Ask HN: Setting up social voting rules?

1 point·locopati··3 comments

I'm looking for pointers to setting up a site based on social voting (like HN or StackOverflow) to prevent the system from being badly gamed or ruined by troublemakers (like the joke that americaspeakingout.com turned into). For example: tips on how one decides on points allocation, rewards/demerits, badges, etc.

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Limit the reward for voting badly and increase the chance that you'll get publicly and anonymously hand-slapped.

On HN and StackOverflow:

1. These are not places that non-techs would tend to frequent, and they mostly evolved into more serious areas, unlike Slashdot, which gave points for "funny", etc.

2. People are typically serious enough to self-regulate or community-regulate via negative voting.

So, I'd not provide points for funny, and I'd cut off editing and negative voting early after the post (like HN), as continuous negative voting is demoralizing.

One more thing: general forums are more likely to get vandalized.

By general forums, do you mean forums that allow anonymous posting (versus requiring an account) or do you mean sites that have a broad topic (versus a narrow focus like HN)?

broad topic/community. Vandalized might have been too strong a word. Just mean that the broader the topic and community, the more likely it is to attract spam, ridiculous posts, etc. and for your case, ridiculous voting.

I wouldn't say that HN is necessarily all that narrow of a topic (it is somewhat open, even though it is primarily tech entrepreneurs), but the community is more narrow.

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