A good pattern/solution to the social web user problem of point whoring?

Question

Take any social website like digg or stackoverflow that lets users reward points for stories/questions/etc. somehow.

What happens is quite similar to the process that lead to the rise of tabloid newspapers that feed only headlines and no content to its readers.

Users are usually smart enough to figure out strategies to maximize their point rewards regardless weather that strategy harmonized with the goal of the website or not.

I identify the following problems

• People will swamp more general and more entertaining questions with answers. Answering more specific questions requires actual domain knowledge.
• Getting most points is often tied to involving most users. Given a random web crowd this unfortunately means mostly generic, subjective, argumentative and unspecific entries.

As the creator of a social website you have the unique chance to influence social behavior towards a favorable direction. I think that the influence the system has on the behavior of the people far outweighs the initial seed of users.

I'm interested in patterns/solutions that aim to solve this problem in terms of:

• ranking algorithms
• expert systems
• limiting/creating ways of social interaction
• information that is provided/hidden

In particular, given the perspective of stackoverflow, how could one solve entries like "What's your favorite programmer cartoon" become the most popular entries (I pick this one because it is a good example for the undesired phenomenon)

Answer 1

I find the voting system that Stack overflow uses to be quite good. Other people essentially judge you as an expert or not. And the good answers bubble up to the top.

I'd stray away from punishing people who don't get voted for, and maybe have some threshhold for those who get consistently voted down losing points.

That said with popular topics most people wont be bothered sorting through the flack to find the diamonds in the rough. So you are going to lose some good answers.

Also stack overflow seems to punish people who post lost of unvoted answers... My score went down after posting this as I have a few posts with 0 votes.

[Update]

In response to comments: I think if you want more specific answers you have to dig deeper and look at a questions for a particular tag. I think the recent post whats your favourite programming cartoon has shown that people will swamp more general and more "entertaining" questions with answers as they are more like procrastination. Answering more specific questions requires actual domain knowledge.

As for why my score went down it may have been a bug, my score went from 91 to 81 when I posted this answer and then rose to 111 after that. As I'm not privy to the algorith that Stack overflow uses, I assumed that that was what had happened.

It might just have normalised my score.

[Update 2]

I think that social networks have to police themselves, they are owned and run by the community byt thier very nature. Just looking at the AACS Revolt that happened on dig last year is proof enough that you can't control it.

The trick is to have enough users who will mod down the garbage and mod up the good stuff.

Perhaps hiring a number of moderators who can do this full time, or even just giving a few people who have proven themselves to be good citizens mod rights, with extra weight on thier moderation, most people online live for this kind of recognition and some might be willing to do it for free as they will have become members of some kind of social networking elite.

The question is how do you stop them from abusing this power? As Stan Lee is fond of saying with great power comes great responsibility.

Answer 2

It's probably hard to have a completely workable solution. Essentially, if the reason people attain points has a positive effect on the community, then point-whoring will increase the quality of the community over time. Would a measure that decreases the rate at which points grow in proportion to the number of points attained be workable?

(i.e first 100 points are 'normal', next 100 take 20% longer to attain, etc)

Answer 3

The most important lesson with regard to the design of any social computing is that community dynamics problems cannot be solved purely by technological means.

In other words, whatever the solution you implement, if you have users to whom getting points (or trolling or getting involved in flame wars or whatever other disruption) is more important that participating in the community, that is what they will do.

When designing the solution, you "simply" have to make sure that there are sufficient benefits (badges, entertainment, information, rewarding feedback) in place for people who aren't in it just for the points. Then, if you are very lucky, you will attract the right kind of people.

This may seem trite, but it is one of the most importat results of CSCW research (Olson and Olson, 2000): unless users are prepared to collaborate/play fair/be productive, then no amount of technology is going to solve that problem.

Answer 4

This isn't fundamentally different from asking what's the best way to stop people from cash whoring in real life. Looking at it in that context, I suspect the only way to stop this behaviour is to remove the opportunity ie don't use points (or money).

The problem is that if you do that, there's no quantifiable reason to get out of bed.

Points and cash both measure social status and ability to influence others. Ability to sequestre resources is a primary sexual selection criterion, which is why greed is so powerful; it is a direct sublimation of the sex drive.

Answer 5

Where there's a lot of people you should always expect the casual jerk or childish individual or attention whore or troll to show up. I don't think there's a method, a scientifically proved strategy, a technology to prevent this from happening. After all programmers are (almost always= people, also, and people tend to be quite diverse in behavior, communication skills, patience to bear the stupid, self-consciousness, sense of opportunity and even common sense. Being an heterogeneous group is something that might probably enrich everyone involved.

There shall be, nonetheless, a system to slow down the annoying people. Downvoting and closing question and answers might work - provided that the vast majority of the participants are well-behaved, responsible adults. If this is not the case... well, then everyone who feels offended would better bail out, because there's no value in attending a community where these tenets are widely disregarded.

