Re:Design: Voting up or Down is Dead
by earthboundkid on Monday October 15, 2007 @06:38AM
(#67982)
I think one thing that might help is if the choice was a little less binary. A one to five star rating system might help sort out the difference between "a decent way to kill some time at work, so up vote" (3 stars) and "something that will actually change the way that I look at the world, so up vote" (5 stars). Something to think about.
[ Parent
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"Maybe" is one option too many
http://www.zeldman.com/2007/06/20/remove-maybe-from-invitati...
A better solution than that would probably be to add two different types of votes, "agree" and "disagree." Maybe even "interesting." That way you don't have upvotes meaning a bunch of different things.
Then you can indicate the level of agreement/disagreement on some sort of graphical/iconic bar. Having a number of points means almost nothing except that a bunch of people clicked the arrow. With an agree/disagree/interesting system, you can even do math in the background to determine the kinds of articles that certain people tend to like, and you can really figure out their personality that way.
Then again, polarizing things into three categories isn't a very accurate way of discovering what is truly popular in a community. But I do think it's better than selecting certain people to have heavier votes.