
Slashdot | How to Stop Digg-cheating, Forever - brett
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/30/1415239.shtml
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whacked_new
There is an inherent problem with how current voting systems are designed.
First of all, democracy isn't the best filter of quality. It is a filter of
popularity. A gamed news article, gamed by actual people, is in fact, by vote,
popular. And if you were paid to vote, you would still have a memory trace of
what you voted for so it makes sense to count it as a click-through anyway.

If people go to news sites like digg looking for "popular" articles, they are
mistaken. The popularity meter is supposed to be a filter for quality.
Problems arise when people focus too much on the popularity measure itself,
rather than the content. This reminds of high school class counsel (or
whatever it is) elections... in connection I wouldn't rule out the possibility
that digg has gained popularity among the younger user market because of this
instant feedback of popularity, which seems to be the mode of highschoolers
(in contrast, pg said digg was actively promoted to this audience
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17979> ). Anyhow, chicken and egg;
back to voting.

There are several ways to attack the current voting system from different
disciplines. You can cite some psychology studies that immediately show how
the system falls short of accomodating the will of the user. Some "big
brother" study a couple months ago was conducted by placing a plate of candies
on a table and allowing people to take as many as they wanted. When a poster
of a "big brother" was present, people were more self conscious and took less
candy. How does this relate? When people take candy, they don't think, "I want
candy" or "I don't want candy." They think, "yummy, take!" or "very yummy,
take lots!" or "yummy but big bro is watching, take, but less!"

Now pretend you have a recipe-oriented digg, where good recipes get a yummy
vote. See the problem? A recipe is not yummy or not yummy. Sure, there are
arguments for the current method. Simplification is one. Another is the
ability to make stats of ratings between 0 and 1 and apply, say, bayesian
learning. But think of what you end up with. 90% users liked this article. 56%
probability this article is popular. Article is 13% good. That's it. 13%
good?? What's that? Take a camera for example. After vote, P(good) = 0.96. If
I am Mr. Mediocre, fine. But if I am Professor Pro, how do I know which is
better, consumer camera A with P(good) = 0.96, or prosumer camera B with
P(good) = 0.8?

What's the solution? I haven't seen something very effective as an example.
But ideally a voting system will combine the digg style and the old fashioned
5-star rating, having the efficiency of digg but the informativeness of the
star rating. I don't really understand why this idea doesn't seem popular... I
can only reason that the concept of "voting," modeled after the actual voting
system for political candidates, is so deeply ingrained into the minds of the
developers; otherwise, the people making voting systems these days are all
copying the existing ones.

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mojuba
Can be done by showing, say, 3-4 randomly chosen new articles on the top and
then below some separator line may come the hot ones, as usual. It is very
likely that even those who never vote would pay some attention to those fresh
random items on the top of the frontpage, check them out and eventually vote.
In fact, the "new" page is no longer relevant in this case.

Regardless, the original idea is brilliant.

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brett
An interesting idea but it comes at a pretty high cost. Digg and reddit work
well because of the simple design; they are essentially lists of links. This
allows the user to go down the list, read what they want and casually vote on
links on their own terms. What he describes is a lot like StumbleUpon; the
voting results are not as good because it's more involved to browse through
sites.

~~~
amichail
It can be implemented behind the scenes by counting certain votes but not
others.

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reitzensteinm
I think a far better tweak for Digg would be to hide the 'who voted for this
item', making it impossible to verify that you got what you paid for when you
use a Digg cheating site. It might not be as effective, but there would be few
(if any) downsides.

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walesmd
Not counting votes from direct hits is ridiculous. There goes every user who
uses RSS, widgets, or the dozen visualizations from digg themselves - all of
which link directly to the story article.

digg already throttles people's votes - in a nondirect way. Yes, your vote
counts as much as mine, but if a group of users attempting to game the system
are voting on that story - then that story requires more votes to get to the
front of the page.

The throttling is implemented at the story level based on the users voting for
that story and the pattern in which they are voting.

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timg
99.9999% of the views of reddit and similar are people wanting to see what the
hottest current news is. Are you really going to hide it from them?

If not, then are you going to make some votes not count as much as others?
Users will hate this.

Another problem is not counting votes from people who go directly to the
page!?! Sorry but that is completely asinine. Those blog "digg it"-like
widgets are the best form of marketing that these news sites have. If the
votes are worthless then the bloggers will ditch you fast.

