Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

1.Remove the anonymous factor from the voting system
2. this:

At 12/6/11 10:35 AM, jarrydn wrote: are we designing a snuggle-net for cradling fragile egos?

At 12/6/11 10:35 AM, jarrydn wrote: are we designing a snuggle-net for cradling fragile egos?

I seriously hope this is sarcasm.

There's a difference, jarrdyn, between "cradling fragile egos" and coming up with a voting system that works a little better. I would hope that you'd be smart enough to be able to tell the difference.

basically one that can't be abused - because we all know if you can break it, you WILL break it :P

if only to see if you can :P

These suggestions with formula and cross checking and stuff are waaaaay too complicated. To reiterate my views on this, all we really need is to:

- Remove or deprecate 0-5 voting and replace it with a like button (not a dislike button)
- Leave reviews exactly the same as they are now

The voting remains anonymous and easy but with no score attached, you just like it or leave the page; nobody ever has to know that you're a big, fat, mean poo-poo head.

At 12/6/11 07:02 PM, jarrydn wrote: Because most of the suggestions have been realistic and well thought out, yeah?

If you go back and read the thread, you'll see quite a bit of healthy discussion regarding the pros and cons of each suggested alternative to the current system. So, yes, the suggestions have been thought out.

Realistic? I would say so. Facebook can keep track of likes; YouTube can keep track of Likes and Dislikes and rank videos by popularity (# of views and/or # of likes).

Find me one suggestion that you think is actually unrealistic, and I'll attempt to explain to you how it could be done.

Because most of the suggestions haven't consisted of excessive and over-zealous systems designed to pat every sensitive goof on the head, and tell him that his shit doesn't stink?

Really? All our suggestions do is remove or hinder the ability for people to zero-bomb submissions to the last page, and YOU think it's excessive mollycoddling? No offense, but that's utterly pathetic.

I think the some kind of voting/rating system is definitely worth it. I think its important to have a system where everyone can shape the persona of the portal. I don't like the idea of leaving this up to a select few people as the taste in music would encompass a much smaller scope. Right now the rating system is tool of abuse and doesn't represent the tastes of anyone. Exposure isnt just about getting your name out there. It's also about validating that you music has an audience. I think if we also should keep in mind that while no system can be 100% fair, It's admerable to at least strive toward that goal as much as possible, and I don't think that can be done by just switching some buttons around.

At 12/6/11 06:26 PM, midimachine wrote: - Remove or deprecate 0-5 voting and replace it with a like button (not a dislike button)
- Leave reviews exactly the same as they are now

The voting remains anonymous and easy but with no score attached, you just like it or leave the page; nobody ever has to know that you're a big, fat, mean poo-poo head.

YESSSS!!!

At 12/6/11 07:52 PM, jarrydn wrote:

At 12/6/11 07:19 PM, RampantMusik wrote:

At 12/6/11 07:02 PM, jarrydn wrote: Because most of the suggestions have been realistic and well thought out, yeah?

Find me one suggestion that you think is actually unrealistic, and I'll attempt to explain to you how it could be done.

^ So you ignore this. Which suggests you either couldn't be bothered to find an example, or (more likely) couldn't find one at all.

Because most of the suggestions haven't consisted of excessive and over-zealous systems designed to pat every sensitive goof on the head, and tell him that his shit doesn't stink?

Really? All our suggestions do is remove or hinder the ability for people to zero-bomb submissions to the last page, and YOU think it's excessive mollycoddling? No offense, but that's utterly pathetic.

I never said anything about zero-bombing.

May I suggest you re-read your post, then. Although you never outright stated anything about zero-bombing, it is very heavily implied: "excessive and over-zealous systems designed to pat every sensitive goof on the head."

In other words - and it's a little sad that I have to explain your own post back to you - you're saying that these proposed changes are a bad idea because they encourage constructive criticism and prevent people from feeling hurt when their submissions get zero-bombed.

Sorry. Try again.

...some punk kid who has a borderline insane desire to prove people wrong all the time.

Your problem doesn't lie with me, it lies with logic and your inability to read subtext.

Just thought I'd add my say:

I'm not too keen on this "Like" thing. It's certainly a cool idea, but I would like a way to easily tell someone that they suck if they do. I think that putting more emphasis on reviewing would work better.

My System:

Keep the 0-5 votes! But make it more like the Flash Portal. Add experience (extra exp if you review) and blamming. On top of that, though, the voting should be limited. Say, only three zeros/fives per day (that will limit zero and five bombing) UNLESS they leave a review. Also, voting scores will only determine the five of the week. The top 30 and related lists should be based on listens. Listens of your own track don't get added, and you have to sit through 10-15% of a song for the listen to count. If it doesn't seem right for the top 30 to be popularity based, then make it a separate list of "30 Most Popular."

There are plenty of other cool ideas that people have brought up, and I agree with most of them. Favoriting and downloading should be easier, favoriting an artist should be replaced with subscriptions, stuff like that.

