Limit Votes (promote careful voting)
This may not be a popular suggestion, but I believe this is important to ensure people carefully cast their votes and don't simply up-vote suggestions that sound useful (without taking time to check them more carefully) .
Having users up-vote proposals without putting much effort into reading them has the danger that popular areas of development will always have more up-votes, even when the proposals aren't very good. And developers will be less likely to take the proposals seriously.
It also encourages de-duplicating proposals, so votes aren't split between both, which isn't such an issue if users are able to vote on both.
Successful sites that manage user feedback limit votes, eg:
- feedback.unity3d.com
- makeuseof.com/tag/windows-uservoice-portal/
- 3dsmaxfeedback.autodesk.com/forums/80695-general-feature-requests
Exact limit can always be adjusted, so leaving this part out of the proposal.
17 Comments
This is necessary for sure. There is one drawback. If user spend all his points and cannot interact in meaningful way he will less likely return to site. Upvoting idea is much quicker than implementing it. ;) There is probability that all ideas upvoted by user will stay non-implemented for months, that's natural. We need to think how many votes to spend user get. Do they increase over time? Maybe they are linked to his Karma? Some reward for regularly using site in way that is helpfull, like upvotes for good comments?
Why not just base the amount of votes on the amount of suggestions you have read. So a user that read 100 suggestions will have ten times the amount of votes than one that only read 10.
I kind of feel like that's too easy to game. As far as I can tell, Dillo doesn't currently track which proposals a user has clicked on. And even if it did, that's no guarantee that the person has actually read the content in the proposal.
Assuming we start with, say, a monthly vote limit. Does the count reset each month, or are they cumulative?
>cumulative I think cumulative is better. In one month - can be - not have themes for what I want to vote in other can appear themes more than limit quotes and it fill more fair. In other way i add reminder to use all votes every month :)
Guess you would get N new votes to use each month.
I think a monthly (or weekly) vote limit would be better because otherwise users could have a weird incentive to save up votes.
I suppose part of this depends on how frequently we expect new posts to come in. I'll need to look at the post history here. Some analysis of that will probably be a good indicator of where to go.
This brings up another point. Currently votes are mutable. You can downvote a proposal and suggest recommendations to make the proposal more complete or actionable (or otherwise high quality). Then if the propsoal changes, you can retract the downvote and and even convert it to an upvote if you agree with the proposal.
In a system where there's a vote quota, how would mutability play into it?
I don't like the idea of vote limiting, if we are here reading, pondering and commenting on proposal, it's because we care. Already having limited to a blender-id it's enough filtering imho.
These are just proposal, it doesn't mean that the most voted will get implemented, it's just the voice of the community and I don't see any real benefit in limiting it. With the same principle one would limit the number of proposal a user can issue and I don't see any benefit in it either. What I would like to see it's some filtering/sorting options, and some guideline template to help write a good proposal. Most of the feature request posted are unclear or badly described. So maybe having a second step for the most voted proposal with a review board it's more useful feature.
I'm not so sure that you (and everyone else) are reading and pondering the actual proposals before voting.
Case in point, you say that you "see no benefit" in limiting, even though this proposal (by a developer, no less) tells you outright: "Having users up-vote proposals without putting much effort into reading them has the danger that popular areas of development will always have more up-votes, even when the proposals aren’t very good. And developers will be less likely to take the proposals seriously ."
By limiting (or weighting) the votes, they become more meaningful . It would reflect the fact that actual development resources are limited, as well. This is in your interest as a user.
This feature is crucial.
However, an alternative that might be more appealing from a user perspective would be to not limit but weight vote influence, for example like this:
weight = 10*(1+activeUserMonths)/voteCount
This would have a similar effect to rate-limiting to 10 votes per month, without disadvantaging those users that don't spend all their votes and without making users worry about spending all their votes prematurely.
The exact method of determining the weight may be difficult to understand, but that's also unimportant in the same way that the exact amount of votes a proposal receives is unimportant.
The consequence of the weighting is rather simple to communicate:
"The more you vote, the less influence each vote will have, so choose carefully which proposals to support!"
Of course, the weighting could also be influenced by other factors such as Karma (as monio suggests) or even Development Fund contributions (as I would suggest).
I also considered some weighting method, but agree if its hard to explain, it risks being off-putting. Its also possible users won't need to understand it. It can be summarized as: "If you vote a lot, your votes count for less" .
However this makes peoples votes just feel less important... so I rather just limit total votes, so people make their votes count. Initially the limit may seem too rigid, but over time I think people wont find is so bad.
Instead of being off-putting, it means when they get new votes, they have reason to check for new proposals to vote on.
I've created a counter-proposal to determine if users would rather have an unlimited amount of votes through a process that they most likely don't understand: rightclickselect.com/p/general/Mfbbbc/don-t-limit-votes
Your proposal is already off-putting (it's barely hovering above 0 votes at this moment), I believe my proposal to be more psychologically easy on the user.
Conceptually speaking, I think this idea has a lot of appeal. If it's easy to add as a feature in Dillo, I'd certainly consider testing it for a stretch.
It can be issued in a month - a certain number of votes. E.g. three month. And that would vote - more than three need to wait another month.