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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: March 2009 - Less Wrong
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Comments (68)
Your idea about getting closer to 50% probability of an upvote in order to get more information identifies a weakness in the voting system. It doesn't matter as much for comments, but I think it is inadequate for articles.
Much better than having to put every article into one of three categories -- up, down, or neither -- would be to have a slider that starts at 0 and can take values between -100 and +100. What we have now is equivalent to something like having -100 to -33.3 all mapped to 'down', -33.3 to +33.3 all mapped to neither, and +33.3 to +100 all mapped to 'up'. Obviously, lots of information is being discarded by design.
Another problem is that votes aren't normalized with respect to the user that cast the vote. An up vote from a user who rarely votes up should be worth more than one from someone who votes everything up.
Also, there could be distorting effects due to different subsets of readers preferentially reading different subsets of articles. If readers coming to LW without having read OB tend to vote differently (which is plausible since OB folks have not voted for years and may think of not voting up or down as the default, with a vote being for special emphasis), and they tend to read different sorts of articles (simpler articles on easier topics), the articles they read will appear to be wildly more popular.
The slider is an interesting notion. It adds user-interface complexity, and may have incentive problems for users who desire to exert control, but potentially garners a substantially more useful form of information.
That's a good idea. Though I didn't say it originally, when I mentioned normalization of a vote with respect to the user that cast it, I meant not only that it should be normalized against the average rating of a vote for that user but also against how much the user votes in general -- users who rate everything would then have less influence per vote than users who vote less frequently. If that were the case, then people who prefer to ration their votes and use them only for things they feel very strongly about (or have thought carefully about) would not have much less influence on what is popular and the direction of the site, as they currently do.
At the moment the current score is a strong influence on how I vote on comments: I vote to move the score to the value I'd like it to have. This is somewhat unstable; directly specifying a personal score and taking a median would be less problematic.