Upvotes and Downvotes

[firstRainbowRose]

Wow, you guys really do like your arrows! I would like to step in here and answer a question I've seen pop up a lot, and I don't think has truly been answered. More than a few have asked how the new use devalues the system when compared to the old use. The answer, I think, is in the word chose. Devalue, as in value is now less.

 

Imagine, if you will, someone who has a mental disorder that causes them to be unable to touch a single person. Now imagine that person gave you a hug. The fact that this person took time to do something extra means the world to you. Now, let's have that person get better. They can now hug you each time you meet. A few months later, and they are cuddling, and sitting on your lap, and joking around like there's nothing to it.

 

Which set of hugs will you remember? It won't be those ones at the end where it's a throw away "oh, hi!" It's the ones where they took extra time, and did something that was hard on them.

 

In a similar vein, the votes on the site used to be used to show that you found something of value in a post (that value did very from person to person.) It was something that would stay with you for a period after you moved onto something different. Now, I'm willing to bet most people couldn't tell me what the they spent their last ten upvotes on.

 

There is no need to align the different mentalities. We don't care if you use your upvotes to show appreciation for a meme, or because you are impressed with the time invested in a post. We just want to make sure the votes are used to show it is something you value.

 

While I'm here, I have a question for those of you who have been here for a longer time and have stood witness to this change in voting patterns : Do you bear ill will towards the less serious "new generation" of Sharders?

 

As one of the oldest users on the site, I can say I actually love a lot of the new posts. I used to be able to keep up with the theories... and then they went way over my head, and I stop being as active. I can't follow the topics like "random stuff" simply due to time constraints, but one of my favorite topics to follow is the memes thread. But, just like above, I've only given a couple of votes out because I found I valued the content.

[Chaos]

(Warning, this is a long post! This is why it's taken me so long to respond to things brought up here.)

I think there's been some miscommunication regarding "the purpose" of up or downvotes, and everyone having a little different impression of them. There has also been some talk that there are rules regarding them. That's really never been the case: we've actually had basically no real rules aside from going on a concentrated up or downvote attack on a person. It's been a "use it how you want and the community self-corrects small aberrations."

So, when I say, "there will be a topic clarifying things about usage of reputation," this is actually one of the first times we've ever made such a definitive list. Among the reason we are doing this is to prevent conflicts on differing opinions regarding the system. It's caused a lot of work for us, and so we will simply refer to this document in the future. There will be do's and don'ts, and other things to make it a smooth operation, such as not derailing topics regarding the use of the system (to say +1 or complaining, etc.).

I don't think anyone will be surprised by what's on the list. It's stuff we've already said, really. It will contain a large, very broad list of things that can be upvoted, and also a list of reasons that one could downvote a post. On that downvote list, it explicitly will say that you shouldn't downvote a thing just because you disagree with it. However, on that list, you might find that a post is rude, abrasive, or otherwise a poor contribution to the site... well, there are a lot of reasons to downvote a thing. But don't downvote stuff that's well written and respectful just because it doesn't match your viewpoint.

The intent of the reputation system is to promote good posts and good discussion. Good posts include anything from theory discussion, character discussion, an awesome joke, or an awesome RP post (there are some really good ones!). All of these should absolutely be upvoted, and have value.

I have always maintained that the reputation system reflects a "community average" on what marks a good contribution. I know others have commented that they see upvotes as "a post that made them smile," but we consider upvotes as a marker as to what a good or bad contribution is to the site--whatever that may mean to you. This community average idea has a lot of value. (In fact, since downvotes exist, that gives such a number more value than if that would not be a thing.) You will see that in this document about reputation, reputation will focus on the contents of a post, not the post's author. That's the essence of the community average idea, after all: to see which posts are good contributions, and not about the person. As such, I am strongly leaning that a member's reputation total not be displayed on every post. The reputation title can stay--because those are fun--but by obscuring the numbers, the focus is lessened on the total reputation of a person equalling the value of the person. Reputation is primarily valuable in seeing which posts are good contributions or not, not the value of a member. Let's tweak the system to reflect that.

