is the ‘vote button’ robust enough?
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before we discuss the button, here are the positive and negative voting options on the 4 main social news sites: digg allows people to either ‘digg’ the story or bury it as duplicate story, spam, wrong topic, inaccurate and ok, this is lame, propeller allows users to either vote on a story or ’sink’ it (and separately report a story as broken link, duplicate, inflammatory, inaccurate, lame, and spam) reddit allows upvoting or downvoting, and stumbleupon gives you the option to vote either ‘i like it!’ or ‘no more like this’ on a given story.
as you can see, the options for burying content are quite robust and allow the algorithms behind these sites to accurately determine how much people dislike the story and want it gone, but the options for promoting content aren’t as developed. for example, the question i ask myself whenever i’m voting for stories on social news sites and come across something truly outrageous is: yes, i want the story to receive more attention so the issue can be resolved, but do i really like what is happening? of course not. while in practice it’s not really a problem, in spirit i don’t want to be ‘digging’ or ‘i like it’ a story about child rape.
in fact, i think that when we vote on stories, we should have just as many options to ‘vote as…’ as we do when we bury something. here are some of the classifiers that i would like to see:
- general vote.
- vote as funny.
- vote as interesting.
- vote as important (timely/time-sensitive).
- vote as outrageous.
just as different ways of burying something carry different weights (for example, something that is buried as spam will be removed from the queue where as something can be promoted, marked as inaccurate but still stay on the front page) different ways of voting on something should also carry different weights. something that has the most amount of votes as important (breaking news, heath ledger’s death) should probably be promoted faster than something that has lots of votes as funny (pictures of a cats).
furthermore, we can actually display a tag next to the story so that once it is promoted to the front page, visitors can decide wether they want to read a story or not based solely on the tag (funny, important, outrageous, etc.). the one site that does a somewhat decent job at that is fark.
what do you think of this idea and what kind of ‘vote as…’ or ‘promoted as…’ tags would you like to see?
Technorati Tags: social media, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, fark, vote, bury
April 16th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I agree with the general thrust of your argument, and think that makes more sense than a 1-10 vote based system which I’ve heard some people suggest.
What about a vote to change topics? so many votes to change a topic an article is under, it changes.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
If we had more voting options, Digg (or other social sites) could then promote timely stories on a different algo as well, returning to the days when Digg broke the news rather than having a breaking or developing story have to wait a day before hitting the front page.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
i absolutely agree. digg has the oddest combination of simplicity and complexity. the positive voting is too simple and the algorithm is too complex. look at reddit for example, a story that gets on reddit in an hour can take 18 hours or more to get on digg.
April 16th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
i think the “time-sensitive” button for digg would be great for digg. like @Skitzzo said it would be like the old days of digg where it use to break news when it happened. i’m not sure about the other options… they just don’t sit with me well.
April 17th, 2008 at 1:01 am
I like this idea, but I think it depends on whether it’s an opt-in thing, or a requirement. One of the appeals about hitting a Digg This button is that it’s quick. The more steps you have to go through to digg something, the more likely you are to skip digging it altogether.
Mixx is attempting to do the breaking news thing better, but I’ve been a less-than-impressed with how it’s turned out so far. Since they’ve launched it, I’ve probably only seen about 3 or 4 stories in the breaking news section. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’m based in Australia, so I’m in a different time zone, but so far it doesn’t seem robust enough to be truly valuable.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Voting is a great start, naturally I think the more options there are for users the better.
Where to go after voting is a good topic to discuss, like you say Mu, you can add more “reasons” for why you voted for the article. But yea you never want to force a community to do more, but additional options are always good.
I remember running into a website that had a biased meter, its an interesting start, but thats almost asking for abuse. When new features are implemented gaming and abuse have to be considered.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:30 am
Excellent idea to improve voting process. In that case the likelihood of burying the article will decrease significantly
April 19th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Unless you are a power users (and most people are not), simpler is better.
Having options you could access might be a good idea, but the default should always be something close to yes/no.