I am firmly of the opinion that voting of any kind is only helpful in ranking the discussion as beheld by its participants and spectators. One aspect I'm keenly fond of on Hubski is the fact that the wheel loops around for ever and ever without counting because you know what? Outside of an individual comment, the overall score of any participant is totally irrelevant. I'm currently in a fight with some mouthbreathers in /r/centuryclub about how their endless pursuit of karma is, in fact, the cancer that is killing /b/.
I think the wheel is the closest to perfection I've seen. It gives you the slightest bit of ego stroking feedback you crave (even if you're against it on principle), -then stops. You get 8 votes of approval, and once there, you just have to be content that at least a few people out there found what you have to say valuable (or more likely agreeable, given how we humans tend to operate) and it's now time to let it go. No being the first to race into a serious discussion with a clever pun or meme to reap as many upvofes as humanly possible. I don't mind humor as an honest spontaneous response, but when it gets in the way of discussion as often and severely as it does on Reddit it gets really tiresome.
The wheel was thenewgreen's idea. I loved it immediately, but I can't take credit for it. At the time, posts and comments had between 1 and 5 +'s, if I remember correctly. The idea was similar, that the score was only a rough indicator of approval, and there was an upper limit. But tng was the one that said: "Why not just use the wheel instead?" Then we had the wheel, but still a plus sign to click on. Finally, I think it was alpha0 that suggested that we just click on the wheel itself. EDIT: Here's a image of Hubski before the wheel:
On my tombstone: "Came up with the idea to use the hubwheel as a voting mechanism and died at sea saving his family from Somali pirates"
btw, I didn't see the image the first time I read your comment. FANTASTIC!! It's like seeing a baby photo. Hubski sure has come a long way, good times pal!!
I like the wheel too, but as someone viewing posts that already have a full wheel there's little reason to click on the wheel. Does it do anything?
If you click the wheel on a link, it will push that link out to all your followers, along with links you post yourself. If you click it on a comment, it just adds a 'spoke' to the wheel until it fills up...after that it doesn't really do anything (again, just on comments, not links), which is a very good thing IMO :)
sweet sweet karma. the problem with reddit is that it's the new digg, and whatever... it's not the small cozy site it used to be in 2006. hubski to me is like the way the old reddit was.... small and cozy. Don't much care for the trivial technical differences, though i do like the trivial technical differences between hubski and reddit... tags are great here..... the idea of sub-reddits is a major fail.
I don't think subreddits were the mayor failure. In fact, I think small private subreddits are the only thing saving reddit from being 100% of full shit. This place doesn't have actual downvotes as far as I know, and I think downvotes are the biggest issue on reddit too. Also, sorry for necroposting a 42 day old thread.
Hubski is far more provider-based and far less content-based and I endorse that. I do think tags/subreddits/whatever are useful to discover and enjoy content that isn't provided within your usual haunts, but I think the best solution there is going to be different for everyone. I think a real issue is that Reddit didn't start out being inclusive to everyone but as soon as f7u12 cartoons hit, the universality of its architecture began to be exploited by everyone. And since you can't disinterest the f7u12 crowd from occasional forays into /r/askscience, the universality dragged everything down.
Does Reddit automatically weight your comment higher if you have a lot of Karma? I don't use it, so I don't know these basic things. If so, I think that's a huge mistake. We should all be in each discussion as equals, at least in terms of opportunity for participation.
As far as Reddit's rankings: - you need over 10 karma (not comment karma) in any given subreddit in order to bypass the spam filter in that subreddit. Having, say 55,000 karma in all other subreddits does not matter. Comment karma within that subreddit does not matter. - Having -10 or less comment karma in any given subreddit will trip the comment timer in that subreddit. It is a point of pride of mine that I have managed to trip the troll filter in both /r/2xchromosomes and /r/mensrights because they're both full of extremist morons. - If there are two comments posted at roughly the same time (think it's within a minute), the commenter with the higher comment karma will have their post appear on top and the lower comment karma will appear below. Note that as soon as their vote totals are no longer equal, the individual comment karma of the poster becomes irrelevant. That's it. That's all karma is used for on Reddit. That is the sum total of the utility of scorekeeping. FUN FACT: backintheday it was routine to see trolls with negative comment karma. As Reddit has grown larger, it hs become virtually impossible to amass negative comment karma, in no small part because while Reddit counts the impact of "downvote brigades" on any given page (where it really shouldn't be counted), the voting impact of "downvote brigades" has no impact on an individual's overall score (where it really should be). In other words, they have it exactly backwards: campaigns to silence dissent are chillingly effective but any overall impact on the prestige of any given user is nill.
The effect is less than you might imagine, particularly now. Over the past year I've gone from being "oh, of course you're being upvoted, you're kleinbl00" to "why are all these people downvoting you?" I know where the bodies are buried and WarPhalange isn't even on my radar. I'd say less than 1% of Reddit's users these days could name five users.