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PSA: You should vote more

Pendragon·8/28/2014, 6:49:25 PM·71 votes·21,378 views

Summoners,

Here on the team that's working on the boards - we really believe that the best way to create a healthy dynamic community is to enable to community at large - and ultimately the individual - to control their own destiny. One of the tools that we've implemented to facilitate that is voting. Voting is incredibly important for a number of reasons and you should do more of it.

  1. Voting controls how content is sorted in "Best" and "Hot" views. While it's not the only factor in placement - it's a significant contributor. When you vote on something you're validating, (or invalidating), the quality of the content and subsequent discussion - and hopefully increasing the quality of the experience for those who come after you.

  2. Voting tells us what you care about. The goal of the boards is to provide you with the most relevant content. The more rich and robust information we have about voting patterns, the better we're going to be able to tune the sorting systems.

**How you should vote: ** My view - Vote with your heart. Ultimately knowing the impact of a vote - means when you cast that vote you're making a claim about whether content is worth seeing or a discussion is worth having. You should not vote based simply on whether you agree or disagree with a point that's made.

Questions to you: Do you view voting the same way? What are some things that you think we can do to encourage more voting

78 Comments

Teenbus8/28/2014, 6:54:38 PM7 votes

I'm not quite sure how to word this, but there's a psychological difference between viewing a post that starts at 1 and remains at 1 and viewing a post that starts at 0 and remains at 0. This may be intentional, but I think that starting at 0 and not allowing users to vote on their own comment makes voting feel more merit-based. This is the tiniest thing because, logically, there's no difference, but it might make people feel better about the board system.

Old Man Teeto8/28/2014, 11:21:14 PM7 votes

I ended up downvoting this post.

I expected this to have something to do with politic's and voting for your representatives, thus taking a responsibility in the outcome of government.

Instead it was about forum post voting, so I took your advice and voted with my heart.

EMOFRATPARTY8/28/2014, 7:03:37 PM6 votes

I don't know if it's encouraging more voting as opposed to encouraging more quality voting.

How you should vote: My view - Vote with your heart. Ultimately knowing the impact of a vote - means when you cast that vote you're making a claim about whether content is worth seeing or a discussion is worth having. You should not vote based simply on whether you agree or disagree with a point that's made.

Couldn't agree more, my friend! However, it's very easy for people to instinctively react...especially to something they might disagree with.

So my question to you is: How do we encourage more votes that are based on the quality of a post and not someone's opinion of that post?

Infero8/28/2014, 7:13:24 PM5 votes

So if you're aiming at a positive environment, let's brainstorm methods to positively reinforce voting....cause reinforcing a behavior should by definition increase the frequency of future occurrence for the targeted behavior.

My quick thoughts:

  1. A small dialog box "Thanks for voting! You're vote represents the importance of this discussion."
  2. People like Red Comments in their threads (untested assumption), so some sort of notification that "A rioter has commented on a thread you voted on"
  3. If a discussion becomes very active maybe a notification: "A thread you voted/participated in has reached 50 comments." Perhaps some incremental notifications. This not only reinforces voting but commenting as well.

Just my quick behavior analyst 2 cents.

Daen8/28/2014, 8:24:39 PM5 votes

So as far as voting is concerned, there is a significant thing I'd like to address. Let's use this thread as an example.

This thread has a poll in it that essentially asks "do you think this content is worth your time?". The poll has (as of me writing this) 152 responses, 148 of which are positive. Let's now take a look at the vote totals, clearly this should reflect the poll...oh. The thread has 30 upvotes, as compared to the 148 positive responses to the poll.

Why do people prefer to vote on a poll rather than use the built-in functionality for voting on content? This is a multifaceted question of course, but I think it comes down to a few pretty important things:

  • Voting on someone else's content can make your own content less visible
  • Votes are very powerful
  • Voting is ambiguous

Voting on Someone Else's Content Can Make Your Own Content Less Visible

If I post a topic about something and someone else also posts about the same topic, the incentive is either to not vote on the other person's content or to downvote it, regardless of the fact I agree. Obviously morality helps to put a damper on this, but the fact remains that voting on others' content can lower visibility of your own.

Votes are VERY Powerful

With the current size of the community, a single vote can completely change the visibility of a given post or comment. If my opinion can completely hide a post or start it snowballing, it makes me very hesitant to vote.

Voting is Ambiguous

If I see two responses in a thread, both of which I like and both of which are +5:

  1. Hilarious remark
  2. Insightful response

This becomes a conflict of interest. I want the insightful response to have more visibility than the hilarious remark, but I still enjoyed both responses. How do I effectively convey both my opinion and my desire for content that I enjoy to rise?

Trylobyte8/29/2014, 1:00:43 AM4 votes

The way I see it, there are two types of people who vote on posts.

  1. People who believe a discussion is good, well-written, and worth having, even if they don't agree with it.
  2. People who upvote posts they agree with or posters they like, and downvote posts they don't agree with or people they dislike.

There should ideally be some way to mitigate the effects of #2, since I'm pretty sure they're more numerous than #1. I also believe that votes gain power through herd mentality - The more upvotes it has the more likely people are to upvote it, and the more downvotes it has the more likely people downvote it. These two principles combine to form the 'circlejerks' are a big part of what makes General Discussion so difficult to navigate these days. How could we prevent that from happening here?

