People voting for whatever they want other people to read is basically the same as voting for what they want themselves. I know surveyors occasionally ask questions like "How do you think most people would answer the following question: ___" in order to get an honest answer in cases where people might not want to fess up to some position personally.
People voting for whatever they want other people to read is basically the same as voting for what they want themselves.
Only if the Bible is basically the same as porn.
As an aside, this is actually true, though the filter we read the Bible through makes it quite boring. There's a reason the Bible is the most important book for understanding Western civilization.
For a blind person, they basically are.
Why people vote the way they do is an interesting topic, but it won't really affect how the reddits of the world deal with it. A vote is a vote.
Not the best comparison. I don't see why a person would vote something up that they have no interest in personally. Altruism isn't all that common.
There's a difference between what people want to read and what they want other people to read. I know of no precise word for this. Altruism is too charitable, and hypocrisy too uncharitable.
Imagine yourself inside the head of, say, an abortion rights advocate. A story appears with a headline saying that abortion is just as common where it's illegal. You don't read it; you already know that; but you upvote it as a way of saying "hear hear." Now apply the same rule to articles about Bush, Ron Paul, the RIAA, police abuses, etc, and you've filled up most of the frontpage of a site.
Re:Design: Voting up or Down is Dead
by DanielBMarkham on Monday October 15, 2007 @09:35AM
(#68024)
Seems to me like we're confusing the users and the system. The users want to read the best material for them. The system only has two states: yes/no. If people are voting _knowing that their vote will influence what others read_, then they aren't working for the best interests of the users, only their own best interests. As you indicate, I don't think there's a word for that, but if there is a recommendation-consumption impedance mismatch (a gap between recommender interests and reader interests) then the system will always swing out of whack. That's true no matter how much it is weighted, because all you're doing is switching the impedance mismatch from a user-to-user scenario to a user-to-editor one.
Not quite, unfortunately. The problem with voting, as the reddits realized from the very beginning, is that people will vote something up not just because they liked it, but because they want other people to read it. And a site full of what the majority want everyone else to read could be significantly less interesting than one full of what people like themselves.
And with polls there's not even a pretense that they reflect anyone's interest. The voting mechanism is being hacked for another use.