A different kind of voting system

Mon, 24 May 2010 19:01:54 +0100

I was reading the comments on a site and there were a couple of folks who, quite clearly, hadn't read what they were responding to but were parroting out a knee-jerk reaction from deep in their gut.

It made me think about how you could moderate such a thing and that lead to a thought which is somewhat akin to an idea I've had for how I want my Twitter client to work.

The idea is this, you vote on a post but not for how much you like it. Rather your vote is:

the minimum length of time before you'd want to see another post from this person

So you might vote 0 meaning good stuff or tomorrow for someone who has written something in poor taste or ranty or next week for someone constantly irritating or next month for a real asshole.

Now here's the thing, the site would then use some function f with the input being incoming votes for that user and use the output of that function as the minimum time before the user could post again. A naive example might be median time.

Instead of down-voting individual posts which is kind of negative and, anyway, useless (because you were forced to read the garbage before you could vote it down) a community could muzzle idiots who insist on posting without thinking. They could still post but would have to wait increasingly long between such posts. Maybe they'd learn.

I guess this would depend to some extent on it not being super-easy to create an maintain a whole bunch of accounts.

Anyway just a random thought.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on voting-systems

A different kind of voting system