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Two Simple Ideas For Upvote/Downvote Mechanics

CupcakeTrap·8/7/2014, 11:17:52 PM·3 votes·4,893 views

Upvotes and downvotes do not need to have the same weight.

Perhaps out of pure mathematical simplicity, Reddit makes upvotes worth +1 point and downvotes worth -1 point. It is not obvious to me why it necessarily has to be like this. I propose that downvotes should have less weight than upvotes. Here are three reasons why.

  1. Abusive downvotes are a bigger problem than undeserved upvotes. There seems to be a consensus that we have a problem with unpopular opinions getting buried due to spurious "I disagree with your opinion!" downvotes, or simply mean-spirited "I'm not interested in lore/eSports/artwork/Twisted Treeline, so you shouldn't be either!" downvotes. In contrast, there aren't as many obvious abuse cases for upvoting.
  2. Upvotes promote discussion, downvotes stifle it. Upvotes and downvotes are inherently different, in that upvotes increase visibility and invite further discussion, while downvotes kill discussion. A stupid upvoted post might trigger discussion that will help turn community opinion against such repetitious preaching-to-the-choir posts, while a thought-provoking but unpopular downvoted thread will never be processed.
  3. Really awful posts are currently overkilled, so it's safe to reduce downvote weight. One important function of downvoting is to get rid of obvious trash posts ("get 4000 RP free just click here"). If we removed downvotes altogether, these might start to rise up and muddle the forum. But these posts get downvoted so heavily that, even at (say) quarter-strength, the tide of downvotes will suffice to quickly bury them.

Votes can work differently at different phases of a thread's life.

The system could be set up so that voting works differently at the very start of a thread's life, such as for the first hour or the first ten votes. I propose that downvotes are temporarily ignored during the first part of a thread's life. Here are two reasons why.

  1. The first test of a thread should be "does anyone care?" It should be easier to be promoted to "hmm, this warrants a glance by a larger set of people" than it is to rocket to the top and become a Big Thread. To make a slightly absurd comparison, it takes less than a majority of Justices for the Supreme Court to agree to hear a case. Many parliamentary systems work similarly: it's much easier to get a bill put forward for general consideration than to adopt it.
  2. The Reddit vote-weighting mechanism doesn't cut it here. Reddit does change how votes are counted over time, by making the first 10 votes as impactful as the next 100 votes, which are as impactful as the next 1000 votes, and so on. However, this doesn't really address the major problem of good posts being insta-killed by a few non-representative, mean-spirited jerks stalking through the New section: it just makes their votes stronger.

12 Comments

Pendragon8/8/2014, 4:49:20 PM4 votes

Thanks for the well thought-out post. I think one thing to consider here is that what matters most is the desired outcome - not necessarily the philosophical viewpoint on what the functionality represents.

Ultimately what we're looking to do is make it so the content that every player sees is relevant. We build instrumentation around what it means for content to be relevant like views, read-throughs, votes, comments, etc and each of those things is increasingly an indication that content is relevant.

Then we have to look at what influences those things. Maybe it's what other people like (upvotes) or didn't like (downvotes), maybe it's content from people I respect (pros, content creators, Riot, etc), maybe it's because it's from a board that I'm more interested in (Esports, Concepts, etc), maybe it's because the content is really long, or really short, or maybe I prefer really deep discussions, and so on. Lots of things can influence whether or not you like something - much more than just up and down votes.

Then over time you break it out a few ways -- first you have to make really strong defaults. The average player won't log in, won't opt in/out of certain board content, and won't participate by voting or commenting - so you have to have a reasonable generic view.

Then once that's strong - you can start to create slightly more sophisticated, but still generalized views with things like board subscriptions - ways for large groups to exist that will share some sorts of preferences.

Then over a long enough time you can individualize - so that your feed is uniquely you. We may never get to this point but it's certainly where it can go.

Of course you also have the people who don't want to trust the system - so you still leave all of the controls in place for people who want to chart their own content course.

Hyrum Graff8/8/2014, 12:21:56 AM3 votes

Another reason in favor of making upvotes be worth than downvotes is this

  1. Post gets downvoted early, is never seen again.
  2. Post gets upvoted early, is seen by more people, who realize it's bad content, and downvote it again.
exec38/9/2014, 12:56:50 AM3 votes

I wish they'd show the number of upvotes and downvotes instead of just the sum of the total. You could have 100 downvotes and 50 upvotes but you'd only see 50 downvotes thinking no one liked your post. It often just feels mean spirited when you mean well when you write a post and it gets downvoted to hell and back for whatever reason without knowing that some people actually did like your post.

I'd also be curious what would happen if the forums were only an upvote system with a different button for getting rid of "free 4000RP" posts or alternatively not displaying a negative number of downvotes (stopping at 0 even though internally the number might be -20), this will still show a general indifference/disagreement with the post without coming off as mean spirited (proof of downvote system stifling conversation, I almost didn't write these other ideas because of how unpopular they'll probably be resulting in downvote hell).

Daen8/7/2014, 11:31:51 PM1 votes

Abusive downvotes are a bigger problem than undeserved upvotes.

Are they? The example you give is "If I'm not interested in this, no one is interested in this", but that can very easily be flipped into "if I'm interested in this, everyone is interested in this".

Upvotes promote discussion, downvotes stifle it.

I do actually agree with you on this. However, there is a very important flip side as well. It is possible for comments to become so inflated that other comments cannot compete for visibility and thus become stifled.

I propose that downvotes are temporarily ignored during the first part of a thread's life.

While I understand the premise, this would completely undermine the community's ability to self-regulate for however long downvotes are ignored. It would be impossible to get rid of troll posts or even really feel like you are able to show a dissenting opinion during that time period, which to me is a very significant downside.

Ideally, downvotes should be calculated in conjunction with upvotes and comments. It should be very possible for a thread to be negatively received by the community but still visible, as long as it promotes discussion.