YTMND talk:Weighted Voting

Weighted Voting

What exactly is a weighted voting system trying to accomplish?

1) Give more voting sway or power to people who have been at the site for a while and know there are more ways to vote something besides a 1 and a five. Hopefully resulting in better content highlights.

2) Dissuade people from making alt accounts with the purpose of giving their site a better score or competing sites a lower score. As well as providing a long term goal for new users to achieve in order to attract them to become part of the community for the long term.

Some things to keep in mind:

1) The less we give to an automatable action, the better. We want to avoid giving the opportunity to create hundreds of drones which automate some votes and then sit dormant until six months later their voting power is great enough to drastically change site scores.

2) How does voting power change over time? ie: If I vote 5 on a site in Jan when my vote weight is 2.0 effectively giving it 10 points, what happens when my voting score is increased to 4? If I go back later vote it a 4.0, what happens then?

3) How should voting score be applied to votes? If a user has 2.0 voting power should that affect the score by applying a vote of 10 to the site if the user votes a 5 or is the preferred method to try to keep voting weights as an integer (as opposed to a float) and then make that many votes (ie a 2.0 voting power would net a the voting power of 2 users)?

That all being said, I think I want to focus less on passive rewards and more on active rewards. Possibly create an activity score, commenting score (again some things that wouldn't be hard to automate), site moderation scores (ie. if a user marks a site as nws when the majority say its ws, lower their score or vice versa) which would be popped into the algorithm.

This is a giant step for YTMND and could possibly be a great deal of work depending on which path we end up taking, but I appreciate the time you're spending on it. Max 07:05, August 22, 2006 (CDT)

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My god I forgot how hard the NARVs bite when they see something they don't like. Looks like if Weighted Voting ever comes, it will come with most people unaware of what the hell it means. Aw well.

Thanks very much for the imput Max. That first one was kinda written half blind as to what you and everyone wants, so I now find it pretty silly in retrospect. I'm gonna write up another one over the night that is more direct with what you said.

Peace, Mewchu11 22:07, August 23, 2006 (CDT)

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The problem with normal distribution

Most of the algorithims seem to suggest that votes should be normally distributed with a median of 3, but such a distribution also assumes that there are an equal number of sites worthy of 5 stars and 1 stars. Is that really the case? At all?

Even max, whose voting is mostly restricted to random looks at the front page, has an average under 3 and like 60% more 1s than 5s. To end up with an average of 3 or as many 1s as 5s, one really has to go out of their way to avoid sites they suspect might be bad, or just refrain from voting on the majority of them.

If our voting system really assumes that there are an equal number of awful sites as there are good ones (rather than what should be apparent - that the chaff outweights the cream by orders of magnitude,) the system will be just one more factor contributing to the already over-inflated scores sites are getting and further discourage low votes, as users afraid of screwing up their weighting will bump votes up to 2s and 3s.

To recap, a 3 median punishes users who visit more than their preferred pockets of the site and vote accordingly, and also artificially inflates the scores of the mass of sites which deserve 1 and 2 stars. Each instance of pointing out a bad site will now trigger not only the unavoidable revenge downvoting, but a loss in that user's vote weight.

Perhaps nudging the median to 2 would be called for?--Inkdrinker 22:25, September 20, 2006 (CDT)

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This is a valid point, as well as the fact that people are more likely to vote on a site if they really hate or love it.

+-----------+
| AVG(vote) | (this is from 12,377,951 votes.)
+-----------+ 
|    3.5529 | 
+-----------+

The average site score rounded to the nearest value:

| score | number  |
+-------+---------+
|     1 |  44247 | 
|     2 | 100608 | 
|     3 | 133445 | 
|     4 |  71395 | 
|     5 |   2130 |

Vote spread:

| score | number  |
+-------+---------+
|     1 | 2742685 | 
|     2 |  781141 | 
|     3 | 1313178 | 
|     4 | 1972549 | 
|     5 | 5569626 | 

Max 20:41, September 21, 2006 (CDT)

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Good ideas, the only downside is that a non-linear rating system (the actual value being the number of stars squared, for example) is not very intuitive, at least not to me... And if the median is not going to be the middle of the scale, non-linearity exists in some form or another. I'd also like to point out that the number of 4 votes vastly outweight the number of 2 votes, same for 5s vs. 1s; this implies that we don't need to worry that much about people wasting a lot of time downvoting chaff. The system self-regulates by promoting better sites to be viewed anyway, with top rated/most viewed/up and coming/worthwhile, and as a result people use their votes on a scale of those better YTMNDs. If someone decides to venture off into the wilderness and downvote a bunch of chaff, that only emphasizes how great the better stuff is when they come back and vote on decent things. Wallet 18:28, September 22, 2006 (CDT)

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Original TODO Note on Weighted Voting/Site Deletion

!- THIS WILL REQUIRE A LOT OF DISCUSSION!
!-- I don't feel this is a feature I should add without a LOT of user and moderator feedback.
!-- This will GREATLY sway the score of sites (and possibly in the future users etc).
!--
!-- I really don't want people to resort to automating the use of the site to get higher score.
!-- and I know they will so I'm not sure if it's even worth it to add this (I could randomly
!-- show captchas but that would be more annoying than worth it.


@- Create a score for each user based on a plethora of information:
@-- Signup date. (Older is better.)
@-- Number of votes (obviously people with > x thousand votes would get nulled.
@-- Site Score divided by Number of Votes ( this would be recursive )
@--- Try not to give users like Syncan super powers, and try not to make new users completely useless.
@-- Your vote compare to average vote (Do we have to assume the average vote on each site is correct?)
@--- Or if not at what number is a site's rating considered correct? (10 votes? 50? 100?)
@-- Activity on the site (a simple calculation of how active a user is)
@-- User votes (a rep system like vbulletin but much less swayable)
@-- Warning or reward points given out by moderators and administrators.


@-  Votes would be a multiplier on User score*User vote.
@-- There would have to be a maximum and minimum multiplier.

@-  Treasure/Trash System
!-- There is too much garbage on the site, and it shouldn't be up to mods to clean it up, it should
!-- be up to users.

@-  Based on your score you get a certain number of "Treasure" or "Trash" votes per day (or week/month etc)
@-  Newly created sites will have "Treasure" and "Trash" buttons available to all logged in users.
@-  During this "trial period", site profiles will have a separate tab with trash/treasure votes
@-  and comments from each user.


@-- Sites with a certain number or percentage of "Trash" get added to the deletion queue:
@--- The sites will be listed on the deletion queue page, and when viewed will have a notice near the
@--- top warning of deletion. The site will be listed for ~ 2 weeks and if it isn't saved by "Treasure"
@--- votes, it is deleted. Possibly force a change to "PRIVATE" instead.

@-- Sites with a higher percentage of "Treasure" votes will be highlighted on the front page or other
@-- pages.

Max 21:05, October 21, 2006 (CDT)