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Ask PG: Why Have An Upvote?
Why have an upvote on stories? Why not just see if people click them or not? Clicked stories move up and unclicked stories move down. A click is more honest than an upvote. It's like looking at sales data instead of asking a focus group.
- amock 17y agoI often click on a story and then find out that it's not particularly interesting or relevant, so I don't upvote it. Just because a story is clicked on doesn't make it good.
- Tawheed 17y agoI think your logic is flawed. I'll click on something that says "Whoa, Node.js + Sinatra + Websocks = AWESOME!" and it could be the biggest link bait ever. UpVote is my explicit way of saying, yes, this is indeed awesome.
- benologist 17y agoThen combine both actions?
- Tawheed 17y agoRight, I think up-votes done by people that didn't click on the link is an interesting case to look for.
- anigbrowl 17y agoMaybe, but I'll sometimes see something on the new page that I already know what it is (because I was thinking about posting it), or that obviously adds information about some existing story.
- carbocation 17y agoSometimes the discussion is so good that I don't really care about how good or bad the article might have been anyways.
- icey 17y agoThere are often 3 or 4 items on the frontpage that I know are awesome because I read them somewhere else already. I don't need to read it again to share that - I'm certain that happens pretty regularly at every social aggregation site.
- JoshCole 17y agoIf number of clicks compared to number of votes is correlated with the extent to which the title is link bait than couldn't link bait be handled more efficiently by giving moderators access to the metric?
- jacquesm 17y agoHow do you quantify the 'linkbaitiness' of a title?
- JoshCole 17y agoI had remembered reading about how you could use the rating system mentioned at http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.... to determine what was abusive as well as what was good. So you could quantify 'linkbaitiness' if you set the pos to be the number of people who viewed an item without voting for it, and n to the number of viewers, as long as people are less likely to up-vote linkbait than quality. I figured that the last bit is a big if so I just phrased it as a question.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dejb 17y agoCause then popularity would just be about how good the title was, not the actual contents of the article.
- tokenadult 17y agoA click is more honest than an upvote. It's like looking at sales data instead of asking a focus group. An upvote is like my friends telling me whether or not a product was lousy after trying it out. Following a link is only the trying-out step.