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The Boards Voting System: Why it doesn't work, and how to fix it. (long, no TL;DR)

EvanThomas·6/17/2017, 5:31:46 AM·6 votes·515 views

#INTRODUCTION Hi, I'm Evan. I frequent these boards a lot and enjoy spending my time in Memes and Games, as well as browse Gameplay. I was inspired to write this thread by this other thread which was created pretty recently. The Voting System seems to be a topic that pops up pretty frequently here on boards, usually by the posts complaining about Gameplay, although a few threads have been been dedicated specifically to this topic. Here are my thoughts on where the Voting system works and does not work, and my ideas on how to fix it.

In order to best tackle this issue, I think we need to answer a few questions.

#Question number 1: How do most people use the Upvote/Downvote system? #Answer: Boards Members use the Upvote/Downvote system to show whether or not they like and/or agree with a thread. I theorize that this is because of many major websites using a very similar voting system: the Like and Dislike system. While this may suit their respective website's purposes, it does not fit Boards' purposes. However, Upvotes and Downvotes seem very similar to Likes and Dislikes, which is why people utilize the current Upvote/Downvote system this way.

#Q2: What is the best use (aka the purpose) of the Upvote/Downvote system? #A: The purpose of the Upvote/Downvote system is to make good posts visible, and make bad posts disappear. As I said before, the Upvote/Downvote system is very similar to the Like/Dislike system found on other sites. However, the Like/Dislike system is a bit more niche than the Upvote/Downvote system. The reason for this is because the purpose of the Like/Dislike system is to bring popular posts to visibility. However, this does not fit Boards' purposes, as popular posts are not always good posts (source: Gameplay).

#Q3: What are "good posts"? #A: It depends... ...on the sub-board, mainly. A "good post" doesn't always have the same qualities as another "good post." However, a good post can do a lot of things: It can evoke/provoke discussion, make you laugh, make you think, make you say WOW, inspire creativity, inspire your sense of justice, help you enjoy what is right, help you fix what is wrong, etc. I guess, in a sense, a good post pushes for its readers/viewers to be better people. That may be a topic to delve into another time, but you get the idea. To be a bit more specific, though, each sub-board has its own purposes that a good post should try to fulfill:

  • Gameplay: Evoking/provoking discussion on how to play better, evolving the meta, addressing state-of-the-game issues, and appreciating recent positive changes.
  • Memes and Games: Making people laugh, and inspiring creativity and fellowship.
  • Story, Art, and Sound: Appreciating and discussing lore, art, music, and other aesthetics from Riot (including champions and items), inside and outside of League of Legends.
  • Player Behavior: Pushing others to be better, pushing yourself to be better, resolving punishments (whether deserved or undeserved).
  • Concepts and Creations: Same as Story, Art, and Sound, except by fans. Makes me wonder if the two sub-boards should be combined.
  • Boards Feedback: How to make the Boards a better place. Take my post as an example, I guess? :^)

I don't think it's likely that we can re-train people on how to use the Upvote/Downvote system to better reflect these values, so let's just count the Upvote/Downvote system as equal to Like/Dislike system.

#Q4: Out of all of these boards, which ones does the Like/Dislike system fit? #A: None of them. The Like/Dislike system does not fit any of these sub-boards wholly. I will go through each of them:

  • Memes and Games: This seems like it would be an obvious fit for the Like/Dislike system, right? Unfortunately, it is not. Yes, the memes aspect does like the Like/Dislike system, and works well with it. However, the GAMES portion does not. The games that people come up with on Memes and Games are meant to provoke/evoke audience participation. Upvotes/Downvotes are not a good measure of how well the game is going. The best measure of audience participation is counting the comments. Here are a few examples from my own experience of making audience participation posts: "Name the stupid ways you have used your Store Refund Tokens and why" (3 points) and "Your mains' Passives are now three times as powerful. How OP are they?" (48 points) Note: despite the good number of upvotes I got for this post, I got a large number of replies before my post even reached a score of 5. I believe this demonstrates that the Like/Dislike system doesn't work for Memes and Games. These posts were both good, but they didn't reach popularity as well as the memes and jokes people post. On to the next one.
  • Gameplay: This sub-board is notorious for the upvote-farming posts. It's quite obvious that the Like/Dislike system doesn't work. Why? Because the popular posts are the posts that many people agree with, not the posts that provoke/evoke discussion. There have been good posts brought to the top on occasion, but I don't think anyone will tell you that the majority of the top posts there are good posts.
  • Story, Art, and Sound, and Concepts and Creations: This sub-board is split between the posts that go for the WOW factor, and the ones that want discussion. The Like/Dislike system favors the WOW factor, but not always the discussion posts, similar to the issue in Memes and Games.
  • Player Behavior and Boards Feedback: In a nutshell, these two sub-boards should favor discussion-oriented posts over Likes and Dislikes, or Agree and Disagree. These boards don't have as many popular posts as Gameplay, so even though they share the same problem, it's not as prevalent as in Gameplay.

