The Downvote Blues
The VideoSift FAQ states the following:
Negative voting is useful for when you find something that you really don't like. It's also helpful for us if you negative vote videos that don't belong here. This includes things that violate the posting guidelines (eg. self-links) and duplicate posts.
The question this leaves open is obvious: "At what point does a video deserve a downvote?" It seems that many users are divided on this subject.
Some believe that a down vote is purely as a rules state: a downvote should only be issued when a video is something deserving a discard or, more important to this debate, a video that is disliked by the voter.
Does this mean that the options of voting for a user should mostly consist of upvotes and downvotes, rather than upvotes and novotes? In one sense, we are all conditioned to either upvote or leave alone until we get our first star, at which point we have the ability to downvote. To many people this can be seen as something as a privilege, while others believe that it should become something commonplace and used often.
After presenting this, the question I leave to the community is, "What will the final consensus be on the topic of downvoting?" Should a downvote be reserved only for videos that are distasteful to VideoSift, or should a downvote be used whenever an upvote isn't?
Negative voting is useful for when you find something that you really don't like. It's also helpful for us if you negative vote videos that don't belong here. This includes things that violate the posting guidelines (eg. self-links) and duplicate posts.
The question this leaves open is obvious: "At what point does a video deserve a downvote?" It seems that many users are divided on this subject.
Some believe that a down vote is purely as a rules state: a downvote should only be issued when a video is something deserving a discard or, more important to this debate, a video that is disliked by the voter.
Does this mean that the options of voting for a user should mostly consist of upvotes and downvotes, rather than upvotes and novotes? In one sense, we are all conditioned to either upvote or leave alone until we get our first star, at which point we have the ability to downvote. To many people this can be seen as something as a privilege, while others believe that it should become something commonplace and used often.
After presenting this, the question I leave to the community is, "What will the final consensus be on the topic of downvoting?" Should a downvote be reserved only for videos that are distasteful to VideoSift, or should a downvote be used whenever an upvote isn't?
8 Comments
KrupoNo, you have three options: down, ignore, and up.
To avoid retracing old arguments please refer to these conversations for additional background on VS consensus:
Main "downvote philosophy" thread: http://www.videosift.com/blog/story.php?id=5594
Additional comments: http://www.videosift.com/blog/story.php?id=6401
joedirtAnother way to fix the queue problem is downvotes for videos that aren't "front page" quality. The problem here is that tastes vary, and who decides what is frontpage quality.
dotdudeHere is the post introducing the downvote - almost 73 days ago.
http://www.videosift.com/blog/story.php?id=3864
AnlizSorry guys, its tough to search blogs
KrupoNo need to apologize - there's a TON of old posts - we cycled through the "front page" of the blog in just a day or so - it used to feature a new post once a week or so. Nothing wrong with this at all.
But do read up on the history and see what you can learn from it - and what novel ideas you can build upon them.
nashbaar says...Maybe this is a different topic, but another interesting tidbit would be to have how many times the video was watched. We can vote up/down etc., but another great stat would be how many people have watched the video.
James Roenashbaar, we would love to do that. However, we are in large part reliant on the api's of the hosting services we use. If they eventually improve their api's we will no doubt start offering this feature.
ambassdorBecause the Siftbot will remove unpopular videos that are submitted anyway, I'd be in favor for an alternative voting system. Perhaps "Keep vs Trash" as something like the abuse by the US Army in Iraq could cause; Upvote for wanting to raise awareness or Downvote for video content, however users may feel uncomfortable upvoting controversial content.
Discuss...
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