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The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on.

The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse.

There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality

  true / false
  funny / serious
  insightful / wrong
  kind / hurtful
  agree / disagree  (useful for votes)
I haven't got a clue how a good UX would deal with it, let alone the ranking for display purposes, but I do know the trinary up/neutral/down vote is a big issue.



In terms of agree/disagree, I'd want to add that unrationalized downvotes is not very useful to readers.

Someone anonymously disagrees with a statement - but why?

Upvotes, on the other hand, makes sense inherently. Someone agrees to the statement, which is rationalized by itself.


this is how slashdot works (worked?). I never thought it worked that well, it's hard to get people to give you meaningful signal when the choices are so complex


Slashdot doesn't seem to keep them separate, so they really don't work that way at all. Information is still tossed to /dev/nul




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