Dean Landolt

I was just catching up on some feeds and I came across a Matt Wilcox suggestion that really sparked my interest — social sites should ditch the ability to vote down…

Either vote up, or don’t vote at all. As your mother may once have told you; if you’ve not got something nice to say, don’t say anything.

At first blush this struck me as equivalent to calls for teachers to ditch their red pens when grading papers, and I believe it would be equally silly. But reading further there’s a deeper rationale…

The main problem with down-voting is that it is lazy feedback. The kind of people that down-vote are often the kind of people that do not leave a comment on why they down-vote. They just down-vote and move on. They down-vote because it’s easy. They down-vote because they can. It’s a lot easier to say to yourself “pft, that’s rubbish” and down-vote, than it is to take the time to compose constructive feedback. In a lot of cases, if the down-vote button wasn’t there, the user wouldn’t bother doing anything at all. Commenting takes effort, clicking down doesn’t.

This is an interesting point. Of course, this assumes that people who vote up have a valid non-tribalist reason to. I’m sure many do, but we all know what a big pile of trolls and flames, shit and spam many comment threads are — so if anything, aren’t many of the down votes just as valid? But I agree, drive-by voting strikes me as flippant — democracy at its worst. So why not force the feedback to be less lazy? If you want to vote, up or down, you have to leave a comment about why. It could be a short slashdot-esque moderation qualifier (+1 Insightful; -1 Troll). Even better, you could expound on why — and if your reasons stink or your motivations are suspect, others can thrash your comment, burying your vote.

This is still subject to abuse of course, so I’d have to think it through further. But I can’t help but believe there’s something to this notion that for a vote to really matter, it ought to be more than a superficial click.

This entry was posted Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Reputation, Internet. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.