Idea for Fixing Reddit Voting

reddit

I am getting increasingly annoyed with Reddit. Not so much the service, but the voting system.

One of the best, and most frustrating, aspects of Reddit is the fact you can see how many up and down votes a submission has received.

This is a great feature and a surprisingly uncommon one amongst these kinds of social bookmarking services.

Unfortunately great stories get down voted and you have no idea of why. OK, at least on Reddit you can see that you have been down voted, on some competing services you are just left wondering what went on with zero clues.

Now on Mixx you can see not only the votes, but who voted. That is a good start.

The Flaw in Thumb Downs

What would be even better, would be to see who voted, and if they voted, WHY. In theory the comments should tell you, but they don’t. If you actually got some feedback you could improve your next submission, making the whole service much better.

Ideal would be to get actual justifications for down voting, but a compromise would have to be made in the form of check boxes or some sort of list. My concern with that is I don’t think many of the down votes are justified, and giving someone the ability to randomly pick a reason would keep the whole thing going down the same path.

Not All Votes Are Made Equal

A solution to THAT would be to penalize anyone who repeatedly abused the voting system. If they are marking “spam spam spam” perhaps they would have to justify one in five spam submissions, or perhaps they would get flagged as habitual down-voter and their votes count for less.

I’m sure a lot of down votes are simply because the voter has a competing story they want to promote.

Split “Taste-Bias” Votes from “Quality” Votes

At the very least, some distinction needs to be made between “I just don’t like this, it is not to my taste” and “This is factually or morally wrong”. It makes me sick how many times people down vote because they don’t like blogs. Some down votes are because people don’t like commercial and for-profit sites. These same people happily watch cable television stuffed with ads but don’t think web publishers should be allowed to make money from their creativity. You see it in the comments all the time. There are people who actually believe blog = spam, hello?

How would you fix Reddit voting?

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Web 2.0

Comments

2 Responses to “Idea for Fixing Reddit Voting”

  1. Apollo on October 1st, 2008 8:21 pm

    I completely agree with you. I frequently post on Reddit and find things like my WipEout HD review being down voted before it gets a chance with no justification at all just down votes that effectively bury your story.

    At least if you could see if the same people were down voting you could ask them or at least do the same back if their sole reason is they are selfish people who want everything for themselves.

  2. Max on October 25th, 2008 3:50 am

    Totally agree with this, found this article searching google, becasue of so many down down votes for a perfectly good article, really makes you angry that people are so stupid and self obsessed, oh well.

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