FWIW, this is all coming from a guy who's been submitting music here for a year, gets one to three zero-bombs per track, considers ten votes and three reviews to be a lot, and whose songs only recently started getting any more than ~100 listens.

Looking through the thread, there seems to be one fairly large issue that isn't addressed in here yet that affects the Audio portal quite a bit. In the current system, all of the voter's weight is placed into how many Flash movies they've reviewed, and there is no affect of how many Audio tracks have been reviewed/voted for. This is a major factor in who has the power to vote and incentives to vote for Audio submissions (rather than just listen to them). I've been tempted simply to avoid voting and reviewing in the Audio portal because in the eyes of the system these votes don't count towards seniority. It hurts to make a well thought out vote and review of a track and have it count for 1.50, while somebody who reviews Flash movies in general listens to something and has a vote worth 9.50, even if they don't vote for audio at all normally. I have nothing against voting for flash movies (seriously, I'd be out of place on Newgrounds if I did), but I hope you understand that it makes as much sense to solely give audio voting power to flash reviewers as it does to have a mathematicians grade English papers. If you want more audio people to vote for more audio submissions, have it add weight to their voting power.

I'm not at all for a 100% review system of voting. In that system it discourages both zero bombers AND regular voters from voting for the track It only aggravates the bigger problem further. A pure 'likes' system might not be too bad, though. I would also propose something that follows the most downloaded tracks in a day/week/month, instead - those numbers are tricky to twist. Heck, if this isn't in the works already perhaps there should be multiple methods of organizing searches (rather than Alphebetical, Date and Vote)? Things like Downloads, Views, etc., could help give artists some more recognition by detouring from the vote's method of finding music on here.

I'm looking forward to an overhaul to the system, here. The Audio Portal does need something to curb the current issues and/or effects of few voters and zero bombers, if it's at all possible.

At 12/6/11 09:26 PM, AetherX wrote: Keep the 0-5 votes! But make it more like the Flash Portal. Add experience (extra exp if you review) and blamming. On top of that, though, the voting should be limited. Say, only three zeros/fives per day (that will limit zero and five bombing) UNLESS they leave a review. Also, voting scores will only determine the five of the week.

Again, over-complicating things with this 10-15% song stuff and limiting scores per day and making people review stuff. Nobody should be forced to do anything, it would only make using the AP a massive chore for the majority of users.

If they got rid of 0-5 votes in the audio portal I think they could give xp to people simply for loading a song up and it wouldn't be of any detriment at all. It would be perhaps a fraction quicker than getting xp in the flash portal. Maybe.

You know, it just occurred to me: why not justadd a counter for how many 0's, 1's, 2's, 3's, 4's, and 5's? That way, we know how well our songs are being received, taking into account some internalized, unspoken "zero bomb skew." There is still the average score (with the # of likes next to it--i like that), and this counter is just there to help us the artists gauge the actual quality of our songs (A, B, C, D, F). The counter doesn't even have to be public. I think it could be useful. And it could help some one determine their actual fanbase (likes vs 5's).

I don't think we necessarily need to take anything away from the current system. The only thing that could be changed I think is making a voter's vote count once. 1 vote per IP address/user. An IP address (i.e. no account) has a vote associated with it. A user does as well. Meaning the only way something could be zero bombed is if a person goes from computer to computer and votes zero. But the vote can changed at a later time to something else. So if a zero bomber uses a library, and then some other people come and just so happen to also frequent Newgrounds and find your stuff, and actually listen to it and like it, and they vote higher than zero, the zero bomber bombed for naught. With this though, the current system of 1 vote per day should stay in place for sure.

At 12/6/11 09:26 PM, AetherX wrote: Keep the 0-5 votes! But make it more like the Flash Portal. Add experience (extra exp if you review) and blamming.

Audio doesn't get enough traffic, though, to make a blamming system viable. If a lot of people here consider 10 votes to be a good week, then how long would it take to get through the blam/protect process? A month? Two months?

Not to mention, people still zero-bomb because they think its funny. All you're doing is allowing submissions by popular artists to get through (relatively) unscathed, while other tracks simply get blammed out of existence -- in my humble opinion, that's even worse than being moved to the last page. At least there's some hope of a random person stumbling upon your audio submission.

Speaking of which, stumbleupon can actually be a useful tool. Add one or two of your most popular songs to the site: given how many people click 'Stumble,' there's a good chance someone will eventually land on your song. And if they like it, they might even sign up an account to tell you that (I've had a couple of reviews like that -- "this track is so good, I had to sign up just to tell you so.")

At 12/6/11 11:07 PM, RampantMusik wrote: Audio doesn't get enough traffic, though, to make a blamming system viable.

It will get enough traffic once XP points are available in the AP.

After seeing the kinds of problems that seem to be inherent in the Audio Portal, I think we can all agree the best solution is to close it down to everyone except the top 20 artists on Newgrounds, and then make sure every submission they upload is featured in big shiny writing above a small disclaimer that says "Let's face it, this is what you came here to listen to anyway, wasn't it".
We can keep the Audio Forum running the way it is, to make sure that all the ther artists have somewhere to vent their angst at being forever anonymous. And to make music for video games occasionally, I guess.

