Ask Lemmy

Not exactly social media as one would typically define it, but I like Techdirt's system. Insightful, Funny, or Report (for Troll/Spam), at least as a framework.

More sites should use more granular voting systems so that people can indicate why they like/dislike content. A downvote for "I disagree with this person's opinion" shouldn't count the same as "This is a spam account." And "This content is factually correct information provided by an expert in the field" shouldn't count the same as "hur hur, he said 'boobies'."

Slashdot had an interesting variation on voting. People would be randomly assigned mod points to give to posts they like. It didn’t happen every day but when it did you spent those points and then it was other people’s turn the next day. Then they had a similar meta-moderation system on top of that so that misused points or trolling could get corrected. I’ve not seen it’s like since.

Newgrounds still has YouTube's old five star system.

I know plenty that call it something else but it still is basically a binary up/down system. Some may also drop the down part and only have the up (such as likes on Facebook).

I recall a few things way back in the day that had a 5 point scale system, like a star rating, though. However, those arguably suck worse than the binary up/down system.

The only thing that comes to mind is the "kudos" system on some forums. But it's not really a vote system, more so a way to indicate helpful people.

A while back, I launched a site that used a stock trading mechanism to rank posted links and content. It was kind of a speculation market. There was a flurry of activity as a community embraced the game aspect of it, even though no actual money was involved. However, I learned that it’s difficult to manage such a system when many clever people are trying to game it. Eventually pulled the plug as I didn’t make enough time to properly grow it. Still think the concept has merit.

I've been thinking about the idea of adding an emotional aspect to votes — e.g. using one from a specific set of emojis to convey one's sentiment towards the content.

This would most likely need to exist alongside the classic up/down vote system.

Feels like no matter what the system is, no matter how simple (single upvote) or complicated it is (lvx's different votes and weights-per-community-per-user idea from elsewhere ITT - cool but not terribly practical-seeming), people are just gonna faceroll it at best, spam/abuse it as a general rule.

Possibly, maybe a tiny amount of people will even use it as intended.

Even Reddit's system (quality/irrelevant) works in theory but nobody actually uses it that way, so it's agree/disagree-or-just-fuck-you instead. You will not be able to educate users on the simplest shit ever ("upvote for quality"), let alone if there's e.g. six different votes with different nuances. Even if you did make sure everyone knew the intended way, you would not defeat the general "fuck that lol, I do what I want" attitude. Even if you did that, it would only last until some guy sees something he disagrees with, and that's a trillion times per second on the internet.

But with that in mind:

• Youtube used to have stars,
• plenty of systems just have the upvote,
• Steam has the supposedly useful "Useful/Funny/whatever" stuff
• Facebook does limited emojis in addition to upvote.
• some sites have tags apply to content (tags are love, tags are life) and each tag is then upvoted or downvoted for its relevance to that content

Instagram just uses likes. So that's kind of an upvote only system

Dev.to has upvotes, bookmark, and fire. They used to have more, and you can vote all three.

Medium had a system where you can do 1 to 50 upvotes per article.

Not certain if this fits the criteria.

And I don't know if it's really good or not.

On PieFed the value of a vote depends on which instance it came from.