

Make users read before they vote - crasshopper
http://blog.hiremebecauseimsmart.com/post/2167716518/read-before-you-vote

======
gdl
"Somebody should have stopped me before I voted on something I knew nothing
about."

Yes: yourself. Is that really so hard?

I'd like to think that we can manage at least that much responsibility on our
own without it being forced on us through technical restraints.

~~~
zck
But people won't stop themselves. From a user's point of view: yes, you should
stop yourself, but that takes effort to remember to read the article first.
From pg's point of view (as this argument goes): no matter how many times you
ask, people will still vote without reading the article, so if you don't want
people to do so, the website needs to prevent them from doing so.

Your argument could be made for many features, like "please don't downvote
comments before you have 500 karma", or "rather than protect against SQL
injection, I'll ask the users not to do so".

Besides, this could be a way to detect accounts that are votebots -- why would
they click on the article unless they know that you're tracking it?

A downside to this change would be that sometimes I'll read an article
somewhere else _first_ , and then see it here. I don't always re-open it
before voting; I don't think this behavior is bad.

~~~
CUViper
You can protect against SQL injection, but you can't _make_ anyone read the
article. The best you could do is make them click the link first.

Just like you can't make anyone read a EULA before clicking "I agree". You can
force them to scroll through it, but then you sometimes end up with the
comical scroll-all-the-way-down button as well. (Can't remember where I've
seen that, but it's more than once.)

~~~
crasshopper
I agree. But I think the extra level of annoyance is enough of a "sin
warning". If I _really_ want to vote something up w/o reading, I'll sin.

But the annoyance of having 25 new tabs would dissuade me enough of the time
to make the tweak worthwhile.

As for spammers -- you have to take a separate approach with them. What I'm
targeting are not the malicious but the _careless_ rulebreakers.

(I didn't go into this level of detail in the article because I thought it
would come up in comments.)

------
jasonjei
I use voting as a way to mark a story to be read later, so I'm guilty of
upvoting before reading. I don't think there should be a mechanism to require
a click-through, but I think a way to save a story to a "to be read" later
queue would be nice.

Otherwise, upvoting is the quick way that I mark an article with an
interesting headline for reading. Most articles with a well-written headline
do deserve the upvote.

Although I wish there was a way to revoke an upvote if the headline
misrepresented the article... maybe I don't have enough karma to revoke an
upvote?

~~~
ABrandt
I started upvoting to book mark things as well when I discovered the "Saved
Stories" section of my profile. Instapaper is a better solution to this
though--<http://www.instapaper.com/>

~~~
Nick_C
How does one save a story? I don't see a "Save" link in the menu bar and it's
not mentioned in the guidelines or faq.

------
wccrawford
I'm glad I didn't upvote before I read that.

------
Vekz
I voted for this before reading.

------
Detrus
I'm voting for the discussion here.

Mechanisms are worth a try. Votes from people who haven't clicked the article
should be weighted differently. Also worth trying is a timer after you click
the article. If the user skims the article in 20 seconds, that vote should
weigh less than a vote after several minutes.

Then see if weighing votes differently increases the quality of top stories.

~~~
zacharycohn
The article linked above took me about 20 seconds to read...

I like the idea of a timer, but there's no way you can set a timer that will
equate well to all the links submitted.

~~~
Detrus
Yes and tweets have the same problem. A thorough fix would scrape the article
and measure the length.

~~~
crasshopper
> tweets have the same problem

Can you explain what you mean?

~~~
Detrus
Sometimes tweets show up as top stories on HN. A tweet takes a few seconds to
read and vote on. So the timer idea would not allow tweet stories to get to
the top unless the timer knew the story was a tweet.

But most stories are not tweets and not short, so should take over a minute to
read.

------
anigbrowl
What would be more useful IMHO would be a way to flag spam on the New page
without needing to hit the 'discuss' link first. Most spam is glaringly
obvious, but discuss-flag-back/close is a 3 step operation. I don't think this
will be a problem for actual content except for the occasional big news events
where everyone races to post 20 links to the same story.

------
dmitri1981
What is the font used for the headline? Reminds of the Vertigo poster font.

~~~
crasshopper
Yup, it's Vertigo rendered via SiFR, in one of the standard tumblr styles.

Scroll to the bottom of the blog for credits.

PS I'm rubbish at CSS so the sidebar may not render correctly for you.

------
DanielBMarkham
I've banged my head against this User Generated Content ranking problem
several times, and I keep getting back to there being some kind of trade: the
user does something, then the site allows them to vote.

That "something" can be clicking through to the article, categorizing or
tagging the article, or even betting or spending karma for the privilege to
vote.

But site developers know that if they make the user do "something", then they
will lose users. To which I ask: is it worth having a user who is going to
knee-jerk vote?

I don't think so, but heck if I know anything about growing a huge site like
HN.

~~~
crasshopper
HN is piggybacking on YCombinator fame for its success.

I don't believe HN would lose users if it required you to click through before
voting.

Also -- how come you can't take back an upvote?

