I think a more useful solution is to move away from a binary "up/down" vote to a system which gives multiple options with differing meanings to each.
Agree, useful/helpful, disagree, not relevant, spam, illegal, inflammatory, etc...
Then you can apply different weights to different votes and maybe even allow people to sort by the different values. Even some "dark" UI patterns might work well like completely ignoring some values (like disagree) and leave them there as a way for some to express that without having it change anything.
I haven't given much thought to the details, but it seems like this could help on the surface.
I feel like a major problem would be getting people to actually vote. It's already hard enough IMO and I frequently forget to vote on comments which I very much enjoyed and we're very relevant (like your own until this moment), and needing to have many options to choose from and possibly multiple steps would make that bar even higher which means less votes overall. Also getting across the meaning of what each vote really is meant to represent would be tough as well...
Encourage people to vote as many ways as possible, as many times as possible, as much as possible.
Here's the magic of the Slashdot system: not everyone has all day to click voting buttons, but some people do. So what you'll end up with your proposition is voting dominated by people that make a career out of hanging out on one web forum, with the conversation consequentially dominated by them.
The Slashdot system is more like jury duty: go in, do your civic duty by casting your five or ten votes, then go on about your day. I don't want a justice system dominated by people with nothing better to do than sit on juries every day.
That just lowers where the "poweruser" bar maxes out, it still doesn't encourage users to vote, nor does it really help with the reason for voting (as after I use my 10 votes, what happens when I see clearly off topic or bad content? Do I need to un-vote something good? Do I need to choose to un-vote something "less off topic"? Should I just ignore it?). I have a feeling that it would be gamed as well, comments or posts earlier in the day would be more likely to get votes.
I feel making the voting process easier by creative UX would help, and then weighting can take care of the rest. If a power user votes 100X more than the average, have their votes count 100X less, or some kind of other method to weight them back into normalcy and keep the system from becoming a "most active dictates what the platform is" kind of thing.
I think you're overestimating people's need for encouragement. Slashdot cleverly gives out moderator points occasionally, not regularly, which gives users the experience of wanting them but not having them.
Slashdot sets lower and upper bounds on comment scores and lets readers set a threshold. Promoting good posts has more impact than demoting bad ones, so you'd probably just ignore all but the worst off-topic posts.
Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more often.
>Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more often.
But the nice part is you can control how you approach this weighting.
Perhaps every days votes is normalized to 10. So if I only voted once it counts 10x, but if I voted 100 times each would count .1x.
There are tons of ways to implement it so the feeling of uselessness doesn't apply, after all, qt the end of the day we are pretty gullible bags of meat.
If the weighting formula is known, I'm going to think twice before casting my second vote of the day. And it only takes one person to reverse-engineer it.
That might not be a bad thing. I'm just saying it works against your goal of getting people to vote as many times as possible.
You owe it to yourself to at least study Slashdot's system before putting too much thought into creative UX, dark patterns, and complex weighting. It isn't the last word in comment scoring, but as someone else pointed out, you could probably fill a book with all the lessons that shaped it.
You're creating an unexessarily complex system. If you look at * chans, all of this is naturally handled by the system itself; how willing people are to actually respond to the post. It's only really insufficient against particularly malicious actors, like shills and bots.
Willingness to converse is the prinary metric; upvotes fuck with that by also pushing the orthogonal metric of how much people like the post itself (regardless of how worthy of response it is).
And ofc, you're trying to tack on like 6 more orthogonal metrics. But whats wrong with letting people vote with their feet?
Well I disagree. I don't comment unless I have something to add. In a chan style system I'm completely ignored unless I comment with bullshit like "I agree".
Not to mention that it encourages controversial content as it generates more arguing (read discussion).
It's just not a system that I believe works well, especially with threaded content like on HN or Reddit.
>In a chan style system I'm completely ignored unless I comment with bullshit like "I agree".
You're completely ignored, but only in the sense that people skim your post... since the posts all live on the same plane, the comment must still be skimmed over (in order of time). But its not the system, or some subset of users ignoring you (by hiding your post automatically, by downvotes or a lack of upvotes)... it's the users choosing, individually, to ignore you.
And AFAICT, upvote-based systems have a higher tendency to post bullshit, in the form of trivially community-acceptable statements, or simple nonsense like "I agree".
However, I'm also of the opinion that most interesting comments on both types of systems are arguements and refutations (by knowledgeable people), info dumps (by knowledgeable people), or histories (by experienced people).
The latter two are supported by upvotes, but the goal of upvotes is to utterly extinguish the former.
Agree, useful/helpful, disagree, not relevant, spam, illegal, inflammatory, etc...
Then you can apply different weights to different votes and maybe even allow people to sort by the different values. Even some "dark" UI patterns might work well like completely ignoring some values (like disagree) and leave them there as a way for some to express that without having it change anything.
I haven't given much thought to the details, but it seems like this could help on the surface.
I feel like a major problem would be getting people to actually vote. It's already hard enough IMO and I frequently forget to vote on comments which I very much enjoyed and we're very relevant (like your own until this moment), and needing to have many options to choose from and possibly multiple steps would make that bar even higher which means less votes overall. Also getting across the meaning of what each vote really is meant to represent would be tough as well...