Not exactly social media as one would typically define it, but I like Techdirt’s system. Insightful, Funny, or Report (for Troll/Spam), at least as a framework.
More sites should use more granular voting systems so that people can indicate why they like/dislike content. A downvote for “I disagree with this person’s opinion” shouldn’t count the same as “This is a spam account.” And “This content is factually correct information provided by an expert in the field” shouldn’t count the same as “hur hur, he said ‘boobies’.”
I feel like a more granular voting system would be specially good here in the Lemmy/Kbin/etc. “Fediverse forums”: it would counter the fluff principle, make voting brigades more noticeable, open room for users to personalise their feeds in a transparent way, and perhaps even allow communities to get more distinct identities.
(I do have an idea of a system that I believe that would work really well here. It’s basically “reverse Slashdot” - one type of upvote, 5 types of downvote. I can go further on that if anyone wants, but keep in mind that it’s just “ideas guy” tier.)
Why not just go to a collection of votes with configurable values of +1, 0, and -1? They all have global values that default to something sane and each user can define custom values both globally and per community.
I might set “Funny” to +1 except in /WorldNews, where it’s a -1. I might appreciate controversial posts so I might set “Flamebait” to a global 0 so it doesn’t affect a post’s rating. And so on.
(Wait, that’s basically just extended Slashdot. Eh, I like Slashdot’s system.)
(Wait, that’s basically just extended Slashdot. Eh, I like Slashdot’s system.)
Yup! And so is my idea, really. The key differences between my idea and Slashdot’s implementation are as follows.
Everyone gets to cast a vote, a la Reddit. I don’t think that that Venetian Republic style “random mod powers” system does any good.
There’s only a single upvote, but multiple types of downvote. For the following reasons:
- good content often scores well on multiple categories, but shitty content usually has a jarring flaw.
- interface-wise, the upvote could demand a simple click, while the downvote would require two (“downvote”, then select type of downvote). That would weakly discourage downvotes (as they take “more effort”), without discouraging upvotes.
- people don’t usually get pissed because they don’t know why they’re being upvoted. They do it because they don’t know why they’re being downvoted.
The downvote categories that I’m thinking about are “dislike”, “rude”, “unfunny”, “misleading/assumptive”, “non-contributive”.
Then its usage for sorting goes a lot like in your idea; you’d have the “default” scoring for the community, but users can override it for themselves with a personal one. So for example if you’re like me and don’t care too much about rudeness, you set up the weight of “rude” downvotes to 0.5 or something like this; this means that two “rude” downvotes cancel out a single upvote. And if you got a hate boner against “ackshyually”, you set up the “non-contributive” ones to -2.
Trying to remember what each community considers a downvote sounds exhausting
No, you get to set that. The defaults are global. But you can override that (both globally and per community) only for you. If you never like jokes except in joke communities you can set “Funny” to -1 globally and to +1 in Ten Forward. But that doesn’t affect how it works for me.
This would, of course, man that posts are sorted completely differently for us. A really funny post might be extremely highly upvoted for me but in the deep negatives for you.
It would also mean that a global karma counter doesn’t exist.
That sounds even more chaotic tbh
Heh. Boobies.
Slashdot had an interesting variation on voting. People would be randomly assigned mod points to give to posts they like. It didn’t happen every day but when it did you spent those points and then it was other people’s turn the next day. Then they had a similar meta-moderation system on top of that so that misused points or trolling could get corrected. I’ve not seen it’s like since.
You could also vote things as funny or insightful and other tags. And you could then of course filter based on those labels.
Randomocracy(or Sortition) is considered one of the better forms of limited democracy, and it worked well for SD that I remember in 97-99. Much harder to brigade, if at all.
Newgrounds still has YouTube’s old five star system.
I know plenty that call it something else but it still is basically a binary up/down system. Some may also drop the down part and only have the up (such as likes on Facebook).
I recall a few things way back in the day that had a 5 point scale system, like a star rating, though. However, those arguably suck worse than the binary up/down system.
I recall a few things way back in the day that had a 5 point scale system, like a star rating, though. However, those arguably suck worse than the binary up/down system.
