Topic: Can we "Like" a post? - page 10. (Read 23465 times)

Assume I was to buy 10 accounts with low upvoting power , maybe just a couple.
I could then make a single post that seems kinda constructive on one of the accounts and upvote it on all of the other accounts. While this would be a little suspicious , it would not be enough to be flagged in any way.
That account would gain a lot of upvoting power.


The only way that will not happen is if people give upvotes only for good reasons, just like trust.

It seems like a lose-lose scenario from there , because if it is used as rarely as trust , it will not help much on the forums and if it is used any more commonly , it may create dangers.

More than upvoting , I think downvoting would be the better part.

Downvoting would make an awesome addition into the report system.
If a post receives x downvotes , while the user has already been flagged or has under y activity , they would be automatically reported , for admins/mods/staff to check.

Cryptopher and ranlo
Voting on a topic does not effect it's position on the board the same goes for posts. They are still laid out in the same time related fashion as they are now. The only effect a large amount of negative downvotes is to have that topic or post "closed" by default. The topic or post will never disappear but it may be grayed out or have some other visual indicator that yells out that this topic or post has been voted as either unpopular or does not contribute to the parent object.

Otsu
Care to elaborate?
If the shill accounts you mean newly generated accounts, those cannot vote by default. Another user would have to upvote enough of their content to the point where they can vote. And at only one vote per piece of content. That's a lot of surface area to cover without getting any downvotes to really pull it off. Again, the only real downside that someone else has mentioned is if someone were to buy already upvoted accounts. They would still need to generate more good content (thus increasing their surface area for downvotes) before those account can get more upvote and more "weight." I have not figured out the issue with bought account but unless they contribute content, they, at the very least, cannot raise the "weight" they carry without risking spam content and downvote momentum.

dserrano5
Thanks for the link. I'll look into it.

monbux
That's the plan!

jbrnt
That's another aspect I'm trying to tackle right now, transferring over the status of the old forum to the new one. There obviously needs to be some kind of a reputation translation but on the other hand... it may be easier to start from scratch? *flame suit on*
I also agree about the measure of a member's "judgement" needing careful implementation. Which is why I'm trying to keep the design process for this pretty public. I haven't written any code for it yet though. Just throwing my ideas out there and having you all poke holes in it that I probably would not have seen otherwise.

Members would "like" a post for various reasons other than it being useful to the community. Someone could post something outragous and be liked, other could just post a funny joke and got liked. The amount of likes one gets could not gauge reputation. By the time the new forum software is up, a lot of junior members now would have gained senior status, I cannot imagine their "likes" will carry more weight in the new scoring system.

I like the idea of a post scoring system, but how that score translates into a measure of members' "judgement" requires careful implementation.

If someone were to make this feature and release it, please make it visible in a topic's link.. before we actually click it.  This allows us to filter what we want to see without actually clicking the thread itself.

@taesup,

A lot of time ago (I can't be bothered to search right now) I suggested implementing the PerlMonks voting/experience system. It's similar to what you're describing (reputation of posts affects the experience points of its author) with a limited number of votes awarded to every user on a daily basis, which they can spend on the posts they see fit. Users with more experience points (XP for short) get more votes. The act of voting affects the experience points of both the author of the post voted and the user casting the vote. Casting a lot of negative votes in a row can result in your XP getting lower.

All the details are here. The other link I gave is linked from here too.

Seems like a bad idea because so many shill accounts that it would defeat the purpose of it.

Topics leads to the same problem (only on a worse scale, considering you can ensure your topic is basically like a sticky). The only way I can see this working is if you have a special option that you have to choose that organizes the threads based on popularity. This should not be default though.

That's precisely why you just do it for topics, if at all. Replies just confuses the hell out of everything, as there can be conversations forming within a topic, but topics should not depend on any other topic.

Putting some replies above others again opens the door to exploits. I want to ensure my ad is being seen or my post is being seen by everyone? Easy. I'll just go load up my 2500 shill accounts and mass upvote everything I have.

This is still a horrible implementation.

I'm all for features that help users track posts of interest. I also think that the upvoting (possibly downvote) is neat too.

My only concern is that we may find that a lot of posts will sink to other pages as a result, also it becomes harder to track posts in a thread of conversation if one of the replies gets bumped. Or are we saying that they stay where they are, and merely reflect the feedback on the post itself?

It would apply to all post within a topic. Topic will still be order by time so newest posted topics at the top.

As for the ability to like a post to save it for later. Reddit has a system like this where you can see all the posts you've liked or all the posts you've saved. I like this system better because all the things I like, I may not want to keep track of. So you may see a save button next to the upvote/downvote.

What do you guys think though?

Would this apply literally to all posts, or to just topics?

I can imagine that this will be used heavily by signature deal campaigns to float their deal at the top of the relevant board, not that there's anything wrong with that


I like this idea as it would be useful for me personally to keep tabs on my post for signing up to a sig campaign, but more generally for all users to keep tabs on reference posts i.e. one explaining what the activity ranks are etc.

I thought about that as well. First off, I apologize for not laying things out in detail. I'll try to go more in depth but the design is still in flux so there's a limit to how far I can go.

The reason why the upvote system will be tied into reputation system is because the upvote/downvote will be weighted per user by their reputation. So a user with a higher reputation will have their upvote "count" more than another user that has low reputation. Also new user cannot vote until they've reached some level of reputation.

As for accounts that are sold and abused, I could write something in where a quick succession of downvote could carry some momentum and bring down that user's reputation far quicker. But even this can be abused. I'll have to think about account be sold...

Above all else, the moderator has the final say and their vote counts the most.

My theory is that users with good content will get more upvotes which positively affects their reputation. They will eventually get enough reputation to start voting on other content. Those with higher reputation can quickly upvote other good user post which leads to good content promoting more good content. (As long as they don't sell their account) Users with low reputation could upvote or downvote other posts but may have little to no effect until the new user starts putting out good content that other users promote up. This effectively kills troll rings that want to generate a large number of accounts to just harass the forum.

Again this is still in flux so comments are welcome. Also, I'm writing this from home at two in the morning so I could have missed a few points from the whiteboard session we had up earlier.

You don't even have to buy them, just create your own. Not hard to build up an army of Jnr accounts or whatever. This system is definitely a concern. It'll work well in some cases for serial trollers or fud-spreaders, but like you said, horribly exploited in other situations and being able to 'kill' accounts has me worried.

This is my issue. People are buying and selling accounts and that's allowed. This means someone can easily get 50+ accounts with +rep and that are older accounts, then go around harassing people by using all of them to downvote people they dislike. This is a horrible idea and it absolutely will be exploited.

Hmm... Not so sure about that. What do you mean by 'kill posts/accounts'? What's to stop people just trying to 'kill' accounts/posts of people they just don't like?

I'm actually working on the design for this exact feature. As of right now, it'll be tied into the reputation system so that +1 on a forum post actually means something. There's also some algorithmic juice that'll use the downvote (or -1 depending on which is a better metric) to kill troll posts and accounts. It's not finalized yet so comments and opinions are welcome.

Actually, from my experience with forums, it really doesn't.

Personally, I'm kinda 'against' liking a post. I've seen it on other forums, and it just creates an eyesore. If there IS an option to like a post, please allow it to be hidden away.