Let's talk about quotas and scarcity. Kobold, among other people, has raised some good points. Why does there need to be a scarcity of such a thing? And I think there is the fear that scarcity does disproprotionately hit power users of the forum more. That is certainly true.

There are two sides of these things. Obviously, we want to do what is best for the site, and keeping users who come here on a daily basis is important there. What is also important is to make sure the site is inviting to new members, or members that lurk around. So while appeasing our base is important, the site dies if we don't get new people.

"Eric, what the crap does this have to do with reputation?" you ask.

Absolutely everything.

You see, the reputation system helps new members because they can see that their content is good. Rewarding that is important. (The reputation ranks also can get quite addictive, which also helps keep people in.)

Downvotes, in particular, help keep the tone of the site moderate. Believe it or not, there have been some who have left the site because we didn't ban certain people they didn't like, or didn't ban them fast enough. In their mind, we moderated the site too little. But by having downvotes, if you find something offensive or rudely stated, the ability for a random member to be able to not feed a person they find trollish and downvote them is an empowering ability. It also prevents the perception of a random person browsing the site for the first time to look at a post on the site, and thinking, "Wait, seriously? This is a post that's acceptable?" And they leave in disgust. (This has actually happened.) Downvotes allow for the very positive community we have here to decide what is tonally acceptable or not. If we lacked downvotes, then what happens to a post that some might find rude is that it has a +3 or some sort rank, and then another post goes to refute that, and gets another amount of upvotes. It becomes Upvote Wars. Whoever has the biggest upvote count "wins" the argument. Random browser, however, looks at the first rude post, doesn't see the counterargument, gets offended, and leaves.

By having downvotes in a system, random browser can look at a post and roughly see how acceptable it is to the overall community. One person might find a post abrasive, another might not, so its net neutral. If a post has -3, then that was probably too harsh.

It should be obvious that a downvote quota is necessary to prevent discussions from turning into Downvote Wars. Two or three downvotes in a day seems pretty reasonable. (If you're curious as to what it was before, you had four downvotes per day. It was another very low number.) People aren't going to be able to look at a person's post, get offended, and say, "Wow, screw that person, I'm going to downvote all their stuff." Not only is that super rep abuse, but it's just not possible now.

I'm rambling about downvotes. Sorry, that has also been extremely topical in my mind, and that was the primary reason this system is being clarified in the first place. We're making a big post clarifying acceptable use on downvotes. They are broad, so it basically covers most people's usage in this thread. The upvote quota was not the primary thrust of this.

Why, then, are upvote quotas a good thing? Why is this artificial scarcity a good thing?

For me, it comes down to empowering new members. If a power user has unlimited upvotes to give, then the attitude of said power user is to give them out very freely. This, of course, has positives. But if you compare a power user's amount of upvotes given compared to a new user, a power user gives out way more of them. This isn't surprising. If you browse more, you are more likely to upvote things.

But what that does mean is that a newer user's +1 matters less than power users, simply because power users give so many more upvotes than a newer member.

We have multiple bases of users on the site. There are theorizers. There are people who love character discussion. There are people who like memes. There are people who like off-topic discussion. There are multiple successful RP groups, like the Oregon RP and the SE games, that each have distinct subcultures. We also have anywhere from 250-350 members log in daily, to say nothing of the horde of lurkers who don't even have a registered account. That's a lot of people. Now imagine that amount triple, both in user count and in the number of subcultures on the site (because you are darn right that when there is enough people for a particular subculture, we want them to feel at home and cultivate that). That means there will be a ton more posts, and more users means a lot more upvotes. I imagine that if things were unlimited, posts could easily average 50-100 upvotes. That doesn't seem unreasonable.

What that means is that a new member's upvote does have less say on this "community average" on a post than others. However, by limiting the amount of upvotes people can give, you are giving new users a more equal footing in this regard. Sure, there might be triple the members and triple (or more) posts, but the amount of upvotes won't go up exponentially. It will be a lot more linear growth. A new user has more "effective weight" on the community average score on a post, because he or she deliberately spent this upvote to show, "yeah, this is a good contribution!" I think this is really, really important.

