It'd be interesting if the cost were something like "vote on these items in the moderation queue", and they'd only get through if they voted in line with existing votes (with a few new items mixed in).
The idea being to help cut down on work for mods by getting some prioritization based on new/young user votes. By mixing in topics that have been voted on, the user can be convinced that they have to vote honestly, and by gathering a large number of votes on actual posts mixed in, things can be roughly classified reliably.
By voting I'm referring to things like whether or not a question is a duplicate of another etc.
This is a very good idea, and I think the quota should be even lower. I also think the old Slashdot mechanic of allowing a set of tags on user mod votes is useful to provide additional feedback.
I think the best solution to maintaining the quality of a rapidly growing community/vote driven site is restricting the flow of new users by providing disincentives. Metafilter (for example) has a $5 sign up fee.
Requiring a small karma minimum before allowing users to vote on posts & comments, or submit new posts could work well. This way new users can only influence the community by engaging with it, which would filter out votes from casual users and trolls, while also giving new users a chance to grasp the community norms though participation.
Other approaches like vote-weighting and down-voting ignore the root of the problem, which is dilution of the community and its norms.
It does work well for MetaFilter, but voting seems to work okay here. What exactly would you describe as "a lot of problems"? What problems need to be solved?
What if you could buy 5 whuffies (or whatever points on here are called) for $5, but could only post comments if your score remained above zero? Or maybe something in the stackoverflow type scheme, where the points are correlated with privileges?
This is a great idea. Makes people more mindful of their voting. A good addition might be to tie a similar system to submissions. Doing so could boost quality of content and reduce the noise in submissions.
The idea would be a fixed price for an upvote. Not to create a market, but for two other advantages.
It creates a cost for bots and hence a cost for massive spam campaigns. And it creates compensation to the system for processing and displaying the content.
As for people selling their vote, this occurs even without costs in the form of vote brigading, and seems pretty controllable on e.g. reddit.
That seems like a decent idea but a bit tedious for the voter. I also like the Stack Overflow model where each downvote costs 1 of your own karma points.
Maybe adjust the cost of upvoting and downvoting. So a downvote to a reputable commenter might cost 10 or 100 karma. Upvoting might also incur a cost.
Maybe it should depend on the reputation of the post (post karma) or the poster (reputation) and also it should cost people with more karma more to vote (but not linearly).
As a side-effect it would allow real-time insight into a sliver of online virtual economics.
I was actually about to suggest something similar, and in fact the number I was thinking is 20%. You are right -- it ought to cost something to downvote, but not so much that it discourages downvote completely.
It may be a bit complicated to implement the follow-up adjustment of karma, so I'm not too strong on that.
The solution is to have a karma cost for voting on a submission/comment that isn't upvoted enough (for example doesn't make the 40th percentile) or to finally add downmod for submissions and make you pay for supporting something the community rejects.
I liked good ol Slashdot’s system, where if you vote, you need to select a reason with a drop down menu. This tiny bit of extra friction might be helpful to discourage quick “drive-by” downvoting and brigading. Additionally, their meta-moderation system helped to make sure people were really voting in good faith. I think they were really ahead of their time in some respects.
Also, give people a vote budget so they think about whether they really need to vote. Maybe 5 votes per day. For whatever reason I can only write 5 posts per day here, so I try to use them wisely. Same should go for votes.
Would this fee be based on money or "karma"? I feel like if one had to earn upvotes to spend on Reddit, regular users will engage in more karma-farming reposts. At least now it's only the weirdos and people looking to sell accounts.
Has anyone tried a logarithmic or similar scale for voting? Show the 'tier' they are at (A B C D or some rating number) and it gets progressively harder to go up or down a level as you deviate from the starting point.
Yeah. But maybe with multiple votes, we already effectively have this. The problem is that those votes are counted internally not as preference order but as total number of votes, adding to a user's general karma score.
This could also apply to moderation in addition to comments; we could make it so only people whose moderations we respect actually count. Others' voting is disregarded.
I'd completely forgotten about this. Having to review votes from other users feels like work to me though. Having the community arrive at the community rules with metamoderation isn't going to always go along with the goals of the site either I would have thought.
I wonder if a similar system would work where 1) regular users vote as normal 2) moderators who strictly stick to community guidelines vote (e.g. vote up comments that add to the discussion, vote down trolls, silly jokes and rude comments) 3) only votes from people whose votes are consistent with the moderators are weighted heavily.
Maybe you could even be rewarded with karma when a moderator agrees with you to encourage it instead of it being hidden. Obviously all these systems are open to abuse and problems but just throwing out ideas.
I like your ideas that voting should have a cost. I think though that your last paragraph (staking much of your karma) would inevitably lead to a karma market and marketers abusing the feature.
By voting I'm referring to things like whether or not a question is a duplicate of another etc.
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