h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm interested in the topic of gaming voting systems. Using votes to pick and rate content is a no-brainer in terms of a basic idea, but it's very open to gaming.

(I keep having to re-find these links, so I'm putting in a short journal entry on the subject, so that I can easily re-find them wherever I am!)

I'm really interesting in the relationship between communities and reputation/voting systems. The DNA platform doesn't include voting, yet people have still attempted to 'game' the system in various ways - the desire to subvert something, or use it to a purpose other than that to which is was primarily intended, seems to be an intrinsic part of human nature!

Discussions and papers on the gaming of voting systems;

http://designforcommunity.com/display.cgi/20020531108 - The gaming of Slashdot

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-976435.html?tag=fd_top - Gaming of Amazon - linking evangelist with male sex guide.

"In a incident that highlights the pitfalls of online recommendation systems, Amazon.com on Friday removed a link to a sex manual that appeared next to a listing for a spiritual guide by well-known Christian televangelist Pat Robertson."

I think there is potential in using a voting system within communities to bring good material to the top of the pile, but using people and human interaction to pick it has real value. It avoids people being able to game the system and it makes the system more accessible and open to a wider range of the public - not all internet users will relate to an upfront Slashdot style voting system. There's also the risk that content of a particular style will rise to the top - there may be social pressure to vote for content covering a particular topic or written in a particular style.

"In a incident that highlights the pitfalls of online recommendation systems, Amazon.com on Friday removed a link to a sex manual that appeared next to a listing for a spiritual guide by well-known Christian televangelist Pat Robertson."


Who would buy a sex manual?

Everyone is so different, I've not had the "same" sex with the same person {except when I was married} - never mind the same sex with different people!

Can you teach someone to drive by telling them to buy a book?

"Who would buy a sex manual?"

Me!

A woman learnt to drive a car through watching videos once. The first time she got in her car was her driving test and she passed. It was all over the news. Unless it was some sort of publicity stunt of course...

Now how is it that I do a serious topic in my journal for once and you two jump in and discuss the one sex element in the entire posting! *sigh!*

Peta, you're not REALLY surprised, are you?

No not at all, although it normally takes *slightly* longer for a conversation to go totally off track!

If you think so, you're probably spending too much time on other DNA sites!

Good response Ottox. You're right of course, whatever was I thinking?

Ok everyone, sex, come on tell me everything you know.

I need at least a list of ten guide entries that could be written about sex, but haven't been so far, for The Peta Sex Guide Entries Challenge cup.

Any takers?

Let's change the subject...

(I'll bet that won't happen THIS time! )

Going off-topic for a moment I wouldn't want to see more formal voting on dna sites. I can think of h2g2 Researchers I hardly ever agree with, but I wouldn't want to try to vote them off the site in any way.

Now, to business. I think the authors of that sex guide should sue for defamation. What an insult, linking their book with an evil like Pat Robertson!

I hate the whole idea of rating and voting - it goes against my whole anti-hierarchical nature...

And as for sex entries, I was thinking about a strip of road just down the Pennsylvania state capital which houses all of the region's smut shops.

There are two adult bookstores (which sell novelties and videos too) and a strip club.

It's all in a one block area and all three businesses are located side-by-side. It's always made me wonder what the town council decided to zone that particular tract 'porn zone', 'smut zone'.

When I was in high school we'd drive past there and honk the horn and wave to the perverts just to see them dart behind parked cars.

SimCity 4 doesn't include zoning for porn.

Back off-topic - maybe you could look at how well Book of the Future's grafted-on rating system performed.

I like the idea of DNA having voting capabilities, but wouldn't like it to be attached to Entries and possibly not used on hootoo at all.

Whoami?

Hi again,

I'm not thinking of voting in relation to h2g2 at all, so don't worry about that at all, my interest is totally related to issues facing a new site that is still in the process of development.

I'm not hugely pro-voting either - as I imply in the first post, I think it's very open to gaming and abuse. It would seem to me that it would also very open to being influenced by a self-defined *intellectual elite*, who may not value comments written by less eloquent members - which I think is likely to deter a lot of people from posting at all.

However, the question I'm looking to answer is - if you have a website that is ten times the size of h2g2, or even bigger - how do you direct people to the good conversations? (We're looking to find interesting postings or conversations, BTW - not articles, that's easier to resolve.)

It could be easy to assume that the topics started by the Editors that are flagged on the front page are the most active and therefore the best, but I don't believe that to be true for one moment. Community members and groups often start off some of the most thought provoking conversations themselves.

So bearing all this in mind, what do you all think the most efficient way of flagging up the best conversations and postings to the Editors would be? (Any possible solution has to be scalable, if it needs to employ a huge team to make it work then it wouldn't be a viable option.)

What are your thoughts?

Perhaps a search engine which culls the past 24-48 hours to find content which the person is interested in talking about?

Hi Jimi,

Yes, not a bad idea. It could look for keywords and then pull out a list of those conversations.

We'd also like to show really good conversations, so that people could see a range of the conversations that are both current and interesting they could join into to.

The problem with an all conversations search might be that someone would put in something topical and come up with a huge list that might or might not be totally trivial. We'd like to put the best stuff at the top...

What about an 'I liked this conversation' button. It's not exactly voting, and you can't vote something downwards, but good stuff will naturally float to the top. If the cookie stops people voting for the same thing more than once, then that should stop people trying to 'fix' it.

If it is flexible, and could be changed manually, then the same conversation wouldn't be at the top all the time.

I meant to add:

then the same conversation wouldn't be at the top all the time, and the Editors could view them in order of how many button clicks each conversation had.

Or you could sort by the number of subscribed people, or the number of unique posters. A popular thread would have lots of people contributing and giving their views. The precise metric chosen will depend upon what the editors feel to be the best content on their site, sometimes the best way might just be to have someone read lots of threads...

spelugx

Maybe something like the "Have you missed" thing for articles, but for conversations instead? People nominate and vote for things they liked. I don't like the idea of using cookies to control voting, it is too easy to cheat, BotF uses cookies, and i have known people delete to cookie and vote twice (the person i am thinking of voted the oposite each time to be fair, as it was just a test). It shouldn't be too hard to keep a database table of the u-numbers of people who voted, and check no-one voted twice. This would be abusable by using multiple accounts, but i think that's unavoidable really. (IP addresses don't work because networks only have one IP but maybe 100s of computers, some ISPs (a lot IIRC) don't give static IPs, and someone can log on a different computer and vote again)

Tango

PS Could this new site be the one the bugfinders stumbled across?