Comment by joelg236
12 years ago
I've had this opinion for a long time now. I think that voting systems slowly lead towards bad content, over years. It doesn't matter what's special about a website.
This is because the users that should be upvoting/downvoting (ie. moderate/reasonable people who have no incentives of 'visibility' or the like) aren't. They just don't have an urge to upvote the things that should be.
It's exactly why political stories and comments pop up to the top very quickly. It's an "impulse buy" for a lot of people. They see it and think "well everyone should know this!" Think NSA scandal here.
I just don't see a site that heavily relies on what people upvote and downvote forever remaining "pristine" or, in HN's case, hacker-based. Sure, we're all hackers. But a lot of us care about the politics. And when people care about a topic, they're much more likely to go out of their way to upvote the things.
I'm guilty of this too. I don't vote often, and I spend a large amount of time on a lot of vote-driven sites.
The solution? I'm not sure. It's possible that there just isn't a solution. We might just need to keep moving from site to site, with new ideas on content aggregation each time. One day, we might find the perfect solution.
Until then, my feeling is that it's our responsibility as users and content viewers to upvote and downvote appropriately.
> They see it and think "well everyone should know this!" Think NSA scandal here.
Indeed; this is commonly called "signal boosting." It's where there's content you have no personal reason to upvote/retweet/reblog/whatever -- but where you're affiliated with a group that would be furthered by doing that -- and so you do it anyway. I do believe a general policy against it could really help a community, but I don't know exactly how you'd implement that (other than naming-and-shaming users who do it.)
Also, though, voting systems only lead toward bad content when the website is also open-registration. If you'll notice, the first growth-period of these sites is usually pretty decent -- even though there's a voting system, the only people there are "core" members who are all there for the sake of the website's topic, so they only vote up that kind of content. It's when secondary and tertiary users flood the site and overwhelm the core audience that you see the decline. So, the solution could just be... not letting those users vote.