4 ms·
I think the voting problem is a serious one. Apparently, only a minority of readers and posters vote and they seem to have a gang mentality that works like this
by Mapou 18y ago
I think the voting problem is a serious one. Apparently, only a minority of readers and posters vote and they seem to have a gang mentality that works like this: "If I don't like you, I'll vote you down regardless of what you write." This sucks the big one.
The same problem is happening on every site where voting is allowed. There is usually a loud, highly emotional and political minority with a lot of time on their hands that invariably takes over and impose a fascist dictatorship on the rest of the community. Digg, Slashdot and Wikipedia are cases in point. I wish there was a way to motivate a greater percentage of readers to take part in the voting process.
Another problem is that a lot of people receive updates via RSS news readers and I suspect that most go directly to the link and rarely check the comments or attempt to vote. YC needs a way to entice people to visit the site and incorporate the number of times a link is clicked to the formula that computes the popularity value of the story. Just one man's opinion.
- bprater 18y agoAgreed, I do my part to try and vote on stuff as much as I can, especially comments that have obviously taken time and effort to create.
- plinkplonk 18y ago"I think the voting problem is a serious one. Apparently, only a minority of readers and posters vote and they seem to have a gang mentality that works like this: "If I don't like you, I'll vote you down regardless of what you write." This sucks the big one." Maybe fade the commenter's name when a comment is posted and restore it to full visibility, say 24 (or 48 or 100) hours later? This way you are forced to focus on the content of the comment and not the commenter.
- nadim 18y agoI agree, I posted the feature request here not too long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223238 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223238
- mynameishere 18y agoAmazon has had the problem of bi-modal review distributions for a while (most reviews are either 5 or 1 stars.) They've done some ineffective things to try to change that, like specifically requesting reviews from people. But then, unless people are emotional about a product, why bother? Skinner: [Looking at political buttons at Cockamamie's] Hmm. These campaign buttons are all partisan. Don’t you have any neutral ones? "May the better man win," "Let's have a good, clean election," that sort of thing? The best solution would be to do what governments have always done: Limit the amount of votes per person.
- narag 18y ago>Limit the amount of votes per person. There are more subtle ways. Raising karma needed for downvote, better as a function of site size. Making downvotes cost you karma. Giving "objetive" scores to certain comments so voting them has an effect on voters' karma. Hiding comments score so you don't get influenced by others' votes. Delaying application of karma so you have to behave instead of probing how to game the system. One thing that I've seen that doesn't work is to use simplistic algorithms that operate automatically based on karma and agreement. That method results in groupthink and, if the site is popular enough, people gaming the system for profit. Other times it generates two confronted bands. It seems that an external human feedback is needed peridically to inform the system what's undesirable.
- adrianwaj 18y agoAlso to give modding quotas, so one only receives a fixed number of mod points that can be applied before having to wait to receive more. That would make each user have a similar impact on the board, whereby an upper limit is placed to curtail people from going on an unthinking modding binge.
- wheels 18y agoThat creates a strong bias for people with lots of time on their hands which I reckon tips the voting bias towards people not actually running a startup.