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How Many People Will Actually Read This? view story

51 votes

Submitted by DarkNemesis618 about 1 month ago

Blind voting does nothing to help the social media communities.

  1. I actually read it. Dan.Knows? I don't think so. He's a pretty notorious blind-voter.

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  2. Just make a "naughty list" and submit it to Mixx every week.

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  3. "I hate going on these rants, so I'm gonna stop now"

    Never say that :)

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  4. I think there are several things the article didn't cover. One is what causes blind voting. Take away the friend feature and blind voting will be more difficult. Or at least more difficult to do with any kind of strategy. The question is, can social news survive without the friend feature. The same thing that makes this a social thing also encourages blind voting.

    It also should be pointed out that there are several levels of blind voting. There are those that constantly get the "Enthusiastic" award by just voting up every story on every up coming list to get reciprocal votes. Then there are those that vote for every submission on their friend list no matter what. Then there is the type that I will bet half of the people on Mixx fall under: The ones that may vote for the majority of their friends submissions with not much more than a glance at the url, headline, and submission description. Then there are those that give at least a quick glance at the link. The final type are those with an insane amount of time on their hands who read every article before any vote at all. I am willing to bet this is the smallest cross section of Mixx users. I will admit that I mostly fall under the two types before the last one. Do I blind vote? Sure. I do however look at several things to make sure it is an article that I have some interest in.

    My point? Social Media would die if there wasn't some level of blind voting. I have even seen blind voting on Heavy As Hell. It doesn't bother me, but if those people at least paid attention to the headline, domain, and description, almost no spam would ever get FP.

    This sounds like a great topic for SNM though. :D

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  5. @MarkCarras some level yes, but there are a lot of times where blind voting goes too far. SilentJay and others have mentioned scraping and copying content off of other people's blogs and whatnot and thats another place where blind voting can be counter-productive. We don't want to vote up spammers and we don't want to vote up scrapers.

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  6. @DarkNemesis618 I'm with ya, but there are many ways to keep from helping the scrapers. One is be very careful about who you add. I notice some people who 'friend' people left and right and then blind vote everything on their friends list. I try to keep from friending anyone who only submits one site. If someone is posting 20 or more submissions a day from one site, there is no way they can create that much quality content. So the chances of them being a scraper is pretty high.

    Another way is to keep watch if a post has negative numbers. If a user has negative numbers a lot it is screaming for further investigation.

    Plus, I was accused of blind voting and if that was true I would be voting for EVERY story on my friends list. This is not the case. So forget about the levels and let's not call it blind voting unless it is truly blind voting.

    Again, I think this is an awesome topic for SNM. We should get a few others in on this too. I love covering passionate topics with cool heads and we have a pretty damn good cast that can handle this one in an awesome way. :D

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  7. But I have Mixxlexia :(

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  8. @DarkNemesis618
    I read it. Blind voting happens on any social news site. I'd have to say that it is less prominent on Mixx than on other such sites IMHO.

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    • ih8mondays ih8mondays
    • added about 1 month ago (edited about 1 month ago)

    I think there's a greasemonkey script out there that looks through all your friends and their submissions and auto-votes all their recent submissions.

    Scrapers account for quite a lot of postings here. There are also some "professional" scrapers who seem to have made their way here on Mixx. I won't point fingers but you people know who you are :) If it weren't for the fact that 50% of the time you actually submit good content, I would have reported you for spamming.

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  10. On the suggestions from the comments in the blog article, I don't think naming and therefore publicly shaming those who are blind voting is a good idea. It will only serve to alienate these users and worse, alienate their friends IRL who may also happen to be on Mixx. Also, some people are just thickheaded enough that no amount of public embarrassment and humiliation will have any effect on them.

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  11. I don't understand the motivation behind scraping ... other than blind greed ... which leads to ...

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  12. Kieth that was very well written and professional. I wouldn't call it a rant though. If you need pointers on ranting or being an asshole, please feel free to contact me. I am a professional at both. ;-)

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  13. First- great article and great discussion. We're proud of this community and it is why we are obsessed on serving it the best we can. Mixxers are generally free to do what they want- so hee is simply my opinion:

    Maybe the best thing about Mixx is just how constructive the community is. Articles, forums and discussions like this illustrate. To date though it has been constructive AND friendly and "calling people out" is probably not that constructuve IMHO. If you think something is spam, downvote it.... and if you think it is really bad spam, report it.

    Again, this is a great post and a great discussion- we'll be reading the thread(s) carefully!

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  14. Blind voting = blind dating! I don`t like it!

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    • MTVmax MTVmax
    • added about 1 month ago

    Agreed, blind voting purely takes the community down. Mixx should be proud of its quality that it has worked hard towards. :D

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  16. Thank you all for reading this. This feedback is by far one of the primary reasons why I write in my blog, and this is just something I guess I've become passionate about. And blind voting doesn't help with the conversation part by any means.

    I agree with much of the comments stating that blind voting does not help the community by any stretch of the imagination. It helps spammers and it helps scrapers. Will blind voting ever go away? I doubt it, as Mark pointed out its part of social media for better or for worse, but acknowledging it and trying to stop it or at least slow it down to make it less prominent is something that can help a community like the one here at Mixx grow bigger, better, and get submissions with better content and produce much better conversation and debate.

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  17. I totally think this is an awesome topic for SNM. Why? Because it's a great article about a passionate topic. Who wants to be part of this round table? If I have you on Skype, just send me a text Saturday night that you want to go on with us. If you don't have my Skype account you can ask about it in a Mixx mail message.

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