Design: Voting up or Down is Dead
whattofix.com
whattofix.com
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 communities smaller and focused. If need be, create many small communities.
[1] http://blog.mindvalleylabs.com/marketing/how-to-get-traffic-...
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.
Restrictions are sometimes good. Compare Facebook to MySpace. With MySpace it's one huge community; everyone can see everyone. With Facebook, you can only join a small set of networks. You cannot even join San Francisco and Silicon Valley at the same time. True, people hate it, but it keeps the system manageable as it scales.
This is a subject I'm interested in and trying to build a startup to address it.
Google News is organized this way, and it seems to work.
I think my point was more that people have "favorite" topics, but it's a loose and free-flowing thing, not a rigid structure. Computers are really good at rigid definitions, while people may be amenable to all kinds of fuzziness. Perhaps my group is better defined as "people who like science, astronomy, politics, and startups" -- but that wouldn't be the topics of the articles! The topics of the articles I like could be anything. And over time, I might add or subtract the stuff I like, even without being consciously aware of it. Heck, I'm not even sure I'm able to give you a precise list of topics I'm interested in, much less self-select against a preconceived ontology.
That's a true challenge due to how we make decisions. We, generally, don't want to feel that we're missing out on something. We want to get ALL the news. Although, in reality, we don't. By reading this site we're missing out on what's being said on many other interesting web sites, and we're okay with that. However, faced with the question: Do you want ALL the news or SOME news, we tend to choose the first.
- 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. This makes it a bit harder to get a core of power users who are practically guaranteed to be voted up. As a bonus, the scarcity probably means that people are more likely to use their votes "wisely".
I wonder if something like this has been tried for selecting the front-page stories on a social news site, and how well it would work. As far as I know everyone's following Digg's model.
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.
Thinking about what makes a vote worthwhile, there has to be some high barrier to entry (or any troll will pile in) and it must not itself be subject to groupthink (or it will result in an automated clique). In the case of Hacker News, I propose the metric: anyone who has founded or co-founded their own startup (defined as: in at the start, and has partial ownership) may vote.
i think one of the very good things in the slashdot model is the cap at 5 on votes. it lowers the number of people who go out of their way to karma whore. what's the point when all you will get is 5 points?
i've used slashdot for a long time (my user id is 5 digits). every year new sites come along.
i used digg for a year before it degenerated into the mess it is now. it went downhill fast once it expanded from a tech only site.
i used reddit for 6 months. it has gone the exact same way. as i type this it has been offline for a day.
after giving up on these i always drift back to slashdot. maybe the question is why do i leave slashdot in the first place? what is wrong with slashdot that i look for other sites?
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.
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 are. I think a time or two I asked "what does this have to do with hacking?" Now that I know the larger focus, I'll be more reticent.
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.
With weighted voting, the stories that wind up on YC news will closely reflect the desires of the editors. That's fine, but it's not a democracy. It's more like a benevolent dictatorship! (very benevolent ;)
After all, if people want the full wisdom of the crouds/mob rule thing then there's always Reddit.
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.
http://www.zeldman.com/2007/06/20/remove-maybe-from-invitati...
Then you can indicate the level of agreement/disagreement on some sort of graphical/iconic bar. Having a number of points means almost nothing except that a bunch of people clicked the arrow. With an agree/disagree/interesting system, you can even do math in the background to determine the kinds of articles that certain people tend to like, and you can really figure out their personality that way.
Then again, polarizing things into three categories isn't a very accurate way of discovering what is truly popular in a community. But I do think it's better than selecting certain people to have heavier votes.
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 step is to Agree/Disagree with the quote at hand. Once a user has voted in this way, they have an optional second step to vote for how 'Important' the quote is (important or unimportant).
I have yet to see how it will work out, but I'd love any comments you guys could provide.
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.
I think the quality not scaling is the main issue. Adding another step to the process is just going to make people less interested in contributing their opinion at all.
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 ;)
I wrote about this a while back: http://breasy.com/blog/2007/07/01/implicit-kicks-explicits-a...
Although I will admit that moderated solutions almost always come out better. See slashdot's complete lack of this problem.
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.
I share the same point of view, and that's what I'm building right now with my new startup. There has to be a balance somewhere. Too small, and you get a dead community that rarely updates. Too big and it loses focus. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.
Commitment to a community is completely independent of investment in a topic.
That being said, I think algorithms can be very effective as intelligence amplifiers, allowing us to make higher level decisions and micro manage less.
Very correct. In fact, nearly half of all the people you'll meet have a "below average" intelligence.
So here's the question: How do you do better?
Not trying to be a pain, just that it's a big question, and whoever makes progress in this area is going to be accomplishing something big, in my opinion. I have my ideas, which I'd like to try out in the market and not kick around on a board. Hope that's an okay answer. I'm not a "cool idea makes the business work" guy, but neither am I a "give away the store" guy either. I think there's going to be some proprietary magic going on when this nut gets cracked, much the same as when search was cracked there was a lot of behind-the-scenes magic that Google did.
BTW -- thanks for the vote. Karma whores unite! :)
Each IP address can only register one unique "vote" per 24 hour period. This makes the system still vulnerable to proxy servers and botnets, but it's not nearly to the point anyone would want to game it yet. (blacklists will go a long way against proxy server attacks)
anyone ever used pandora.com?
you give it an artist, it plays you a song by the artist or in the same genre, you vote the song up or down, eventually pandora learns enough about your tastes to only play songs that you enjoy
what if a social news site kept track of what kind of stories you voted up or down, did some magic to draw connections between types of stories, so the front page of the site would look different for each user... people that don't like poll stories wouldn't have poll stories on the front page, etc, etc
Not quite, unfortunately. The problem with voting, as the reddits realized from the very beginning, is that people will vote something up not just because they liked it, but because they want other people to read it. And a site full of what the majority want everyone else to read could be significantly less interesting than one full of what people like themselves.
And with polls there's not even a pretense that they reflect anyone's interest. The voting mechanism is being hacked for another use.
Only if the Bible is basically the same as porn.
Why people vote the way they do is an interesting topic, but it won't really affect how the reddits of the world deal with it. A vote is a vote.
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 way of saying "hear hear." Now apply the same rule to articles about Bush, Ron Paul, the RIAA, police abuses, etc, and you've filled up most of the frontpage of a site.
What I mean is, the data they have the opportunity to collect and use to benefit the individual would make users infinitly more loyal, and reduce the chance of them being overly liberal in their voting habits. The reason being is that they'd CARE. My argument then if I had one to begin with is that users don't care about the system because there's nothing invested in it for them. Yes..Yes..the community..I know, but whats in it for them to make them care.
I thought the linked story was pretty lame, but at the same time, I thought it was an interesting conversation. In the end, I didn't vote up the link, but I did participate pretty heavily in the comments.
I would like a way to distinguish between liking the story and thinking that other people should see it. But at the same time, I realize how complicated that would make things.
This question/dilemma actually relates directly to my YC app/idea, so I'm going to be following the comments in this thread pretty closely.
I literally have to remind myself go through the news list and comments and vote up every so often -- after I've consumed the material. It's not part of the consumption process for me at all.
There have been a lot of stories on YC that I agreed with, but I thought the linked article was poor. And what about good AskYC questions that have no-so-good conversations? Would you vote up the question because it's good, or ignore it because there's nothing of value there for anybody else?
This is kind of one of those seemingly pointless philosophical conversations that have a great deal of meaning once they turn into solid solutions.