Post in Participation Inequality

2007 Aug 10 03:55 UTC

On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 05:27 +1200, Steven Clift wrote:
> To Richard's comments ... one reason I like "Recommend" or positive
> votes is that with agree/disagree I am concerned with the political
> majority pushing out the minority in our forums ... however, for most
> sites this would be a nifty feature.

I actually don't think it is too much of a concern unless the political
minority is *very* small. It would be easy enough to come up with an
implementation that was loaded against 'ballot stuffing' for example.
One suggestion off the top of my head would be something like using the
natural log of the number of 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' votes (so
1000x more votes would not result in anything close to 1000x the
rating), and then use other vectors to weight the 'goodness' of the
post.

For example, 'guest speakers' (as used by Dan in the Canterbury Issues
Forum) might get a bonus points, newcomers might get a bonus points,
people who accumulated many overall thumbs down ratings might lose
points.

Another more sophisticated way would be to track all votes against all
individuals, and down-bias votes from people who regularly vote always
down or always up, and severely down-bias votes from people who always
vote down or up particular people (and up-bias votes from people who
allocate a vote against the trend for a particular individual).