At 9/8/07 11:59 AM, MeatwadSprite wrote:
the review power could be evened out though with a reputation system - where people vote on the indivuduall reviews based on how much they helped and described the movie the best
Again, this would do absolutely nothing to help stop mass voting.
First of all, there is already a "is this review helpful?" system. And if you wanted some kind of system that would reduce the amount of weight a vote was given, or something, whatever the plan there is, then there would have to be hundreds of review mods so someone could be on at all times to take care of those reviews when they are flagged.
If they aren't taken care of quickly, then the removal of the vote or the depreciation of the vote will come far after it has passed judgement, and that wouldn't solve a thing. If it was an automatic system, the mass voters would just do the same thing to the honest voters that voted highly and negate the whole process.
Second, reviews are hidden on submissions that are under judgement. This is something the admins have specifically done, so I doubt that they'd want to change it.
With reviews hidden, people wouldn't be able to vote on how helpful a review has been until after it has passed judgement. The main goal of mass voting is just to get a submission past judgement, so that wouldn't be helpful there. Other smaller goals like getting awards and/or higher scores could also be attained due to my third point.
Finally, like I said in my first post, it comes down to numbers. The majority of the voters that are giving an opinion on the flash either don't know about certain "groups" and their tendencies to vote in large quantities together, or they just don't care. If they read the reviews, they are just going to be reading them to see what people said, not to mark helpful/not helpful/abusive. There's also a small percentage of this group that would honestly review it as well, but the majority would quick-vote.
The group with the second largest number of people is the group of mass voters. They'll mark their reviews as helpful, and mark other reviews giving 0's as not helpful. If the system is automatic, they pull far ahead, if the system is controlled by review mods, you've just created a lot of extra, unnecessary work for them. And if there aren't enough to be on 24/7, the flash passes anwyay and their main goal is achieved.
And then there's the third group, the smallest, consisting of the users that understand what is going on and want to stop the mass-voters. Just because they want to stop mass-voting doesn't mean they are good reviewers, so now the submission is filled with half-assed reviews from the mass-voters and anti-mass-voters, as well as some "THIS SUCKS, BLAM!" reviews from some people in the first group.
Reviewing should be about giving your opinion because you felt strongly one way or another about the submission, or you want to give advice to the author about what aspects they should change, remove, add, whatever. Not everyone should review everything, and with a system of "your vote equals more if you review" there would probably be more people reviewing, with worse reviews. Review mods have enough work as it is dealing with spammers, trolls, and people that already review horribly. There's no need to add onto that with something that wouldn't really help stop what it was intended to prevent.