A question occurs to me in relation to the voting system: What is its actual, in-practice, goal? Depending on what that goal is, modifications to the system might be made to help edge us along toward that goal.

I would hope that the goal is to encourage higher quality and/or more useful posts, and discourage tripe. If that's the case, however, the current system is somewhat flawed. Like any voting system that doesn't render direct consequences for the voter, it suffers a great deal of susceptibility to degenerating into a popularity contest.

I don't really have any ideas for how to fix that, but there's a second, more sinister effect to such a voting system with no direct consequence on the voter (other than the simple "here's your reward XP for voting"): it also encourages downvoting out of spite.

For this latter, to my mind more serious, problem, I do have two ideas on how that might be discouraged. Both of them involve decreasing the incidence of downvoting spitefully by making the very act of downvoting possibly unpalatable.

The first idea would involve simply making the identities of downvoters publicly evident to everyone (or at least to everyone with the ability to vote). This appeals to me because it imposes a certain amount of necessity for the downvoter to have the courage of his or her convictions, as he or she may well have to defend them in the face of public scrutiny. A major downside, however, is that it requires a bit of coding that may or may not be easily incorporated into the site.

The second idea would involve a possibility of losing XP instead of gaining it for a vote cast to the negative. Perhaps the likelihood of XP "reward" remains the same, but is divided evenly between the possibility of a positive reward and the possibility of a negative. The major benefit of this approach would, of course, be in the fact that it would be easier to incorporate into the site. The main detriment, as I see it, is that I'm not sure it wouldn't end up as subverted by unintended consequences as the current system.

Of course, there's always three more options at least:
  1. Don't change a thing.
  2. Think of some other way of changing it.
  3. Use a combination of the two: make voters' identities public, with the option of "spending" an experience point to make your vote a "secret ballot".

- apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

In reply to discouraging vindictiveness by apotheon

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