So to recap:

  • Gameplay, Player Behavior, and Boards Feedback should be favoring posts that evoke/provoke discussion. I will refer to this as the Discussion Group.
  • M&G, SAS, and C&C should favor Liked posts equally to Discussion posts. I will refer to this as the Reaction Group (although it has elements of discussion as well).

#Q5: How do we show better posts from each sub-board? #A: Take comments into account when calculating the score. . #Q5.5: Wait, score is still important on the Discussion Group Sub-boards? #A: Yes, very! Obviously, there will need to be a score behind the scenes when calculating which posts should be featured in the "Hot" and "Best" sections of each sub-board. Raw score will determine the ranking of a post under "Best", and Score ÷ Time will determine the ranking of a post under "Hot" (or something along those lines). I have no idea what "Recent" is for, since we already have a "New" section. I'm just going to ignore it. But not only is a score important behind the scenes, it's also important that the score is visible to the readers/viewers. I know from frequenting these boards that seeing a score helps me gauge how good a post is in comparison to the other posts that made it to Hot today. Post with 100 votes at the top? Sounds about normal. Post with 300 votes at the top? It's a must-read. There is also the case that high-scoring posts will move down the Hot ladder over time, but I will want to read those posts if I haven't been on boards in a couple of days. Therefore, a VISUAL score is very important to have on every post.

#Back to Q5 There are a few ways we could take comments into account when calculating a post's score. Let's take the Discussion Group of sub-boards first, as comments are the only thing we should take into account.

Ideas of how to find the score of a post in the Discussion Group:

  1. Count the number of comments.
  2. Count the number of comments that directly reply to the post.
  3. Take the highest score out of all the comments in that post, whether replying directly to the post or replying to another comment.
  4. Take the highest score out of the comments that directly reply to the post.
  5. Take the sum of the scores of all the comments that directly reply to the post.

For the Reaction Group, we take any of those methods, but add the upvotes/downvote score the post gets to the score as well. For example: method number 1, add the number of comments to the upvote/downvote score. Easy peasy.

So this is where you come in. I have a poll that asks if you agree with any of the methods I've provided. HOWEVER Before you vote, I would highly suggest reading the other comments on this post to get other people's opinions on this. You may be convinced to change your mind. After all, you can't change your poll vote. If you get here and there are little to no comments, I would suggest waiting until there are more to vote for the same reason.

Thank you for reading! Please comment as well with your thoughts, or if I should make any changes to this post.

[slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

16 Comments

SnakDatSmilesBak6/17/2017, 5:59:14 AM3 votes

If you add the scores of the direct comments there's a very obvious problem. Let me give you an example to show you the problem.

A troll makes a shitpost. Someone comes along and sees it and makes a comment contrary to the post and shows how the post is a shitpost. The comment gets 20 upvotes. Now this shitpost is as visible as any other post with direct comments totalling 20 upvotes.

The voting system is partly meant to allow users to quickly determine the quality of a post. By disregarding the post itself to focus on the comments inside you dismantle that purpose of the voting system. By tallying the score of the comments inside it doesn't even say much about the discussion that's going on.

Your idea to tally the comments inside is a better idea but it still doesn't say much about the quality of the post itself. It's better because a large number of comments is indicative of lively discussion, while a large score on just a few comments doesn't mean much in the way of discussion. However, the issue remains that the post itself isn't judged but rather the discussion inside is.

