He makes some good points regarding the problems with votes-based sites.
Even without cancer mods, minority opinions will have a tougher time on sites like Voat and this one.
Anman had talked about doing away with voting altogether and going to bump order like the chans. I'm not sure what I think about that. edit: the problem with this is post visibility would rely on comments made on it. Some posts are clearly liked by a lot of people but don't elicit much if any discussion. It would dramatically change the site and maybe not for the better.
For now, I'd say the best thing we can do is make it part of our culture to not downvote bad ideas if they're relevant to the discussion topic at hand. But good luck controlling what other people will do.
A bumping system favors spam.
A voting system favors the mainstream.
But a discussion system might boost controversial and mainstream ideas.
It would be a difficult system to develop and would need to be adjusted multiple times to develop the algorithm, but a system that places posts based on comments/hour + total votes/time + the average character length of posts/average variety of words used, in my mind, would place controversial ideas on par with popular ideas and low effort posts.
Down votes wouldn't decrease a post's standing, it would just be there as a quick way to show how you feel about it. Comments would be organized chronologically by default with other options available. The more one person comments, the less each comment is worth.
You know, looking back at what I wrote, it looks like an overly convoluted, shit system. Sounded better in my mind.
There are some interesting ideas here. see above
Particularly a chronological comment system with upvotes/downvotes being present but not re-ordering. And the bump order/votes hybrid where comment activity as well as upvotes play into the ranking. I don't know about character length as a qualification because the wordiest writing isn't necessarily the best (better to get to the point with as few words as possible) and because it would have to be adjusted perfectly so that text posts and link posts were ranked on relatively even terms.
I've read it over. I'm not sure how I feel about that I'll have to think it over. However I do think that at least for the moment its important to create a culture here on poal that encourages people not to use the downvote button as an I disagree button. Its for spam, it needs to stay that way for poal to be successful in its current form.
(post is archived)