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Comment by reidman | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

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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.

I'm not sure if I agree with the idea that importance is completely independent of agreement. It seems to me that agreement is one of the many variables that play into what's important (along with timeliness, 'interestingness,' widespread appeal, and tons of other things).

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.

I'm also very interested to see how something like that would play out. I'm kinda skeptical of any solution that adds complexity to what the user sees though. I'm guessing the more you ask on their part, less people will make proper use of it and click on all the required things appropriately. Then again perhaps thats what you want, only the serious users doing the clicking... We need experiments...

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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