Lumus Avatar8/28/2014, 7:44:14 PM4 votes

What does it say about a thread or people in general when toxic commenters are having their insulting posts upvoted while those same toxic people downvote all the people who would contribute meaningfully to a discussion? I've been noticing this behavior a lot lately and it's made several threads feel very unfriendly and I am avoiding more threads because of the presence of these insulting people. What suggestions might you have to combat these occurrence which can severely hamper open discussions?

wRvwVveWhZ8/28/2014, 6:55:11 PM4 votes

People will always get butthurt about anything so I appreciate your post and encouraging but it simple won't change anything (sorry for being too harsh but I still love you)

Jingerbeardman8/29/2014, 2:05:41 AM3 votes

I have a hard time putting much stock in the voting of posts... It is great when that informative post makes its way to the top, but all to often the funny quips drown those out. Sure I enjoy the funny quips but they don't really do much when it comes to the discussion. I want a way to separate the funny posts from the serious ones and the current upvote/downvote system does not provide that.

Linna Excel8/28/2014, 7:27:36 PM3 votes

Do you view voting the same way? What are some things that you think we can do to encourage more voting

I'm pretty meh about voting. I'll up vote and down vote things sometimes, but not everything I reply to. I'd probably remove the down vote feature, but that's just me.

mi ramfan8/29/2014, 2:29:29 PM3 votes

The problem isn't the number of downvotes vs upvotes, it's the timing.

The first five or so people who view your thread decide its fate. If any of them choose to downvote it, your thread is going away to the depths of page 5 or 6. It doesn't matter if person number 6 might have gotten something out of your thread and supported it if person #5 already made sure that 6+ can't find the thread unless they're specifically looking for it.

I guess I'm fine with "vote counts are hidden for the first hour of a thread/comment's life" so long as they also don't have any weighting effect for the first hour of a thread's life.

I Eat Thyroids8/31/2014, 6:38:50 AM2 votes

So like, I noticed there seems to be a problem in that people both want to raise visibility of issues they care about (and lower stupid issues, like troll posts) while also wanting to show their opinion in a simple manner (I agree or disagree with this idea). They want to do both of these things without conflating them together. So maybe there should be a system that incorporates 3 or 4 types of vote? Like, maybe there should be a vote for "care about and agree", another for "care about but don't agree" and a last for "this post is worthless and everyone should ignore it". You could even add a fourth "I care about this but also don't have an opinion either way". It's a bit more complicated, but it also gives less ambiguity. Another point is that there should be an easy way to "join" threads. Like if me and some other person are actually talking about the same thing, maybe we should be able to somehow combine those posts (at the agreement of both parties, probably with something like a "merge request" button) and thus combine their visibility while also reducing "clutter" on the boards. Unrelated to any of this: red posts tend to accumulate on a single thread, and when I go through the red tracker I'll have like a ten comments on some thread I don't care about (@Lyte please tell me why I was banned again, or something like that) blocking out anything interesting from rioters. You guys should have the red tracker report which threads recently had a rioter show up in them without "repeats" for every time a rioter wants to say something in that thread. Either that or at least don't include the stupid threads of people trying to explain why they called someone a @#$& in game and get their chat restriction removed.

PhailRaptor8/28/2014, 11:03:26 PM2 votes

Something that might make a difference here is tying "votes received" to a player's "vote power" and the various factors that determine how quickly discussion falls down the list.

Toe expand on that, if you are posting things that are consistently voted down, over time your own votes will be worth less compared to the "standard" value. This could potentially continue to the point where your posts more easily drift downward when you reach overwhelmingly minute voting power. Conversely, if you are being voted up a lot by others, over time your votes become worth more, and your posts are more resistant to drifting down.

This will ultimately ensure that the people the community has deemed worthy of being heard (quality posters, people who's views have been deemed significant) can be assured that their content will be seen, while those who are deemed to be sub-standard (mindless shitposters, people prone to raging, pointless trolls, etc) will not take up prime real estate both on the Board in question, and in the discussions themselves.

DerPunkt8/29/2014, 2:59:58 PM2 votes

I don't realy like the idea of content being evaluated by others for me.

I often read the prejudice that the german community is not voting on the quality of a post but rather on wether they agree to what it says or not. This leads to a problematic envirement where critical comments are not being taken seriously or new Ideas are bound to be crushed right after they were posted due to the fact that they adresses a topic which was already adressed eventhough they posted some new concepts to deal with the topic. I am afraid this is not just a german problem, as many people claim, but this is a problem world wide.

What is a high quality comment? Is it a well written text, free of any typos other mistakes? Is it a great written rethorical comment with rathe less actual content compared to it length? Is it sometext with a great idea but poorly wirtten so it gets hard to read and/or understand? Is it all of the above?

I have a problem to decide wether content is of high quality or not. I am involved in the localization board of the german boards and very much interessted in the Player Behaviour system, alot of content I'd claim to be of low quality supplies a player who is not as much well informed on those topics with major insights. Normaly I would not Vote for stuff like that at all. But no you want me to decide to either upvote such discussions which do not provide me with insights but the rest of the community, or to downvote them because overall they are just a bunch of descriptive posts of other discussions which already evolved further - so not state of the art anymore.

So what is a high quality post? Who do I decide? Where is it my private opinion on a certain topic, where is it an objective decision wether or not the post is a win for the community? I can only decide subjective and by that I might vote down stuff which others would see as good content.