Codidact, like many other sites, relies on the wisdom of the majority. The approach has some well known flaws. One is "tyranny of the majority" which is really just a special case of "what if the majority votes wrong?"

Early on communities are small and tight knit. They're obscure and a certain type of person is preselected to join them. The small nature encourages cohesion and people naturally try to get along with each other. The votes work beautifully. Those of us with SO accounts (and reddit, and...) older than 2010 have all seen it.

As the community grows, all sorts of different people start arriving, and there is no longer homogeneity. The community's mass increases inertia, inertia makes individuals take interactions for granted. They stop trying to get along and instead want to disrupt, rebel against or control the community. Principled voting declines and voting blocks based on ideology begin to form. This greatly undervalues voting to users who try to leverage the wisdom of the crowd to find good and bad answers.

What if:

• The site analyzes past voting patterns to find which users have voted the same way on the same types of questions
• A vote similarity score is calculated for each pair of users (this can be done more efficiently than O(N^N))
• The "subjective score" is the same vote tally, but weighted by similarity of each vote's users

This would give users a low impact, peaceful way to handle controversy in the community. People are mad about homework questions, but you love helping with homework? No problem, you'll see homework questions because you vote them up, they won't see them because they don't.

The technical challenges to implementing this aside, what if such a system was in place? Would it help improve the overall user experience?

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago by trichoplax‭

matthewsnyder‭

31 17 117 42