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Let's talk about Voting

Hyrum Graff·8/7/2014, 2:02:23 PM·14 votes·1,597 views

http://www.dstaylor.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/downvote.png

A upvote/downvote can mean...

  1. I (dis)agree with a post.
  • This comes from GD, where the only time downvotes play a role in visibility is if they lock the thread.
  1. I (don't) think a post deserves visibility.
  • This comes from reddit, where, well, votes determine visibility.
  • On GD, a bump is used to give a post visibility.
  • Is there anything else a vote can mean, that I’ve forgotten?

#What exactly do votes mean? What should they mean?

I hope you'll jump in, because we, as a community, we need to decide.

If you don't feel like reading my ideas, or you want to jump in before you see them, stop here. (tl;dr at end)

#Let's take a step back, and think about the purpose of the platform.

#Boards is Riot games' community platform (forum).

It has two purposes:

  1. Promote discussion between Riot and the community.
  1. Promote discussion amongst the community itself.

It needs to do three (related) things:

  1. Surface content that's relevant to Rioters.
  1. Surface content that's relevant to players.
  2. Hide content that isn't relevant to anybody.

We know why people might vote (see top of post). Therefore, we know what votes are useful for:

  1. Votes can be an indication of community sentiment towards a post.
  • If people vote based on their feelings towards a post.
  1. Votes can be used for sorting content.
  • If people vote based on whether they think the post deserves visibility.

I believe votes should be an indication of community sentiment: #People should vote based on whether they agree with a post.

Why?

Some people are going to vote based on whether they agree or not. Even if that’s not what we, as a community, decide to do. If the system assumes people won't vote with their feelings, it will be abused.

An indicator of community sentiment is still useful for sorting. It just doesn’t exactly mean [upvotes -> visibility; downvotes -> hidden].

  • If a post receives many upvotes and few downvotes, it is probably relevant to Riot & Community.
  • If a post receives many downvotes, and no upvotes, it is probably not relevant.
  • If a post receives many votes, it is probably relevant, whether there are more or fewer downvotes than upvotes.
  • A post with 200 up / 250 down may be more relevant to me than one with 50 up / 0 down.

There’s something to notice here: upvotes are the best indicator of what’s relevant to me.

This suggests we should remove downvotes entirely. However, downvotes also show community sentiment. When I look at a post with 200 upvotes, it looks really popular, even if it also would have had 1000 downvotes. That post is probably still relevant to me, but Riot and I both should be able to see the community’s sentiment towards it.

One problem: This system has no way to deal with low-effort posting. The kind that, doesn’t deserve to be deleted, it just doesn’t deserve much visibility (looking at you, QQ threads). We, as a community, need that. Therefore, I present, “flagging posts for low effort.”

https://i.imgur.com/ZsMNPBm.png

On hover-over, the flag turns red. Fancy!

https://i.imgur.com/FrwiNES.png

On click, the flag stays red. Optional, but IMO a bad idea: “number of flags” counter:

https://i.imgur.com/u2iB8n3.png

When you flag a post,

  • The post’s visibility is reduced
  • Any comments you make on the post do not contribute to its visbility.
    • If you want to who want to let OP know he’s not being constructive and suggest ways for him to start being constructive, but don’t want to bump the thread, this is awesome (so are current downvotes, in this respect).

There’s a side benefit of having a separate ‘flag’ function: those who repeatedly flag posts that deserve attention can have their flags be worth less, reducing trolls’ ability to kill threads.

We could also implement features like, "You can only flag one thread per 5 minutes," to prevent mass flagging.

As another added benefit, voting from the home page can stay enabled, but in order to flag you must enter the thread.

For more info, read my comment here.

tl;dr, Downvotes shouldn't count towards thread visibility. Instead, add a separate 'flag' feature for that.

#To be clear: New Downvote + Flag = Current Downvote

#Back to you, community. Thoughts?

Cheers, Hyrum Graff

P.S. If this discussion interests you, there's another similar one here.

######edited to be shorter, clearer, and prettier.

28 Comments

Daen8/7/2014, 4:37:33 PM2 votes

I'm going to start a new branch for this, but votes on posts within a thread should probably be discussed as well.

There is definitely temptation to downvote someone else's reply to bring one's own higher or upvote a reply to one's post in order to boost one's post in the Discussion View order. Thoughts?

This might not be a problem with a higher volume of users, but it's probably still worth discussing.

12tales8/7/2014, 2:30:52 PM2 votes

I personally think the idea of basing visibility on votes is ridiculous, so I use chronological display and vote to express agreement/disagreement whenever I don't have the time to write out a full response.

I have no particular objections to your suggestion.

Linna Excel8/7/2014, 3:54:03 PM1 votes

I voted other. IMO if you vote on a post either up or down, say why you did.