At 12/7/11 03:25 AM, Xyresic wrote: something

Error - too much sarcasm found

But I was being serious...

At 12/7/11 02:16 AM, adsubzero wrote:

At 12/6/11 11:07 PM, RampantMusik wrote: Audio doesn't get enough traffic, though, to make a blamming system viable.

It will get enough traffic once XP points are available in the AP.

I think there'd be very few people who don't use the audio portal solely because they don't get XP from it. The traffic increase would be marginal at best.

I like the idea of scrapping the voting, it's the only way to stop people abusing the system, scores are irrelevant.

I personally like the idea of a weekly top 5, but not based on score, or number of votes etc, but perhaps picked by a select group of audio mods from recent submissions?

I still would most like to see a system implemented where if someone wants to download a track then they have to at least leave some sort of comment/review, I think that#s only fair on the artist and it lets them know who their music is reaching, which is always beneficial.

The point though is that people need an avenue in which to be SEEN - fair or not at least the voting system now allows new users to claw their way to the top - I just think scrapping it would leave some people eternally in oblivion - overshadowed by eternally bigger users.

Never seen that much yellow in the first page of this thread as I did that time I went to- nope, not going there.

I don't use the vote score to decide what music I listen to, I go almost completely by genre.

At best we could just do away with the voting and leave it to review scores, then you can see whose zero bombing stuff.

I've been wondering this for a while, but why haven't the voting and whistle systems been merged yet? They work so well together and the whistle system is pretty much flash portal exclusive. I'd like to see these kinds of things span all across NG instead of focusing on the Flash portal.

And yes, I do understand that the entire point of NG, originally, was the Flash portal and everything else is merely a byproduct.

But think about it. It's just like someone's (I forgot the name) post on the first page of this topic: People who vote zero on a song that get's mostly votes of 3, 4, or 5 otherwise will damage their whistle if they do that for numerous times, etc...

In some way, if the Top 5 are chosen by audio mods -- and let's face it, I think they do a pretty damn fair job choosing the front paged submissions -- then a voting system of some type would still need to be in place: there are way too many submissions to go through them all. The audio mods could perhaps see the Top 15-20 most popular tracks, and then cherry pick the Top 5 from those.

Everyone keeps saying "scores are irrelevant, it's the reviews that matter." So why are some of these same people kicking up a fuss about the voting system being removed or changed? By definition, something that is irrelevant is unnecessary -- scrap the voting system, and you streamline the audio portal.

Just a few more ideas to mull over:

I don't know how hard it would be to implement, but would it be possible to have a news-feed system on the Audio front page? Say someone favorites a song or an artist, it pops up in the news feed? This could be a good way for other artists to be discovered.

Next, we need a mass-messaging ability. Some way that we can PM all of the people who have us on their favorites list, at the same time. Whether it's to let them know we're uploading a new track, or even making it easier to say "Thanks for being a fan: please enjoy this free EP!"

Finally, what if users were automatically informed by e-mail when new tracks are uploaded by their favorite artists? You know, exactly like the Flash Portal. It would save us the trouble of spamming people's PM inbox with 'new track' messages and can recapture the attention of those who favorited a song and then left or rarely come back to NewGrounds.

At 12/7/11 02:30 PM, Chronamut wrote: The point though is that people need an avenue in which to be SEEN - fair or not at least the voting system now allows new users to claw their way to the top - I just think scrapping it would leave some people eternally in oblivion - overshadowed by eternally bigger users.

Fair point, but I don't see how allowing people to vote on submissions, people who might not even make music themselves, or have even listened to the track is fair. Perhaps then, what may be a good idea, is that you can only vote on a submission once you have at least listened to say 50% of it, maybe this would stop any rash 0-voting, as people would have to invest some time listening?

or make it so that you have to review the song BEFORE you can vote on that.

There, problem eternally solved.

Let's move on.

Here's what I think. The 0-5 voting should stay, but, with few modifications.

Two possible solutions.

#1 It shouldn't be anonimous, it should be available for the author to see who voted on his track and what score did the person give.

I think the most obvious solution to this 0-bombing mess is to give bans (temporary or permanent) to people who do that.
How, you ask? Easy, I don't think it would be a problem for mods to see who voted 0 or 1 like ten times in a short period of time.
But with just removing the "anonymous" voting, I think this problem would partially be solved.

To make some balance, people should be allowed to vote on their own submission only once a week.
Also, experience points are a must, because it would make the AP more "popular" than before.

#2 Or just forget all this, you could go for a more strict solution, and that's making people review the song before they can vote on anything.

And of course, like some suggested before, the rank should be based on everything, including vote score, review score, listens and downloads.

No one really ever votes, just zeros. Unless it's new, and at zero already.

I vote for having 2 popularity factors:
Times Favorited
Times Downloaded

That makes actually makes it 100% accurate.