Changes to Voting System

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lcarreau

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by lcarreau » Tue Jan 29, 2013 12:36 am

yatsek wrote:... OK but this kind of contribution doesn't need to be rewarded with power points. Note that one can downvote a worthless page whereas one cannot downvote a worthless comment ...


Depends on what your definition of a "worthless" comment is ... I thought comments were supposed to be entertaining, as well as educational.

Am I wrong? (It's no big deal if I'm wrong, being wrong makes no difference in the forums.) I encourage ALL COMMENTS ... good or bad ! .... :D
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mrchad9

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by mrchad9 » Tue Jan 29, 2013 12:49 am

I agree with Matt that comments are valuable... the site would get stale pretty quickly if no one made any.

I suppose there could be an argument that responding to comments doesn't warrant anything... but then again if that were the case we could just cut the value in half. Or perhaps if you post something that provokes a comment you should get the miniscule extra reward for being able to reply.

But... all that aside... please trust that Matt is working on much more sensible things right now! Currently the page upload process, and later we may consider options to make page adoption easier from inactive members. He has a couple of great ideas in that area that I think account for concerns over wanting to maintain ownership as well... check the 'help improve SP' link at the top of the page to review or comment on it.

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yatsek

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by yatsek » Tue Jan 29, 2013 8:18 am

lcarreau wrote:
yatsek wrote:... OK but this kind of contribution doesn't need to be rewarded with power points. Note that one can downvote a worthless page whereas one cannot downvote a worthless comment ...


Depends on what your definition of a "worthless" comment is ... I thought comments were supposed to be entertaining, as well as educational.

Am I wrong? (It's no big deal if I'm wrong, being wrong makes no difference in the forums.) I encourage ALL COMMENTS ... good or bad ! .... :D

You may be right, but do you think people would stop making valuable/entertaining comments if they were not rewarded with power points? I think a reward for a comment should be a reply to it.

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yatsek

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by yatsek » Tue Jan 29, 2013 8:22 am

Just had an idea, could the grading scale be extended up to 12? This should:

1 make people aware of the sick old system having gone and hopefully make more people vote
2 help voters who have got used to tens start using other grades than the highest one
3 be more fair to the new submissions, which don’t seem to get as many votes as the things submitted in the “good old days”
4 help the best of the frequently viewed older pages climb further up the ranking

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Re: Changes to Voting System

by rgg » Tue Jan 29, 2013 1:36 pm

Montana Matt wrote:...
rgg wrote:Now, consider all the rows in this result set numbered 1 through U. The big difference is that every row number represents a valid image this time, so after using the same random sampling formula as before to determine R (but using this lower value U!) there is no need for looping anymore!

That's a much cleaner and much simpler solution. That one may even be so low profile that it could be run every time the front page is loaded.


Glad to hear it. I wasn't sure about it, because while the looping solution only has to retrieve one image per loop iteration, the select statement in this alternative has to scan the whole object table and, depending on the threshold, might have to deliver up to several tens of thousands of images. Not knowing the architecture of the SummitPost site, I couldn't judge how long that might take.

If you implement this, I just thought of a minor but tricky detail. The formula to generate R is such that, mathematically, it will always be in the range [1,U]. However, due to possible rounding errors, I can't rule out that in very rare cases it produces 0 or U+1, which might cause the program to crash if you use it as an index for the result set. I realized this when I did some testing on the formula in Excel and got U+1.
A safe (and fast) solution would be to change any R smaller than 1 back to 1, and every R larger than U back to U. Unless I made an error in the formula, or there is an error in the implementation later on, this event is so rare that it won't have a noticeable effect on the statistics.

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Buz Groshong

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by Buz Groshong » Tue Jan 29, 2013 2:57 pm

yatsek wrote:Just had an idea, could the grading scale be extended up to 12? This should:

1 make people aware of the sick old system having gone and hopefully make more people vote
2 help voters who have got used to tens start using other grades than the highest one
3 be more fair to the new submissions, which don’t seem to get as many votes as the things submitted in the “good old days”
4 help the best of the frequently viewed older pages climb further up the ranking


In the "good old days" there weren't as many submissions, so it was easier to vote on all of them. They stayed on the front page much longer; now they are up and quickly gone on what's new. Such is the price of the increased popularity.

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Buz Groshong

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by Buz Groshong » Tue Jan 29, 2013 3:00 pm

I have noticed that the new voting system has shuffled my photos. It has put some of my favorites closer to the top than they were before. Seems like it might be an improvement.

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yatsek

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by yatsek » Tue Jan 29, 2013 4:47 pm

Buz Groshong wrote:
yatsek wrote:Just had an idea, could the grading scale be extended up to 12? This should:

1 make people aware of the sick old system having gone and hopefully make more people vote
2 help voters who have got used to tens start using other grades than the highest one
3 be more fair to the new submissions, which don’t seem to get as many votes as the things submitted in the “good old days”
4 help the best of the frequently viewed older pages climb further up the ranking


In the "good old days" there weren't as many submissions, so it was easier to vote on all of them. They stayed on the front page much longer; now they are up and quickly gone on what's new. Such is the price of the increased popularity.

