I loved Reddit for what it is, but nothing made me back out of a post faster than seeing the top 3 parent threads as a regurgitation of the same inside jokes, pun-chains, and so on.
I loved Reddit for what it is, but nothing made me back out of a post faster than seeing the top 3 parent threads as a regurgitation of the same inside jokes, pun-chains, and so on.
this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.
That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.
Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you’d have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.
Then finally, they had ‘meta moderation’ where you’d be shown a comment, and asked “would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment” to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vandetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.
I don’t think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it’s one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.
edit: a couple other points i liked about it:
Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn’t change the comment’s score.
User karma wasn’t shown. The user page would just say Karma: good. Or Excellent, or poor, or some other vague term.
This seems like a great system.
I really hate all the reddit awards. I didn’t even know they exist until I opened the steve huffman ama in new reddit, and it had about a million awards that were all a different (moving/sparkling) emoji. Facebook has those too, all the little icons for like, haha, sad, heart etc. I find that stuff really distracting to look at and it’s one of many reasons i refuse to use facebook, or reddit’s official website & app.
Something like you’re describing sounds like it would work really well though, especially if there were just maybe different colours or something for the upvote/downvote type, instead of space-wasting icons and images.
Yeah, their layout is dated, but the scoring system doesn’t take much room (once you accept the idea that a reply can have a subject line):
Wow, that is pretty fascinating.
That’s so dreamy that I created a feature request post linking to your comment. (I also did an @ you but not sure I did that right.)