

Ask PG: Why Have An Upvote? - asimjalis

Why have an upvote on stories? Why not just see if people click them or not? Clicked stories move up and unclicked stories move down. A click is more honest than an upvote. It's like looking at sales data instead of asking a focus group.
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dejb
Cause then popularity would just be about how good the title was, not the
actual contents of the article.

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Tawheed
I think your logic is flawed. I'll click on something that says "Whoa, Node.js
+ Sinatra + Websocks = AWESOME!" and it could be the biggest link bait ever.

UpVote is my explicit way of saying, yes, this is indeed awesome.

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JoshCole
If number of clicks compared to number of votes is correlated with the extent
to which the title is link bait than couldn't link bait be handled more
efficiently by giving moderators access to the metric?

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jacquesm
How do you quantify the 'linkbaitiness' of a title?

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JoshCole
I had remembered reading about how you could use the rating system mentioned
at [http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-
rating....](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html)
to determine what was abusive as well as what was good. So you could quantify
'linkbaitiness' if you set the pos to be the number of people who viewed an
item without voting for it, and n to the number of viewers, as long as people
are less likely to up-vote linkbait than quality. I figured that the last bit
is a big if so I just phrased it as a question.

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amock
I often click on a story and then find out that it's not particularly
interesting or relevant, so I don't upvote it. Just because a story is clicked
on doesn't make it good.

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tokenadult
_A click is more honest than an upvote. It's like looking at sales data
instead of asking a focus group._

An upvote is like my friends telling me whether or not a product was lousy
after trying it out. Following a link is only the trying-out step.

