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Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

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. 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.

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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. 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.

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.

Are you crazy? You can just set a -1 funny modifier (I set -2, Slashdot's meme humor rampant and unbearable). If you do that, and browse sorted by highest score, Slashdot has by far the best comments anywhere on the net, aside from certain niche newsgroups.

I see Slashdot in a darker light. To me it illustrates two principles. First, that there is a level of "firehose" beyond which quality-maximizing editors don't scale. Second, that an abstract judgment (up/down) is less abused than a list of judgments, all of which are necessarily trite. Handing the right to judge out by lotto only broadens the standard deviation of voters - if anything, it worsens the groupthink. "Power users" have more invested in a vote.

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 don't think it is a lotto as to who gets to vote. those who participate in moderation and those who make comments that are voted up get to 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?

I'd like to see something like this tried instead of the yes/no button -- pick something with a little more meaning. Then at least the system has more information to present.

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!!

What I liked about Slashdot was that you could redefine +1 Funny as -1 Funny.

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