Re:How Not to Sort by Average Rating (2009)
by brudgers on Thursday July 09, 2015 @01:52PM
(#9859536)
If people are upvoting "the right things" then limiting votes is counter-productive. If people are upvoting cat-pictures, then the problem is that the site is not selecting the right group of users and better filters are needed so that the community has the desired structure.
An idea I've had is handling this behind the scenes by weighing the votes accordingly. Let's say each user only has 1,000 "points" but infinite votes. Votes 1,000 times? Each vote == 1 point. Just vote once? That vote is worth 1000x as much as the other guy. Spam a million votes on everything, and each one is basically worthless.
Of course, handling it exactly like that is way too simple, it would need to be balanced more carefully than that. In that naive example, someone who reddits for 5 minutes per month and votes once has as much power as someone online 24/7. Users would also be able to figure out how the system works if scores are visible in some way.
The specific use I played with this for (but never got around to finishing the project) was for movie reviews. There are people who will rate 50% of moves 5-stars and 50% of movies 1-star, but never in between. And some people who are much more selective and may give a 5-star rating to only a few movies ever. A 5-star rating from both of these users should not be valued the same.