MajorPain98/7/2014, 4:04:30 PM1 votes

I honestly don't think you have much of a community to make a sound judgement on how votes are going to influence a post. There isn't enough people posting here to determine how a large influx of posters will manipulate the voting system. While its an interesting discussion to have, I feel like its falling on deaf ears.

CommandShockwave8/7/2014, 8:34:28 PM1 votes

I'm all for voting based on whether or not visibility is deserved. Even if you don't, others may want to see that content.

Angry Monster8/8/2014, 4:07:35 AM1 votes

So their is alot of good posts in this thread. I do not have the time right now to read them all, but the back and forth is good to see.

I personally feel that their is another reason to down vote that should be considered. Low quality threads should be down voted. An example is the WOE is me threads, some call them dear diary threads.

I am tired of getting trolled/flame all the time. I am muting everyone and just locking my character.

We all have seen this type of thread. It is not about talking, figuring things out, or making things better. Its to complain and say I am mad so their.

Their are other types of low quality threads but I feel this type we can mostly agree on.

Thoughts?

Daen8/7/2014, 2:16:05 PM1 votes

A downvote doesn't necessarily lower visibility. There was a thread on the top half of the front page of Hot in Boards Feedback for about a week that had a vote score of -10, significantly lower than everything around it. To my knowledge, a large volume of votes in both directions as well as a large volume of comments ensures that a thread stays visible.

Riot seems to be handling the visibility system pretty intelligently, though I have definitely noticed problems with the first downvote & early discouragement of threads. I guess I might be a bit of a purist, but personally I feel like just tweaking the variables should be enough to resolve visibility issues we as a community might have.

As for the flag function, I think it definitely has potential to be useful. However, it also has a couple of issues. Here are a few:

  • Scenario: flag a post because I disagree and want to lower visibility
  • How will a system that lowers their value over time be handled?
  • Scenario: flag a post because I want to be able to comment on it without giving the OP visibility just to spite them
  • How will flags be calculated & what will their effect be to players other than the user that flags a post?
  • Significant overlap with the report function
  • A limitation on mass flagging could feel like a restriction to users that want to use the feature effectively.
Pryotra8/12/2014, 6:40:58 AM1 votes

So basically a "Sage" button?

Hmm..... I think limiting this with cooldowns is a bad idea, and also that it also has too much power with this iteration. Maybe if it were toned down ALOT, to the point were a single person or small group of people spamming it would have little impact, there might be potential. But as it stands the downvote is simply too easy to use to have the current weight it has attached to it, and if the flag does what I think it does, it has too much power to be spammed, and simply isn't effective at self moderation of the community.

Why? Simply put, if it needs a timer or limiter, chances are it's not healthy for a forum. Reason being, this means that after a certain point the forum can no longer moderate itself. Give this board even 1/10 of GD and this idea will crumple alongside the current system. Now you see why this cannot work. The hope is that one day this board will be naturally popular enough that GD can be evicted, without the fear that the response will be an angry mob outside Riot HQ. This means that the board must be useable with less people, but also can naturally scale with population without becoming unwieldy or, well, GD.

I hope that all makes sense, because I am going to give you some food for thought. Let the solution be elegant in it's simplicity, without being ineffective or broken. Reducing the voting weight below the activity per poster ratio (essentially make average posts per poster > up votes over down votes in terms of weight when determining visibility) is the solution I see, but I wonder what you would come up with. I could see a scenario where a "sage" button could fulfill this, but if you have to give it direct manipulation of visibility with a single/couple mouse clicks, I don't think that it's a good idea. Like wise, a system that is too hard or too unwieldy to use in terms of self moderation, thinking cooldowns here, is essentially useless, unless the effort made is overpowered to the point of it being abusable and broken.

Think about the Homer Simpson raid, if you were around GD for that. If not, imagine 1 person spamming both threads and comments with embedded images that were disturbing and large. Your solution not only has to minimize the damage of this, it also has to be ineffective at single handedly stifling a thread that is of good conversation material even though it is not popular with the sheeple. And it needs to be able to work at both the current Boards pace, and at GD's pace.

Now I hope you are starting to grasp the problems that these Boards are faced with tackling. It is by no means easy, but that isn't why Riot chose this path. They chose it because it was a better option to start from scratch than attempt to repair vbulletin and GD's community. Time to start thinking with portals!

mi ramfan8/7/2014, 2:58:44 PM1 votes

The purpose of votes has always been to flag quality content, even if you disagree with it.

People voting based on whether or not they agree with the post is what creates the "echo chamber" effect that is what many GDers despise about Reddit and the Boards beta.

If we as a community can't use the downvote the way it was meant to be used, then it should be removed from the platform. This has always been and will continue to be my stance until I see evidence that the community can be trusted with the power to silence other posters.