In some comment some time earlier I proposed a voting/rating system (which I now can’t find because “vote” occurs in every hit) which was intendend to be intuitive and provide the necessary information. The basic idea is to asynchroneously transport human emotion. Translating the emotion to/from a few well known words is trivial and if the set of words is sufficiently rich and the aggregation of these ratings (for sorting/filtering) follows some sensible rules then I think this system should be near optimum.
I’d add independent votes for the dichotomies love/hate, happy/sad, awed/pity, surprised/bored, funny/sick, (for comparison you can have a look at the Lojban attitudinals). Using such a system a great insightful post might get voted love+awe. And a rant hate and/or sick. Some unhelpful commonplace get ‘bored’.
Adding a satisfied/dissatisfied attitudinal is problematic because it is prone to depend on the relationship to the poster.
One could add an agreement/disagreement vote which votes the relation between both members and which isn’t taken into account when ranking globally but in a personal view.
In a way the usual ‘like’ is an abstracted sum of the positive emotions. Whereas karma here is a sum of all emotions (because it allows downvotes).
Slashdot tries a different approach that tries to use some objective categories which I can’t translate to simple emotions (‘informative’=curiosity? ‘insightful’=surprise+awe?, ‘funny’=surprise+happyness?). But I do get little out of these tags and they are more difficult to translate.
Since you mention Slashdot, here’s a little side effect of one of their moderation systems. At one point, they decided that “funny” shouldn’t give posters karma. However, given the per-post karma cap of 5, this can prevent karma-giving moderation while encouraging karma-deleting moderation by people who think the comment overrated, potentially costing the poster tons of karma. As such, moderators unwilling to penalize posters for making jokes largely abandoned the “funny” tag in favor of alternatives.
I suspect that if an agree/disagree moderation option were added, it would likely suffer from a similar problem. Eg if we treated that tag reasonably and used it to try to separate karma gains/losses from personal agreement/disagreement, people would be tempted to rate a post they especially like as disagree/love/awe.
A more interesting idea, I think, would be to run correlations between your votes and various other bits, such as keywords, author, and other voters, to increase the visibility of posts you like and decrease the visibility of posts you don’t like. This would encourage honest and frequent voting, and diversity. Conversely, it would cause people to overestimate the community’s agreement with them (more than they would by default).
Interesting, and an interesting Slashdot link. I especially like the idea of “moderating the moderators”. You do need to check whether people vote seriously in some way, it seems to me.
The only problem I see is Richard’s concern below that multi-criterial systems, where you actually vote on all criteria, may turn out to be too cumbersome to use.
In some comment some time earlier I proposed a voting/rating system (which I now can’t find because “vote” occurs in every hit) which was intendend to be intuitive and provide the necessary information. The basic idea is to asynchroneously transport human emotion. Translating the emotion to/from a few well known words is trivial and if the set of words is sufficiently rich and the aggregation of these ratings (for sorting/filtering) follows some sensible rules then I think this system should be near optimum.
I’d add independent votes for the dichotomies love/hate, happy/sad, awed/pity, surprised/bored, funny/sick, (for comparison you can have a look at the Lojban attitudinals). Using such a system a great insightful post might get voted love+awe. And a rant hate and/or sick. Some unhelpful commonplace get ‘bored’.
Adding a satisfied/dissatisfied attitudinal is problematic because it is prone to depend on the relationship to the poster. One could add an agreement/disagreement vote which votes the relation between both members and which isn’t taken into account when ranking globally but in a personal view.
In a way the usual ‘like’ is an abstracted sum of the positive emotions. Whereas karma here is a sum of all emotions (because it allows downvotes).
Slashdot tries a different approach that tries to use some objective categories which I can’t translate to simple emotions (‘informative’=curiosity? ‘insightful’=surprise+awe?, ‘funny’=surprise+happyness?). But I do get little out of these tags and they are more difficult to translate.
ADDED: See Measuring Emotions
Since you mention Slashdot, here’s a little side effect of one of their moderation systems. At one point, they decided that “funny” shouldn’t give posters karma. However, given the per-post karma cap of 5, this can prevent karma-giving moderation while encouraging karma-deleting moderation by people who think the comment overrated, potentially costing the poster tons of karma. As such, moderators unwilling to penalize posters for making jokes largely abandoned the “funny” tag in favor of alternatives.
I suspect that if an agree/disagree moderation option were added, it would likely suffer from a similar problem. Eg if we treated that tag reasonably and used it to try to separate karma gains/losses from personal agreement/disagreement, people would be tempted to rate a post they especially like as disagree/love/awe.
A more interesting idea, I think, would be to run correlations between your votes and various other bits, such as keywords, author, and other voters, to increase the visibility of posts you like and decrease the visibility of posts you don’t like. This would encourage honest and frequent voting, and diversity. Conversely, it would cause people to overestimate the community’s agreement with them (more than they would by default).
Interesting, and an interesting Slashdot link. I especially like the idea of “moderating the moderators”. You do need to check whether people vote seriously in some way, it seems to me.
The only problem I see is Richard’s concern below that multi-criterial systems, where you actually vote on all criteria, may turn out to be too cumbersome to use.
Depends. It’s too cumbersomeif it is as elaborate as this one: Measuring Emotions
I didn’t propose to force a vote on all. Only the stronges emotional responses. Maybe none.