

The Perfect Social Voting System - Judson
http://judstephenson.com/2010/05/13/the-perfect-social-voting-system/

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tansey
You're essentially treating each article as if it's an asset. Users are
allowed to go long or short on the article, depending on their prediction
about its final karma value.

Are people then allowed to exit their positions? Can I place a stop loss? Can
I upvote this article, but when it gets 5 down votes decide that I should exit
it and go short?

If I can't exit my position, then what is the incentive for me to ever be the
first person to vote on an article?

I think it's intuitively obvious to everyone that an article with 20 up votes
will not start getting down voted all of a sudden. If I were to guess, I'd say
that after 5 or so up votes, you're 90% or more to see a higher close; after
20, it's probably more than 99%. However, at 0 votes, you're probably close to
50/50 (again, just guessing based on experience).

If you can't exit, then your risk of ruin is way too high to make initial
voting worth it. If you can exit, then it becomes easy to game the system by
switching sides quickly.

Also, what about the ability of people to submit really crappy articles on a
dummy account and then down vote them on a main account in order to build
karma?

~~~
Judson
I did toy around with weighted entrance rewards, but it makes the model more
complicated.

After thinking about reversals a bit more, it would make sense to allow users
to "exit" their vote. Bringing the total vote count (positive or negative)
closer to zero and allowing more unbiased voting to continue (as people exit
their votes, the percentages fall back to 50/50).

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codeslinger
You might be interested to know that this method has been employed by
Cloudmark for many years in their collaborative spam filtering network:
<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1105677>

However, it works so well for them because the consensus on what is "ham" and
what is "spam" is nearly universal enough that it can be relied upon to be
agreed with by the majority of agents (people) the vast majority of the time.
For news links, this will unlikely be the case unless you are actively
attempting to create a news site where only a very few have power over what is
shown and what is not.

Also, the Cloudmark technique chooses very few people to reward and this is on
purpose. They are sparing with the reputation points and quick to downgrade on
controversy in order to prevent a high-reputation individual gaming the
system. Your news reputation system would likely have to incorporate a similar
technique in order to be similarly robust. However, in doing so, I would
imagine that most people would not see their reputation ever rise and would
likely stop using the system. (due to lack of the "incentives" of which you
speak) Cloudmark gets around this because people are already marking emails as
spam or not in their email clients already, so there's no marginal cost
associated with training Cloudmark's network or building their own reputation.

Its an interesting direction you propose, but I believe you'd be exposing your
user base to scale-free network effects in which only a small few would gain
sufficient reputation to "move the needle" and the rest would wallow in
relative obscurity. This would then essentially replicate the Slashdot of 2000
AD but with the marketing message saying that it was "fairer" because of all
the "incentives" people have.

You might want to think of how to structure a social news site as a kind of
online auction, choosing a structure in which truth-telling is a dominant
strategy, instead, such as
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%93...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey%E2%80%93Clarke%E2%80%93Groves_auction)

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chrischen
It doesn't matter if few people vote, so long as enough votes are registered
to rank the comments/articles.

The only thing I can see happening is incentivizing karma whores like me to
support popular viewpoints even if I disagree (I don't downvote, but I don't
have to upvote). Again, I don't think participation is a problem as long as
there is a consistent group of active participants.

Also I don't vote for a warm fuzzy feeling of making the site better. If
someone says something I think is right, then I upvote to show my support and
hope his viewpoint is propagated enough so that further misunderstandings on
the issue is avoided. This way I will decrease the likelihood of some ignorant
person making his/her way back to me and forcing me to waste time re-espousing
said viewpoint. My motivation for contributing is purely in self-interest.

~~~
Judson
That is a valid point, but I would counter that, while a small group of active
participants does allow "the process" to work, more people would express their
opinion if voting was incentivized.

Also, the "warm fuzzies" was a simple metaphor for upping the incentives for
voting, as "warm fuzzies" could be considered themselves a net marginal gain.
If your going to play the karma game (up and down voting) why not reward the
users in the same nominal terms used to describe the content they voted on.

~~~
chrischen
My commenting, and most peoples' commenting I would assume, is done to get a
weight off their chest, not for karma. Unless we can redeem karma for cash,
even karma itself has little incentive to be gained by users. I'm not sure how
voting making more people vote would make more people comment in this way.

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davidkpham
Interesting and very insightful points you make in your blog entry. However, I
think there is one invalid assumption your social voting is based on - the
fact that the first and last user will vote.

In the point in time at which they vote, the first and last user experience a
hope for a future incentive - but no actual incentive. Why should the first
user vote on a comment about some piece of content?

This dilemma makes this system the same as the current, pre-dominant social
voting system - it provides no initial incentive for someone to create
activity, only the hope for a future incentive.

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jaekwon
There's no need to have absolute karma points or additional incentives.

We just need an intelligent collaborative filter that weighs articles relative
to you. That will give users an incentive to vote as they wish (rather than
vote for what one thinks _others_ think good).

Pandora News anyone?

~~~
Judson
The point is to give users a reason to vote on stories other than for "that
warm feeling of communal good".

If you aren't convicted about the destination of an article, then you won't
vote. Karma makes HN game-like.

Its about making content that other people like, not content that a few people
have filtered for.

~~~
jaekwon
This system would only promote the common denominator. For example, divisive
(but good) articles would get less voting attention because people would be
afraid of voting the wrong way. No?

~~~
Judson
Since we don't know exactly how people would react to given incentive/risk
profiles that would undoubtable differ story to story we can assume two
scenarios:

\- Stories that have perceived "deadlocks" would be considered volatile. They
have a great chance of "breaking out" with large support, so they would be
voted on early by supporters to reap the reward.

\- Divisive stories/comments would scare away any voters and eventually only
stories that were beneficial to the entire community would be voted on. So in
this scenario, this system helps to define the community.

edit: Also, the problem that you describe isn't isolated to my system. In the
current HN system, people don't comment on stories because they fear that
their comment will be "divisive" and attract negative votes. My system
encourages voting, which would reward someone for voting on a "-3" comment
(that makes it back to 0 or 1) that is beneficial to the conversation.

~~~
jaekwon
Pretty interesting. I'd like to see it in practice.

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cmars232
Speculative market based on interest, relevance and attention is an
interesting idea. Does it need to be tied to a social news website?

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DanielBMarkham
Articles and comments that are upvoted provide more marginal utility? Or are
they simply more pleasing to the reader?

If I tell you that your business model sucks and that you should try selling
shoes, you (and others) may be immensely displeased. But then you may try
selling shoes and make a fortune.

Nope. Marginal utility and immediate gratification (or ability to predict what
a crowd likes) is not the same thing.

~~~
Judson
Sorry Daniel, but this is in no way what I was talking about. I am not saying
that marginal utility = what the crowd likes. Neither did I say that HN isn't
"working". Only that providing a more quantifiable reward for correctly voting
on comments could prove beneficial.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
My fault for misunderstanding.

So perhaps people could bet parts of the karma that they have already
accumulated that the story would get more votes than the running average?

