I like that Reddit's voting system is a lot more democratic than Digg's system where there were "power users". I think this also helped create the strong and, at the same time, large community.
Offtopic but, I'd love to see a site where any downvote MUST have a comment associated with it, that way one has to validate their downvotes. A downvote can be agreed with (increasing the downvote) without comment though, like saying "Yes I agree with what this person says is wrong with this".
That would make things worse. The biggest problem with Reddit right now is that not enough people downvote weak content. Making downvotes harder will only increase the rate at which the 4chan refugees meme the place up.
The biggest problem with Reddit right now is that not enough people downvote weak content
IMO the biggest problem with Reddit is that too many people downvote well-supported arguments because it goes against their belief system which really stymies the conversation. I'd like to see downvotes haves some 'cost' associated with them so they are used sparingly and on content that really deserves to be downvoted.
The problem with this is that even the best communities have types of arguments that get plenty of upvotes. That would make it easy for someone who knows how to win upvotes to get all the downvote points they need, while making it hard on people who play fairly.
This was essentially Slashdot's approach to voting. Make mod points a sparse currency, forcing users to be far more cautious in their use of them.
I don't agree with their policy that those who vote in a thread may not comment in that thread but I think a lot can still be learned from Slashdot's model.
It doesn't have to be "downvote points", perhaps it's a limit on downvotes per day, perhaps it's a hit on karma (every downvote means a costs x number of karma points, and below a certain karma you can no longer downvote), etc.
There's always going to be a way for determined users to get around the limits, but if it can reduce the number of reflexive downvotes from most users it could still be a net win.
One tweak to this can be to segregate karma points by category (or sub-reddit). That way, any downvote points that you need will need to be "earned" in the same topic.
Arguably the bigger problem is that interesting content is determined by popular consensus, which rewards ingroup signifiers and pandering to the majority.
> The biggest problem with Reddit right now is that not enough people downvote weak content
No the biggest problem is that for the majority of reddit users that 'weak content' is actually what they come to reddit for. It's a systemic problem with the community. The comment system works fine.
While not directly comparable, this is almost what StackOverflow does. They don't force you to comment, but if you downvote they ask you to comment and the community does not approve of random downvotes. Additionally, downvoting costs a bit of rep.
In all, this means downvotes are uncommon; usually, people try to fix the problem (editing or asking the writer to edit). However, if something is downvoted, it is extremely likely that that post is irrelevant or actively wrong.
Slashdot (the pioneer in this sort of moderation) has always had a 'reason code' for up and down votes (and meta-moderation to check that the reason codes are good).
This allows you to do things like filter results to only high scores, excluding 'funny'.
Even just separate buttons for "funny" and "informative/insightful" would be pretty nice on reddit or HN.
Slashdot's comment moderation system always seemed to work pretty well to me. The general editorial quality is what made me give up on them. (When I checked back recently, most submissions were incredibly blatant flamebait.)
i actually gave up on slashdot because the comment system had a very clunky feel to it, to the extent that it made the site offputting to use. i likewise do not participate on the making light boards, for the same reason, even though in both cases the actual quality of the discussion is excellent. reddit has nailed that aspect.
We thought about doing that a long time ago, but then figured all you would see is a bunch of comments that were just "." or something similarly useless.
There would be no reasonable way to force people to make a useful comment.
Or maybe you could have an "Agree/disagree with parent" on your comment and the top comment got one upvote/downvote for each one of your upvotes, respectively. There are lots of things you can do, who knows if they have any effect, though...
Earlier on, PG experimented with an upvote only scheme and later discarded it. I don't recall if any public reason was given for why the experiment failed, but downvotes were found to be of sufficient value to be worth retaining.
Except on slashdot you also have to state a reason for upvoting.
The main problem with downvoting for me is that often people vote down out of disagreement, resulting in groupthink. In my opinion, downvotes should hide comments and punish commenters that don't contribute to the discussion. By making downvoting slightly harder, you could focus on the proper subset of comments that should be punished, like spam and insults.
(and by the way fix the UI problem of two arrows that are much too close to each other)
Also, there's very little incentive for gaming the system by ordinary users. Karma points give you no advantage whatsoever, and it's more of a running joke than anything substantial.
Redditors' reputation is depends on their actions, not points, badges, friends or any other "scoring" system. This makes for a way more dynamic and sustainable meritocracy than sites who's system tends to create an incumbent elite of power users.
A problem I've noticed with every comment/article voting system, including HN, is that a single downvote shouldn't have any effect. Here on HN one downvote turns the comment dark which is to encourage "pile-on" voting. Any vote up or down should not be visible to other users until X votes have been cast.
I don't think it's a really big issue, but I agree with you wholeheartedly.
The color of the post should only change when it hits a negative score. A post downvoted by only one person is a reflection of that person rather than the post. Also, since they start at 1 point anyhow, it would be a very elegant system.