What you're saying seems to strengthen argument 3.

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mrchad9

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by mrchad9 » Tue Jan 29, 2013 4:53 pm

Buz Groshong wrote:I have noticed that the new voting system has shuffled my photos. It has put some of my favorites closer to the top than they were before. Seems like it might be an improvement.

This is because the new voting system ranks photos (and all other objects) by votes rather than by the voters' power.

For example... a member with little voting weight can raise a photo's score just as much as someone with high voting weight. The formula takes member weight into account BEFORE calculating the average vote on an object and later calculates the object's score without further consideration to the voter weight.

In other words... if a member with little (or no) voting power votes in line with everyone else, then they affect the score in the same way everyone else did... their vote gets to count just as much. But if that member votes out of line with everyone else, the formula does NOT count their vote as much as everyone else. I didn't really highlight this when making the algorithms, but this was intentional.

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mrchad9

 
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by mrchad9 » Tue Jan 29, 2013 4:53 pm

yatsek wrote:
Buz Groshong wrote:
yatsek wrote:Just had an idea, could the grading scale be extended up to 12? This should:

1 make people aware of the sick old system having gone and hopefully make more people vote
2 help voters who have got used to tens start using other grades than the highest one
3 be more fair to the new submissions, which don’t seem to get as many votes as the things submitted in the “good old days”
4 help the best of the frequently viewed older pages climb further up the ranking


In the "good old days" there weren't as many submissions, so it was easier to vote on all of them. They stayed on the front page much longer; now they are up and quickly gone on what's new. Such is the price of the increased popularity.

What you're saying seems to strengthen argument 3.

We can resolve some of the concerns yatsek is bringing up at any point in the future, if we determine there is need enough to do so. Probably easier to implement than going to a 12 point system would be to treat any 10 vote before SPv3 as an 8. Could be done on the back end.

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Scott
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Re: Changes to Voting System

by Scott » Tue Jan 29, 2013 5:33 pm

In other words... if a member with little (or no) voting power votes in line with everyone else, then they affect the score in the same way everyone else did... their vote gets to count just as much.


Chad, I think this is a huge mistake. Before voting power existed, people would create fake avatars to vote their own stuff. This was impossible for the elves to keep up with and the above just opens the door to having all that happen again.

I'm sure a lot of members that were here before voting power existed would agree. While the intentions might be good, I think that it's a very bad idea.

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Re: Changes to Voting System

by mrchad9 » Tue Jan 29, 2013 5:46 pm

Scott wrote:
In other words... if a member with little (or no) voting power votes in line with everyone else, then they affect the score in the same way everyone else did... their vote gets to count just as much.


Chad, I think this is a huge mistake. Before voting power existed, people would create fake avatars to vote their own stuff. This was impossible for the elves to keep up with and the above just opens the door to having all that happen again.

I'm sure a lot of members that were here before voting power existed would agree. While the intentions might be good, I think that it's a very bad idea.

What if we got rid of POTD? Would that eliminate the incentive?

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Re: Changes to Voting System

by Scott » Tue Jan 29, 2013 6:01 pm

What if we got rid of POTD? Would that eliminate the incentive?


It might help, but I don't think that there was a POTD when all that was going on. I think there was only a photo of the week? I don't remember, but I do remember that the fake avatar votes (both positive and negative) were a huge problem (photos, mountain pages, whatever). For a long time, the term was called "Downy voting" after an unfortunate member who was doing it was called out in public, even though many more were doing it (and several of which are still active members whom I won't call out publicly on the forum). It worked not only with people voting their own stuff, but some forum members would keep multiple avatars to downvote other people's stuff as well (later the term coined was "voter fraud" by the SP staff including the owners). Think 10+ avatars owned by several members.

It was impossible for the elves to keep up with. That's the whole reason why voting power was implemented. It think that it is very important that it be kept.

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Re: Changes to Voting System

by mrchad9 » Tue Jan 29, 2013 6:20 pm

The current system eliminates the ability to downvote. As I noted, if a member with no power votes out of line with other members, then the vote doesn't count any more than it did in the old system. Downvoting with an avatar will not happen.

And if there were no POTD or POTW, what would be the incentive to vote up your own pages? (which folks could have done in the past anyway by writing 5 gear comments).

We still have voting power, and it still has an effect on whether your vote counts.

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Re: Changes to Voting System

by Bubba Suess » Tue Jan 29, 2013 6:23 pm

I agree with Scott. I remember the sheriff downy days (just a lurker back then). There was a lot of abuse and the vote weighting was an important step towards overcoming the issues at hand. Getting rid of that only invites more abuse.

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