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Love, Hate and Apathy on reddit.com

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I’m a relatively new user to reddit.com (and social book-marking sites in general).

 

One issue that I have (both as a reader and a writer of blogs and other content), is that there is no way to separate or distinguish articles based on whether the community loved them, hated them, or just didn’t care.

 

Basically, all reddit.com tells me is the net number of “points” that an article received (this is the “up” votes minus the “down” votes).  Though this is certainly helpful, and provides a coarse indication of “interest” from the community, it would be helpful to know how many people actually voted on an article.

 

For example, if a specific article got 10,000 “up” votes and 10,000 “down” votes (for a net of zero), its likely much more interesting than an article that got just one up vote (i.e. most of the community didn’t care enough to vote at all).  This is a situation where love and hate are both more interesting than apathy.  

 

I’m guessing this would be a relatively easy feature to add (would take probably about 2 minutes), and could be enabled through preferences (for those that would argue that it “complicates” the user experience too much).

 

In any case, just a thought.

Comments

What if they gave a list of factors (# positive votes, # neg votes, # views, etc.) and let us come up with our own metric by entering a formula involving all of these factors? They could have a default formula and a list of other suggested or popular formulas as well. Also, one of the factors could be calculated based on the similarity of the article to those that we've voted on previously.
Posted @ Thursday, April 06, 2006 9:25 PM by Rick
Re "... popular formulas ..."

And that popularity is determined ... by voting on the available formulas themselves! Cool!
Posted @ Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:00 PM by Doug L.
Custom formulas and voting on formulas.

Brilliant!

Now, if we could only get the reddit.com guys to actually make the change... (they're not even doing the easy stuff yet).
Posted @ Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:05 PM by Dharmesh Shah
Reddit is awful. I could list all the reasons why it is terrible but my arthritis is bad enough.
Posted @ Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:21 PM by brian
> Reddit is awful. I could list all the reasons why it
> is terrible but my arthritis is bad enough.

Feel free to dictate a few to someone else.
Posted @ Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:42 PM by Foo Barr
the problem is inherently difficult because reading behavior and interests are extremely fickle, especially initially when known information about likes and dislikes are extremely sparse. they're trying to account for taste, and as the old saying goes, de gustibus non est disputandum.
Posted @ Thursday, April 06, 2006 11:17 PM by warren
i often wonder about paul graham's thought processes in how he approved and rejected y combinator proposals. it seems like the quality and future potential of the applicants played more of a role than the likelihood of the proposal turning into something that is profitable, which is a stupid way to do things. venture capital is not kindergarten.
Posted @ Thursday, April 06, 2006 11:19 PM by warren
They recently added the ability to sort links by controversy, which seems to be what you're looking for.

I think some of you underestimate how hard it is to build something like reddit and make it fast. Keep in mind they figured out how to show the hottest links on the site in real-time. Compare that to someone like digg, where votes on the front page don't even change anything.
Posted @ Friday, April 07, 2006 12:56 AM by Mark
I don't think Paul makes it a secret that he tries to put money behind the smartest hackers he can find. While I often hear and read lots of questioning from outsiders as to how effective this strategy can be, what most outsiders don't know is the level of interest that almost all the companies funded by ycombinator have generated among potential acquirers. Including those that don't have a revenue model obvious enough for you to grasp.
Posted @ Friday, April 07, 2006 1:01 AM by Justin
"Custom formulas and voting on formulas."
Yeah, but you need a formula by which to rank people's responses about the different custom formulas.
Posted @ Friday, April 07, 2006 3:21 AM by Liron
please my image insert . 
 
thank you.
Posted @ Wednesday, July 30, 2008 8:51 AM by dharmesh ahir
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