The chance is that if the subject around which the community gathered in the beginning is quite selective in itself then a natural selection will occurr in the long term. I mean: if someone is REALLY interested in programming after a while he/she will calm down, ask more intelligent answers, give more ponderate answer, more polite comments...

Answer 6

It is impossible to avoid entries that are in conflict with a specific social websites goal because one cannot prevent entertainment and procrastination. But given any entry it should be easy to decide weather it is harmonizing with the websites goal.

The solution could be to reward posters if they self police/tag their entry to the right category, and give all users a way to filter out categories they do not want to see.

For instance, on stackoverflow most entertainment posts apear because people want to collect points (hypothesis). If this assumption is correct, then the solution of the pattern above would be that whoever tags his entry as entertaining gets twice as many points for upvotes. However nobody interested in entries tagged specific is going to see it when he has entertaining filtered out.

Answer 7

I've been wanting to post something like this, but afraid to get downvoted to oblivion. The problem is that everyone wants to be included. Look at questions with 100+ answers, who is really going to read the last one? I'm not an expert in anything, if I compare myself to others on this site, but I still want to answer questions (see I'm doing it now).

I wish someone would start a forum for some of these issues.

Answer 8

This is fundamentally the same as making a startup.

The initial moderators, hired by the owner/ceo/founder(s), set the tone for the whole community.

Fortunately Jeff and Co. are moderating as well, so we can look at their example as we choose what stories to dismiss.

I find this to be a very difficult problem, though, as I too enjoy these offtopic conversations, and I know there will be backlash against me, individually, if I close some of these topics - I've already experienced it, and other moderators have to some greater degree.

But these are growing pains in any community, and there's no technical solution. Jeff et al need to cultivate the culture here so that the memes and DNA of the community are set and directed in a good direction.

But it's not as easy as that either, because until you start a community you don't know what it's capable of, or what it will become. You have to let it grow a bit itself, and exercise light authority so you don't stifle something that may be better (inevitably will be, actually) than your initial vision.

In other words, the key here is to solve the social problem with a social solution - select strong moderators that will set the tone and enforce it.

There is no way, technically, to prevent people from gaming the system, especially when there are other humans in the feedback loop - they will always find a way to game the other players into doing what they want.

Answer 9

The design of the site is such that you need points in order to participate fully and a quick way to gain them is to post questions, any question and hope for votes.

Some probably post them to give new users a chance to post easy answers and earn points.

There should be a way for the moderators to downgrade frivolous questions. If those questions constantly fall to the bottom users would probably stop posting them. Further those downgrades should lower a users ranking making "post whoring" fruitless.

Answer 10

Perhaps you should compute reputation on something based on the ratio of votes:views. This might discourage the populism going on and focus people's attention to providing answers across a breadth of less popular but still valid and relevant questions - questions that might actually be of interest to someone.

I would actually like to do some editing and tidying up of posts - Many posts could be improved by a bit of editorial work, filling out detail or providing links to other sources. However, without a dedicated exercise in karma-whoring (on what would be off-topic posts for me) it's very unlikely I would ever my rep up to the level where I have permissions to do this in my real areas of expertise where I might actually have something of value to say.

Answer 11

Separate "points" into different categories. If digg or reddit had a "funny/lame" vote in addition to a "interesting/uninteresting" vote, one could screen out things which have a "funny" vote that's higher than its "interesting" vote. Slashdot has a moderation system that makes such distinctions, and you can filter it such that "+1, Funny" becomes "+0, Funny". Heck, you can even make "-1, Troll" work as "+5, Troll" (not that you should, but you could).

Answer 12

Perhaps there could be a "difficulty" or "obscurity" multiplier for answers to less popular questions.

People will point-whore: it's in our nature to crave recognition. Trying to stop them would be a lot of work, and if you succeed, many of the largest contributors to the site might then leave.

You need to make the behaviour you desire attractive to point-whores.

Answer 13

People will swamp more general and more entertaining questions with answers. Answering more specific questions requires actual domain knowledge.

First of all, I challenge your assertion that this is a problem. More general questions will have a more general audience and will be relevant to a greater number of people. Asking a question like "How do I do OBSCURE_TASK in LANGUAGE using TOOLKIT?" is indeed more specific and probably requires more specific knowledge to answer, but is likely only to be useful to people doing that task in that language in that toolkit. Should that float to the top when it's only of interest to a small number of people? Answered obscure questions can be found by searching. Browsing is better for finding general things.

Users are usually smart enough to figure out strategies to maximize their point rewards regardless weather that strategy harmonized with the goal of the website or not.

Yes, that's the cost of involving other people in the process. They will behave based on their own desires and motivations. If you truly want to enforce a reputation system based on whether or not it "harmonizes with the goal of the website," you want a dictatorship, not a community site.