http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=651605


in reply to History now influences voting

It appears that the most common route taken is to pick an author and just systematically vote for (or against) every one of their nodes. So I think it appropriate and useful to reduce the number of votes one can cast if one is only casting them toward a single author. The tough part for me is how to (mildly) discourage casting most of your votes for a single author while not unduely causing frustration when one reasonably runs into several nodes by one author that all deserve an up-vote.

I see a certain 'danger' (probably a word with too many negative connotations for the exitable, but...) in such an implementation, and perhaps you have already considered them...

One of my "voting behaviours" is to sometimes seek out (via Super Search some area of interest, say, charting and graphing, and work my way back through those threads with promising authors/titles. As I do so, I very often find old nodes/entire threads still worthy of an upvote. And so I find myself sometimes casting many votes on a given topic.

Now, the 'danger' I perceive here is that, possibly, because of my choice of topic, it may appear (to an algorithm, anyway) that I am casting a disproportionate number of votes for a given author... Say, our very wise zentara may receive a "showering" of upvotes simply because he seems to hold the corner on the market for Tk and Gtk2 knowledge.

So, my question is, might node age and also node topic (perhaps using keywording) influence the determination of whether or not a disproportionate number of votes is going to one author?

HTH,

planetscape

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Re^2: History now influences voting (one author)
by tye (Sage) on Nov 19, 2007 at 07:03 UTC

    I'll likely just abandon that feature idea. I already don't see an efficient way to avoid enough false positives. Thanks, that did help.

    - tye        

      This is a somewhat pointless reply, since you've already abandoned it, but I'll mention it anyway to have it taken into consideration for future changes.

      I don't really like the idea of disincentivizing casting multiple upvotes (or even all of your upvotes) for a single author, because I think there is a fairly common positive scenario where this happens. When I read posts where I can tell that the author really knows what they are talking about, or s/he has a vein of expertise in something I find useful, I will start reading through that author's old posts. It's a handy way of discovering a vein of brilliance in the mountain of nodes out there, and it can often uncover some gems that aren't identified well by the node reputation mechanism.

      You could construct an advanced Perl course for yourself simply by reading and understanding all of ikegami's posts, for example. Or I remember when tilly had to bow out of the Monastery, I went through quite a few of his nodes.

      When undertaking such an author-centric mining expedition, it's natural to upvote the nodes you really like along the way. In fact, it will probably bring those nodes' reputations more in line with their "true value".

      That said, I think that use case is still less common than the more typical "I want to reward this author so I'll randomly pick from his/her nodes and upvote them", which doesn't make the nodes' reputations any more accurate.

      Note that planetscape was defending (well, preserving) the practice of topic-centric browsing, partly by saying that it correlates with the presumably undesirable author-centric voting; I am saying that there are not uncommon cases where author-centric browsing is desirable as well.

      Perhaps the amount of xp that the votes have caused can be an indicator? Thus taking into consideration all the other weightings?

      -=( Graq )=-