During the closed beta phase of coRank, we talked a lot about negative votes. And I mean a lot!
Originally I meant the negative vote to be nothing but a "I don't find this interesting" statement. And somehow, I still think that this would be the best way to have coRank deliver good results. But as we shall see, it's not as easy as it seems.
For example, today I saw a story titled "GameCopyWorld--Mirrors". It's been a while I'm not much into computer games, so for me, that story would get a thumbs down.
I'm not implying that I think the site is crap, or that it's something that people shouldn't bother to check out. Not at all. The truth is, even I'm not into games, after checking the site out, I found it was OK - just not my type of thing. So with my "thumbs down" vote I'd just be saying "this is not something I'd be interested in".
But then, reality sinks in. As I see new stories coming to coRank, I find that those stories I'm not interested in, I simply don't vote. Why? Because I fear my negative vote might upset the submitter (ok, fear is not the best word to use here but bear with me) and get him/her thinking that I'm implying the submission is terrible, it should have not been ever sent to coRank, please keep this crap outta here and so on. That's not what I'd mean with my thumbs-down vote, and so to avoid misunderstandings, I just pass and go to the next story. I'm sure I'm not alone.
As I mentioned before, this issue was a hot one during the closed beta phase, and several approaches were suggested. The most radical one was to completely eliminate negative votes. That I didn't want to do. I wanted people being able to express whether they liked something or not.
Other people suggested to rename the "vote up/down" text as "this interests me/it doesn't interest me" or something along those lines. Unfortunately, we couldn't come up with an effective and short way to
describe it, and we kept the "vote up/down" description.
Yet, at the bottom of all this, two things remain:
- The basic idea of coRank is that if I vote something down and I'm not one of your sources, my vote will not affect at all what appears in your front page (it will however affect the front page of people who selected me as their source).
- In coRank everything is transparent - you can see who voted something up or down, so if you have someone as a source that seems to be voting down (or up) stories that you might have enjoyed (or not), just get rid of that person as a source and problem solved.
Wrapping up, things are going to stay the way they area. And while I fully understand some people will not appreciate others voting their stories down (I probably wouldn't be thrilled myself), I say let's all go with the flow. I think that the fact that everything is transparent and that we all get to choose who will be our sources is what will make us all winners, whether we vote down things we didn't find interesting or we limit those votes for things we believe they're complete crap.
