Ask YC: Yet Another Voting Scheme Idea

[lkozma]

Reddit, Digg, News.YC.

What if the number of votes would be invisible? They would still influence the ranking, just the values were not public. Otherwise it's difficult to escape the reflex of upvoting stuff that is already at +50 or downvoting stuff that is at -10, perhaps one would think more about how to vote.

Or, perhaps the number could be visible to the poster only?

[Alex3917]

What if we created a democratic republic, and voted for leaders to vote on stories for us.

[waleedka → Alex3917]

This discriminates against those who rarely post but when they do it's a gem.

[DanielBMarkham → waleedka]

!@#!@!#!

Is it just me, or is this one of those problems where when you fix one part of it another part comes undone?

[jkush]

Displaying the number of votes is a key factor in usability and feedback. It is a very effective way of providing instant gratification to voters and submitters alike. Hiding it would be a mistake.

[waleedka]

A better way is to change the algorithm to compensate for the extra votes a story gets AFTER it becomes popular. For example: votes after the story made it to the home page get half the weight.

Hiding votes removes one of the critical 'social' components of this type of web site.

[Goladus]

I'm the opposite, actually. I usually upvote something if I feel it hasn't gotten enough votes already. That is, if I think a comment is a 3 or a 4, and it only has 2 votes, I'll add another. If it has a 5, I'll leave it alone.

[cstejerean]

I like this idea.

[DanielBMarkham]

Along those lines, how about giving the votes to the poster and not the article? Then you put a picture of the poster and his total number of points next to the article. That way if I'm a great poster, I'll have a huge score. But the articles would sort based on something else.