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I think one of the problems is that a vote is either up or down; there's nothing in between. A vote that means "this is a really good article" is the same as a

I think one of the problems is that a vote is either up or down; there's nothing in between. A vote that means "this is a really good article" is the same as a vote that means "I laughed" or "this article is so awful its funny" or "this was mildly interesting." But having a scale where you can vote up an article by different amounts is pointless too, since it leads most people to voting either the max or the min score in order to have the most impact possible on the overall score. One idea would be to have different types of upvotes (much like the moderation on Slashdot) that correspond to different things the reader liked about it; this information could be used to organize and sort the submissions, in addition to rating them up or down.

huhtenberg 18y ago
The way I see it, an upvote for an article simply means "notable". On a related subject - it'd be nice if the system would look for the similarities in voting patterns between the users and use this information to intelligently boost the score (or the position) of new articles on per-user basis. The idea is rather obvious and it has been floating around social news sites for a while now. Digg even got around to implementing some form of it, and reportedly it is working quite well.
noonespecial 18y ago
The little arrows to me mean Up: Thanks for adding that. I appreciated it. Down: I wish this weren't here. It doesn't add anything at all and just clutters the discussion. If none of those two options presents, I don't touch it. I really like the touch that as things are modded down, they fade (and sometimes really do vanish!)