Some ideas to improve the upvote/downvote system

Shamyase·Jun 5, 2017·2 votes·339 views

Hi there,

So this is a little post to try to improve the system of upvotes and downvotes and limit some of its abuses of use. /!\ Please note that i'm only talking about some abuses from some users,** i'm not reconsidering the system of votes itself** and its effectiveness (because I simply have no idea of a better way to make it).

Some examples of abuses :

Immediatly upvote a thread from a popular personality
Immediatly downvote a thread from a non-popular personality
Immediatly downvote a thread because of its title (it's okay for insulting titles, but when it comes to controversy subjects that are justified but would need some discussion and debate, it's kinda less okay)

Here are some ideas of improvement :

Disable the access to votes from the main page of each section. This would force the abusive users to click on the thread before being able to upvote/downvote (double effort). It could even encourage them to read the thread and possibly to modify their vote.

2)** Prevent the user from voting as long as he didn't justify its vote with a comment, or by voting for another comment.** This restriction is not really user-friendly, so it's not a "final" proposition. But it offers some guidelines for reflection :

Every thread would be a place opened to debates and discussions, not to trolls.
There couldn't be downvoted comments (simply ideas that are shared and/or debated, some more than others).
Downvotes would be reserved for the thread itself, as a result and a resume of the discussion it contains.
And for the insulting threads that call no debate or discussion : well, there's the "Report" button. :p

[Edit] Here is a thread that lists some propositions send to Riot, to give you some more guidelines : https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/community-moderation/4HHR0ibm-boards-feedback-and-what-weve-gathered

Thanks for your attention ! And hey, let a com to discuss about all this !

2 Comments

Last avatarnameJun 5, 20171 votes

ok for both points

##regarding point 1 I Fully agree that this should be a thing I think a some people just log in on the boards just to downvote post from the main page to annoy people.

##Regarding point 2 2 I disagree with this; to me this would lead to one of 2 things:

A comment saying "fuck you" with 20 upvotes on a thread with 20 downvotes.
20 comments saying "generic comment" or "fuck you" on a thread with 20 downvotes.

ShamyaseJun 5, 20171 votes

Hi and thank you for this answer !

About the second point :

I got your point. Instead of being a concentration of downvotes, a thread could also be a concentration of salty comments.

In the other hand, if a troll wants to troll in comments, he can already do that. But he doesn't, because it is far more simple to simply downvote. Now let's imagine that the second idea is applied to this forum. It could end up in two ways :

Scenario 1 Every troll chooses to make its own comment on each thread. But it's an incredible loss of time and energy, so it should discourage them a lot, and would eventually lead them to decrease their downvotes. Plus, their name account appears with their comments. So, coupled with an active moderation, it could also be a way to spot these unlikable users, and to act.

Scenario 2 The "counter" scenario, and I can't come up with a solution for this one (well, I'm too tired to think of a solution right now, it's more like that), is your first example. Trolls use a single bot that writes a generic comment saying "fuck you", this comment collects 20 upvotes and the thread collects 20 downvotes. And a single account is spotted.

A last thing to conclude : I think that if someone is determined to troll, he'll always find a way to do so, whatever is the existing system. We are simply trying to find designs that encourage discussions and make troll behaviors pointless. :)