Which is pretty much why YouTube replaced it with like and dislike. They found the overwhelming majority of people voted 1 or 5 anyway, and for algorithmic purposes it’s not that useful. What do you do with a 3? Is it too bad to promote? Is it good but production quality is bleh? Much easier to look at giving you videos people with a similar profile as yours likes.
You also want people to vote quickly, the more options the more cognitive load and the less people interact with the voting system. Is it a 4, or should I give it 5 to help the creator? Is a 3 too harsh? Nevermind, next video.
And we’re not even in the confusion of, well, is the video a 5 star production quality, but I’m not interested in the topic at all?
When you sort a Youtube creator page by views I feel like you can kind of get a feel for what the star system would have been. 5 stars would be something that appeals to a large general audience and is well made, 3 or 4 would be something that is pretty on par or has been done before, and 1 or 2 would be something that’s lower quality or not of interest. I feel like the amount of views usually match pretty good but it doesn’t scale with old content all the time.
It is a bit annoying having a binary system in my opinion because I feel like I am more reserved with what I vote on. A lot of content I watch is to kill time. It’s not fantastic or bad. I guess that would be 3 stars I suppose.
The only thing that comes to mind is the “kudos” system on some forums. But it’s not really a vote system, more so a way to indicate helpful people.
Is that kind of what sites like AskUbuntu use?
A while back, I launched a site that used a stock trading mechanism to rank posted links and content. It was kind of a speculation market. There was a flurry of activity as a community embraced the game aspect of it, even though no actual money was involved. However, I learned that it’s difficult to manage such a system when many clever people are trying to game it. Eventually pulled the plug as I didn’t make enough time to properly grow it. Still think the concept has merit.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of adding an emotional aspect to votes — e.g. using one from a specific set of emojis to convey one’s sentiment towards the content.
This would most likely need to exist alongside the classic up/down vote system.
So, Facebook.
I did draw my inspiration from that feature. I think it’s a much more human way to interract with content via conveying emotions.
Feels like no matter what the system is, no matter how simple (single upvote) or complicated it is (lvx’s different votes and weights-per-community-per-user idea from elsewhere ITT - cool but not terribly practical-seeming), people are just gonna faceroll it at best, spam/abuse it as a general rule.
Possibly, maybe a tiny amount of people will even use it as intended.
Even Reddit’s system (quality/irrelevant) works in theory but nobody actually uses it that way, so it’s agree/disagree-or-just-fuck-you instead. You will not be able to educate users on the simplest shit ever (“upvote for quality”), let alone if there’s e.g. six different votes with different nuances. Even if you did make sure everyone knew the intended way, you would not defeat the general “fuck that lol, I do what I want” attitude. Even if you did that, it would only last until some guy sees something he disagrees with, and that’s a trillion times per second on the internet.
But with that in mind:
- Youtube used to have stars,
- plenty of systems just have the upvote,
- Steam has the supposedly useful “Useful/Funny/whatever” stuff
- Facebook does limited emojis in addition to upvote.
- some sites have tags apply to content (tags are love, tags are life) and each tag is then upvoted or downvoted for its relevance to that content
Instagram just uses likes. So that’s kind of an upvote only system
Dev.to has upvotes, bookmark, and fire. They used to have more, and you can vote all three.
Medium had a system where you can do 1 to 50 upvotes per article.
Not certain if this fits the criteria.
And I don’t know if it’s really good or not.
On PieFed the value of a vote depends on which instance it came from.
Curious, how does that work? What makes one instance more valuable that another?
It’s up to the PieFed instance admin to decide that, it’s not hard-coded.
My use of it is to reduce the value of votes from instances that have disabled downvotes. My reasoning is they’re only giving me half the “quality signal” that normal up+down voting does so their up votes are less reliable. In practice this has almost no effect as the user base of those instances is tiny and they cast very few votes.
Instances with a niche political ideology might find it helpful to de-emphasise the views of other more mainstream instances. I have not bothered.
It’s an interesting experiment but one that I haven’t found as much use for as I thought I might.
