Anonymous Voting is Garbage
What is the problem with free anonymous votes? Just like an infinite supply of money, it has no real value. Get one account banned and start working on the next. I might be able to believe this drivel if I didn't know so many cases that proved this wrong:
We strongly believe attempts to game Digg are ineffective. While it would be foolish to say that Digg has never been artificially manipulated in the 2+ years (50,000,000+ diggs) we’ve been live, we’re confident that such attempts do not impact the content that reaches the home page.
Beyond self interested manipulation, allowing people (or bots) to vote on content takes the focus away from the content and makes people interested on arbitrary voting or how voters may respond. It makes the content watered down, average, bland, and generally worthless. It takes the focus away from your value and accepts anonymous input as having some real value, but outside of gaming them for links, they don't...just look at how fast they leave sites.
Your creativity, and value are in your addictions.
Comments
Aaron, I totally agree. The entire process of voting is made usless when the voters may simply be faceless bots.
As humans we just love to judge things though, so I guess voting will stay :)
This seems to be a major problem on youtube with pr firms setting up volumes of accounts en mass and creating fake comments and votes for their clients on a huge scale. This appears especially common in the realm of unsigned pop acts.
The potential reach on youtube is so great and the cost to 'game' youtube will on paper appear relatively small to companies used to paying $100k + for TV spots. So i guess they will see it all as worth the risk.
How a genuine voting system overcomes this problem may require some sort of link voting/ citation system similar to regular search engines - so atleast the right people to address this are close by ;-)
Sorry, Aaron, I can't agree completely here.
While I agree that anonymous and not so well moderated content rating and commenting doesn't very well enhance the content, having well moderated content reviews (and rating is a form of a review) will only help greater content bubble up to the surface, because human created reviews, just as editors reviews, inspire trust for content.
The question is, though, that it is hard to make sure voting is not gamed and it is equally hard to moderate all the content rating you get for all the submitted content.
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