

The curse of the upvote - unalone
http://unalone.net/2008/08/the-curse-of-the-upvote/

======
Herring
This problem has already been solved in various forms.

Social features may not be worth it if you want the best content. The guy who
made delicious purposely didn't include "community" features like ratings or
comments. <http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/schachter.txt>

Or from the recent dark knight/godfather episode on IMDB..

 _"...in these types of situations their cognition or cooperation failed
because the members of the crowd were too conscious of the opinions of others
and began to emulate each other and conform rather than think differently."_
\- <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10000650-26.html>

Even Dawkins weighed in on this back in 1997 -
[http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-
archive/D...](http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-
archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1997-11-16trialbyjury.shtml)

I think what we need is an adsense for content.

~~~
unalone
That's what I like about del.icio.us. There are some things is DOESN'T do, but
that's because it doesn't have to. It tackles one problem with a few social
aspects, and it handles it perfectly.

AdSense for content? What do you mean by that?

~~~
Herring
It's just been kicking around in my head. Serving targetted 'ads' that link to
interesting websites might work considering the numbers of people who go to
digg/reddit etc. Arranging it chronologically as everyone does is horrible.
I'm sure I've missed a lot on HN because I wasn't here.

But there's a branding problem & I don't see anyone spending months on
something that google/stumble/delicious can duplicate with a small script.

------
mattmaroon
"Voting, for now, is here to stay."

Translation: voting is temporarily permanent. Nice writing.

~~~
j2d2
I always usually write things like that.

Yeah, no.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
"Are you sure it probably won't be a robot I know?"

"Definitely probably not."

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davidw
This has been discussed a lot, but one element you left out is that the
"wisdom of the crowds" doesn't work as well if you can see how people already
voted (although you hint at it with a comment about a few downvotes being
followed by many more). It creates a 'cascade' rather than genuinely
independent assessments.

~~~
unalone
The solution I came up with was just hiding the number of votes either way.
Bump up good things and lower bad things, but otherwise keep it normal. It's
not a perfect solution, but at least it stops the groupthink and leaves us
with the dilution problem.

~~~
tdoggette
thesixtyone.com, a social music site, has a clever way of dealing with this:
You can "bump" a song, but it costs you "points," which you see a return on if
the song becomes popular. It turns upward momentum into a currency instead of
something tossed around in large amounts.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
But that only exacerbates the problem. People will start to vote for what they
think others will like instead of what they personally like.

~~~
abcde
But that's how the stock market works. :) Trying to do better than that is
futile.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
The stock market wouldn't work either if users of the products companies make
would act like investors. Just imagine what they would buy :-)

------
zzzmarcus
I think think the upvote concept has merit but I agree, it's flawed by votes
for popular stories just because they're popular.

In order to avoid the groupthink problem a simple solution might be to hide
the number of votes an article has received until you've voted either up or
down/neutral. Obviously without a visible vote count you could still tell an
article was doing well by its position on the site, but without the number of
votes visible, there would be less of a tendency to vote something up just
because everybody else is doing it.

------
geuis
Good summary of the voting problem and how the masses are dumber than small
groups. Ironically, I upvoted it.

~~~
mhb
It's ironic if you really are smarter than the masses. But that's what the
masses think about themselves: [http://bps-research-
digest.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-we-think...](http://bps-research-
digest.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-we-think-were-better-than-rest-its.html)

~~~
radu_floricica
It's a bit more nuanced than that. One of the social sites I briefly used
counted clicks more then upvotes. Predictably, being a 30ysh year old male, I
usualy clicked on links promising pictures of (more or less necked) women. In
less then two weeks most of my personalized content was either porn or
lolcats.

The moral of the story: while I do enjoy the ocasional porn and lolcat, it's
definitely not what I want from the net (also why I didn't use the site for
more then 2 weeks). It's just that it was much easier for their algorithm to
categorize those things then the much more abstract "interesting", or even the
somewhat less abstract "programming".

edit: It's not that social sites are doomed. It's just they're damn harder to
get right then just digg, and they're still in infancy.

~~~
unalone
Yeah. I have high hopes for social sites. But it's why I prefer sites trying
new models (like what Facebook was like before it went overboard) rather than
sites that try to be "like Digg but for X."

------
DarkShikari
The solution to this, I think, lies in niche sites--this is why over the next
few years small sites for specific audiences will become more and more
important. Instead of one Youtube, we'll have dozens of video sites catering
to specific niches. The same thing goes for news aggregators. As people learn
to distrust the wisdom of the crowds, the Long Tail will become even more
important as the thousands of smaller sites become more important than the few
large ones.

------
cbetz
Does the author think we are so boring as a community that all we ever want to
read are purely factual and though-provoking articles that we must sit down
for a half hour and read? Don't get me wrong, I love these kinds of articles,
but hackers in general are not 100% serious people who want to _seriously_
discuss hacking 100% of the time. Cartoons _can_ be relevant and they might
actually make me laugh too.

------
DanielBMarkham
I love a good voting discussion. It's the most broken system (along with it's
cousin, recommendation engines) on the web today.

Two comments:

1) What if, instead of quantitative information, we gather qualitative
information? Slashdot doesn't ask you to vote up, it asks you to categorize
the material. I like this much better.

2) Wouldn't it be fun to create an elitist site constructed solely around
debating/discussing hot issues? You'd have to channel the ability of the
audience to respond emotionally, but I bet you could come up with something
like "Pop Wars" and it'd be a hoot. You could have ranking (special titles),
virtual goods (rewards, do-dads, etc), and better yet, the system would drive
to the top the most emotionally engaging and reasoned discussion of the hour.
Something to pull you in and make you think (and participate). Not just a
yes/no hot/cold POS. More like a battle where the audience categorizes the
arguments, not approves or dissaproves of the contents of them. Email me if
you'd like to discuss further.

