Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Post History

57%
+2 −1
Q&A Support subjective scoring

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 m...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 1y ago by trichoplax‭

#2: Post edited by user avatar trichoplax‭ · 2023-06-11T16:26:19Z (over 1 year ago)
Typo plus link to Wikipedia for reference
Support subjective scoring
  • 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 use 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 vote 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?
  • 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"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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?
#1: Initial revision by user avatar matthewsnyder‭ · 2023-06-09T22:00:02Z (over 1 year ago)
Support subjective scoring
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 use 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 vote 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?