Post voting leads to bruised egos?
Jul 25th, 2008 by Brett
We listen to every user on pijoo.com, and take a keen interest in your thoughts and ideas about our service. Recently, a user made a very good point in a blog post about our voting system, and we’d like to address it…
Tea512, writes…
The problem I am having is when a blog post is read then the reader can decide if it was worth their time. You can click on a button called “I Love It” or “I Hate It”. The scores are kept to the left of the post, and the more positive votes for the post the higher in the most popular you will be listed. For some reason there seems to be a maliciousness tone to bloggers grading other bloggers. You would not think this would happen as everyone is in the same game. There is a problem with the system when a person can read the story, then click they hate it based on content, author, language, and grammar, but they do not have to give a reason or leave a name behind of whom they are.
This is a great point, and one I wanted to repond to on the Tea512 blog itself, but since comments are closed I thought it would be a good idea to start a dialogue with the whole community on the Pijoo Blog.
While there’s no malicious intent in voting a post down, the phrase ‘I hate it!’ on the button is probably a little strong, since most people would vote a post down if they disagree with the content, don’t find it interesting etc.. and because of this we’ll be changing ‘I hate it!’ to something friendlier like.. ‘Not for me’ or something similar.
The voting system itself is very similar to other social bookmarking sites, where users can ‘bury’ or vote down an article anonymously, and we think the anonymity should stay, as it allows users to be honest and vote based on their personal tastes, but we’ll be looking at ways to encourage users to leave a comment after voting.
So, any thoughts and ideas on how we can improve the voting system are more than welcome, either by commenting on this post, or if you prefer, a quick email or blog post.
I read the same post and I agree. It’s just so easy to give a really bad rating anonymously and it often gets abused. When I come across a blog post about a subject that doesn’t interest me personally I don’t vote on it. Just because it’s not a subject I care for doesn’t mean it’s a bad entry and can’t be of great value to others content wise, so I don’t think I really have the right to vote on posts like that. Unfortunately not everyone thinks along the same lines and often the votes are random, out of spite, or just to try and push down other blog entries from the main page so people can get their own entries to the top.
I think it’s very hard to circumvent that while at the same time allowing people to keep their anonymity when voting though. what you could possibly do is give people the option of displaying their vote publicly along with their comment and put an additional rating system in place for the people who make use of it and give them a reliability meter so to speak. That way people can rate this person’s credibility and feedback contributions. But of course that system would still be open to abuse because friends can still boost ratings. And to only allow admins to vote on the reliability meter would require way too much work and manpower. So yeah, it’s a tough one.
I personally love the feature of ‘I love it’ or ‘I hate it’. Whatever you call it; I know now it is ‘Not for me’. This is all fine, I am just here for honest feedback. I know everyone wants to hear sugar-coated feedback, but I would rather not be lied to if someone doesn’t like my article or post.
In summary, if you need something sugar-coated, go get yourself some Milk Duds.
K Harvee