At 7/21/15 06:25 PM, EDM364 wrote:
I don't really think this was thought about before the system was implemented.
This has been discussed and analyzed multiple times over the years.
At 7/21/15 06:31 PM, MetalRenard wrote:
Didn't want to say anything because the effort was made to help us out but yeah I agree, there needs to be a different solution because this one just doesn't work. For all the reasons you stated.
You know, this just goes to show that we can never please everyone, even when it's a change that seemed like it would be supported by an overwhelming majority of users (who knows, maybe it was).
A primary driver of this was constant complaints from users about zero bombing, especially on the audio portal. I've seen complaints about this since day one more than anything else in fact. It's been brought up almost every single week since I started working for NG, sometimes more than once.
Even the recent sing-a-long submissions had a few zero bombing users which really surprised me. I did some analysis on the votes on those submissions, and I found that zero bombers tended to vote more than once twice as much as people who voted higher. One user voted 0 on those four submissions a total of 57 times.
This problem is compounded by voting power. A person who votes more gets a higher score and subsequently gets more voting power, which means that a daily zero bomb could be worth as much as 8 or more votes!
So in this instance - and I think this was generally true for most submissions from what I saw - people who went back and voted 0 did so far more than the people who voted higher. I think it's simply human nature to feel far more motivated to do something if you feel negative about it than if you feel positive about it.
Overall I think that this was a net positive change for most content creators on the site. It doesn't solve every problem with voting, but with relatively minimal effort we were able to solve this major problem. While you can't go back and vote on favorites, you also can't go back daily and zero bomb stuff you don't like (or submissions done by people you don't like) which was happening far more often like I said.
And as far as I'm concerned, there is no longer such a thing as "zero bombing." To me, that was when a user repeatedly went back and voted zero on a submission. Now that you can't do that, a vote is just a vote. That would also happen with thumbs up/down as well.
I don't think making votes public makes sense either for the simple fact that maybe not everyone wants people to know what they vote on and that would discourage some people from voting at all and we certainly don't need that. Plus I really don't think it's going to do any good to "name and shame" people who vote 0 on a submission if that's the idea.
We give people the choice to vote between 0 and 5, and if someone wants to vote a 0 then that is certainly their prerogative and there is no shame in that (even as upsetting as it is to receive that 0 vote). I don't see a 0 vote as a "permanent blemish on a score" either - it's just a vote.
Even if we go to a Facebook system of only providing a like or thumbs up, that would basically be the same thing to me. A thumbs down or dislike would be implied and submissions would probably still be sorted by likes/thumbs up.
So it's not a perfect system, but I think it's better now than it was before...and hopefully most users agree.