I don't think someone should be able to go through every new post on the site and up or downvote every one to see if the contributions are good or not. By making upvotes more scarce, this allows the "say" that you have on a post to have more value.

I want to dissuade the notion that quotas are here to promote book discussion in particular, because they are more "valuable." Book discussion is, of course, valuable and near and dear to my heart. But those are sure as heck not the only things that have value. Have an awesome piece of fan art? Upvote it. Have a piece of awesome RP? Upvote that. Did you have an awesome theory? Upvote it. But, by instituting quotas, we make that number more valuable. The member that receives it gets more value. Across all areas.

Yes, this change does affect Community boards more, but I would also like to say that if we really wanted to say, "Yeah, screw those guys, we want to promote book discussion!" we could, in theory, disable the reputation system on all the "off-topic" boards. That's a thing that could be done. We could arbitrarily remove reputation, too. Would we do that? Of course not. We've tried so hard to make this site more than just heavy theoretical cosmere stuff, so attacking the Community boards seems like the worst idea. They do have value. They are important.

Quotas are going to make it so, numerically speaking, upvotes do still retain value. We did intentionally start by making it a low quota. The off-topic discussions have continued. As I said before, we are increasing the quota more, but not to the "effectively unlimited" stage again. There may be future tweaking to this number.

But surely, the balance between new members and old members is satisfied by having some sort of quota system in place. I don't think it'll be the end of the world.

That's all I really want to say regarding quotas and downvotes. I hope this makes sense and I hope everyone can see why this is, overall, a positive change.

As an aside, if downvotes make the community toxic, reputation as a concept will just vanish. We have always retained this an option. Downvotes have kept the site moderate, rather than polarizing things into opposing viewpoints, but they do have the possibility to make discussion toxic. This is always a possibility. You can be %$#@ sure we are going to make this an awesome place for discussion and defend that to hell.

The guidelines topic on reputation will be coming very soon, so don't worry. We're finalizing it!

[Chaos]

I didn't realize that the staff had made an effort to make 17S more than just heavy theorizing. Could one of you elaborate on that?

It has been a huge priority for many, many years to not have the perception that 17th Shard was "Theoryland for Brandon" and to have more widespread appeal. This is still a perception issue that we are working on. Years ago we had many staff discussions on what topics to make to change this perception. Now the community is relatively self-sustaining in this regard.

Changes to the forum layout also allowed to different groups of non-theory based discussion to flourish. For example, the General Brandon Discussion forum didn't exist. It seems so obvious but a good forum layout takes a lot of iteration and thought.

Splintercast is another important pillar in appealing to a wider audience. It is much more character based than talking about the minutiae of the cosmere, and so it has a different group of people who would listen to it than more a more theoretical podcast. (There's other reasons why Shardkeepers isn't a thing right now, but this is a factor.)

I'd say that achieving this wider appeal is one of our top goals, in addition to such things as making the News section useful and timely to our visitors (with value gain on top of just Brandon's site), podcasts, and site updates. It's pretty top tier. It's really hard to advance all of these goals at once...

[firstRainbowRose]

I know that there's quite a few topics I made (such as the Guess the... topic) that were specifically in hopes of getting people talking. We had a couple of ideas that never panned out that were specifically supposed to be to help people stay more active.

[+Slowswift]

Popular posts are not 10 upvotes anymore?

[Curious Anamaximder]

Popular posts are not 10 upvotes anymore?

Nope. I think it is 16 now.

[Chaos]

Hey guys. I have been busy (especially with various Bands prepping), so we have not finished doing the finalized drafting of the reputation guideline topic. But, I did want to say that I have increased the upvote quota a bit, as promised

[Sunbird]

I'm confused as to how things are timed with the quota. I was online last night around 11pm Mountain Time and hit the quota. Then today at about 2pm I hit the quota again after only upvoting like maybe 5 people. Does this mean that the quota doesn't fully reset at midnight, but rather lets your available upvotes trickle back in a full 24 hours after you used them?

[Mestiv]

Hey guys. I have been busy (especially with various Bands prepping), so we have not finished doing the finalized drafting of the reputation guideline topic. But, I did want to say that I have increased the upvote quota a bit, as promised

 

So, how is the work on guideline going?