We already have a way to see how the discussion is going by checking the number of comments. What we need is a more appropriate voting system that alows posts to become visible based on the discussion they spark, while retaining the ability to judge a post itself.

Also it's obvious you put thought and effort into this post. Aside from commending you for that - nice post - I brought that up because under your suggestions there's no way for me to say "nice post," other than commenting that.

Just some things to think about going forward.

SnakDatSmilesBak6/17/2017, 5:40:27 AM2 votes

Remove the option to sort by "best". Force chronological sorting for all topics. The topics that are most talked about are now the ones that are the most visible. Is this the goal?

I had an idea the other day to hide votes until the votes hit a threshold #. This lets the post rise or fall on the merit of the discussion it sparks rather than on the momentum of some early votes. Since the purpose of these boards is to discuss and not to vote I think this is a fitting solution.

Also, your post in particular caught my eye because the title is eerily similar to the title of my own post from yesterday. It's on a very similar topic as well, with a suggestion at the end for the issue you've brought to attention. https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/community-moderation/4MjqulXV-on-the-boards-hive-mind-and-voting-long-af-w-no-tldr-only-literate-ppl-should-click-this-poll

NiamhNyx6/17/2017, 5:35:17 AM2 votes

I will TL:DR if i want to >.> dont test me.

Sir Fuzzi6/17/2017, 11:34:46 PM1 votes

I prefer conventional forums because you get the progression of things and you can analyze any parts of the conversation (if, for instance, you're after one small tidbit along the way). I also like le Leddit Updoots, Socially Void Edition because it means that the top replies are usually the most relevant.

The system is good when it's good and bad when it's bad. I'd rather Riot stopped changing the flowers and plants of their game and started addressing their consistency issues, the fact that they do have ugly champions that aren't just anime tiddy (pray for my amigos to get skins before League closes down forever Cassiopeia Viktor ) and the notion that a lot of old champions are not designed from an intelligent standpoint (LB W dawg, why is it even still in the game).

They keep doing this Client stuff and releasing somewhat-different versions of skins female champs already have while they leave uggo sideliners with generic 975s and under; meanwhile their reworks get brushed up so much that Galio's got a 520 with more bells and whistles than most any skin valued 1350 or under.

Riot is clashing old with new everywhere. They need to stop pretending their game has to be pretty for all the casuals, and they gotta start doing their homework.

Forget the voting system. At least it's in and it functions. Let's just... not distract them from what's actually going on and what does need address, what could actually help players out.

SecondChanceHero6/17/2017, 10:01:02 AM1 votes

Lots of good ideas here so far folks, keep brainstorming, the detail is important and there's very good framework here for something that could work.

SecondChanceHero6/17/2017, 10:22:16 AM1 votes

Hmm.

I had to vote other OP.

I think I'd prefer a weighted system that takes into account the total number of Comments, the total number of DR to the OP, the total number of views, the highest voted DR, the highest voted non DR comment, and the OP vote total, as well as the number of unique posters posting.

I feel like these would be all the categories one would want to track for these purposes, and finding and appropriate weight to each would affect visibility properly and intuitively. I'll throw out some weights just to have some numbers, but take anything from me specific numbers wise here with a big ole grain of salt.

An upvote for the OP gets 1 Vis point. A downvote gets -1 Vis point.

Same goes for all votes tallied for other purposes.

Each comment is worth 1.5 Vis point. Each view is worth .5 Vis point.

Each DR is worth 2 Vis points as it spurs potentially new discussion and will thus ****be weighted most heavily.

Each unique poster is 1 Vis point.

Now we add all these factors together (there are 7, comments or "C", direct replies or "DR", views or "V", highest voted comment or "C+", highest voted direct reply or "DR+", op vote total or "OP+", and unique posters or "UP") and divide by the number of factors to average the factor score. The remaining Visibility Point total is how a thread is rated for visibility. This will help take into account how much discussion a topic is generating firstly while also allowing people to use the upvotes and downvotes in a more intuitive fashion without harming a subboard. Or so I think.

GULAG 4 U6/17/2017, 1:07:00 PM1 votes

Finally someone realizes this. Reddit's voting system doesn't work, and for the forums, this is literally the worst idea ever. Voting systems like reddit's always ends up with massive circlejerks (cough hearthstone cancerjerk).