their own tags that people can give posts. Maybe combine that with a 1-5 star system.
I dunno, maybe a comment rate. The idea here is that there are no low-quality posts to scroll through.
It's seen, because it's inserted at the top of the list and then it sinks down to the bottom according to activity (clicks and follow-ups).