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on Aug 08 2012 65 comments21 DISCUSSING
I think this is a good idea however the community is still young and most posts don't get very many votes even when they go hot. This may not get enough stories to the front page.
Agreed, Stuart. Timing is an important consideration here. It may make more sense to wait until we have a healthy amount of voting, but I still think it's an important play in the long run.
This will probably get deleted You may or may not have noticed I no longer visit Inbound very much any more. There is no community most of the people on here just drop their latest blog post & run. Traffic seems down compared to just a few short months ago & if you check the articles/comments submitted for many people in the top members board their appears to be just a few who have submitted anything in the past few weeks. Maybe inbound needs a community & that community to call out the rubbish & flag it as spam.
This is true for the most part. Comments are usually posted on the content pages themselves instead of on Inbound. I think we need to make a commitment to Inbound.org if we ever want it to be any good. That has to start now.
I've always said I'd rather post a comment on the blog itself. Doing it here seems a little disrespectful to the post author
I think there can be a mix. People on HN comment both there and on the post. The challenge with Inbound is that there is a lot less traffic flowing through here.
I think there's a good mix of comments here on this page and on the Recalibrate post page.
I suppose the good thing about being able to comment here is for submissions/posts that have disabled comments at their end - at least this way, some discussion can take place, even if it's external to their site. :-)
The problem is that the commenting system on Inbound is really bad at tracking comments. You never know when someone replies unless you keep checking again and again manually: On the profile you only see the most popular comments of each user instead of the latest ones, this makes it even more difficult to discuss.
Yes agreed. That said with some rss magic and IFTTT, my private bot tweets me the latest comments with only a maximum 15min lag. If the whole down vote thing and comments is vital then in one swoop with disqus (and Ranks) all that could be dealt with. I don't agree with having a downvote button.
Sadly it's just the standard WordPress commenting system which admittedly is not great and something we should improve.
I suggest Disqus.
Casey: In WordPress you can subscribe to comments below every post if you want. I have it enabled on SEO 2.0
I don't understand, what will get deleted? The post or your comment? In either case, why would you think the admins manually weed comments/content that challenges them? And can you pls explain where the 'UK votes count for 43%' stat comes from? I haven't had any reason to this point to suspect the intentions of the folks managing Inbound. I agree that everyone in the community needs to take responsibility and filter the crap. By crap, I'm not just referring to spam but also content that doesn't meet superior standards. I hate to flag a lot of the submissions here because the authors are generally great at what they do, but that doesn't mean average content is acceptable to post on Inbound. If we want to see the best content surface, then we need to be raise our standards of what 'great' content is. We can do that by submitting and upvoting no less than remarkable posts and flag everything else. If you truly want to share all other content, Twitter/G+/organic/email should suffice. Not Inbound. I believe this is the best way to get long-term quality on Inbound. In the long run, those 'voting rings' and other conspirators will get weeded out naturally. So, in my humble opinion, Inbound will do just GREAT w/out a downvote button.
+1 that "everyone in the community needs to take responsibility and filter the crap." I think we all have a similar understanding to what is crap content, but I like the "I'm not just referring to spam but also content that doesn't meet superior standards." If it doesn't make you go "Wow that's a great post!!" don't submit it.
Well, the issue there is that when the ranking algo is weighted based on who is submitting or voting, then the 'karma' actually turns into something. And then that leads to people basically acting like submission bots and putting a story in 30 seconds after the author tweets about it - clearly not enough time to have actually *read* the content. All in the name of getting to the top of the user list. If you want to keep people from submitting for the sake of submitting, it's pretty easy, just remove the incentives by... 1) making all votes equal 2) removing the top users list & not having a public karma score
Ah, Rand corrected some misinformation below. Apparently votes are equal. So then, sadly enough, people are acting like submission bots just for the sake of upping a meaningless karma score.
I've noticed the drop and run issue too. Not sure a downvote button will create a better community though. We need to curb self promotion more IMHO.
Why would it be deleted? I don't think we've removed any comments unless they were A) spam or B) overtly offensive. And even then, I think there have been less than 10 "B" scenarios ever. Have you seen comment deletion here previously? If so, and the admins haven't, I wonder if it's the result of flagging from the community and we might need to check how the algo handles that.
Or we can just go to a place that already has a community and downvote buttons: reddit.com/r/seo
The voting algo overall is interesting. For example.. this has gotten 11 votes in 2 hours, but I'm seeing it halfway down the 'incoming' page while the #1 under "hot" only has 10 votes over 5 hours. I'm assuming this is due to weight being given based on who submitted/voted... which is probably a really bad idea given what that lead to on other social voting sites. (People paying power users to submit their content.)
...and, naturally - 90 seconds later my comment is no longer valid :)
Votes are no longer created equal. There was a change some time ago so that some members vote counts for more than others.
Yeah the UK votes count for 43%
Wait, are you kidding?
Yeah certain people have more karma to give, not sure how it was calculated i.e. profile age, karma received, up votes given etc but not all up votes are created equal
Wow, did not know
Interesting. I mean I assumed that was the case, but nice to see that it's confirmed.
So in the spirit of transparence, currently we do not weight individual members votes. It's something that have thought about but have not implemented. I've played around with it on a testing server with mixed results. Currently there are about 8 things we look at when we calculate the score of an article. The current algo Inbound.org uses is based off of this article -> http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574 for those interested. We did tweak it by adding a few features to prevent gaming. Chris I'd be curious to know where you got the info that the UK votes count for 43%? Also as I stated above all upvotes are currently counted as equals.
This has never been true. Please don't make stuff up. It's really easy to ask Casey, Dharmesh or I - we're very accessible. No reason to spread misinformation.
It's my interpretation based on tweets from Casey to Peter Attia a few weeks ago that inbound's algo is based on time, number of votes & WHO voted? Also the 43% is me being sarcastic.
I did a random refresh and the post was gone from the home page. 2 minutes later we were back. I also saw some strange algo results in the 6 weeks that I took close notes. Maybe I'll need to share those once they're organized.
That's a bug IMHO. I've seen that quite a lot since the early days of Inbound.
That sounds like a bug, my guess is that you happen to reload the page when the algo was recalculating the article scores. As we have gotten bigger that process has become slower but we are working on speeding it up so people don't notice it.
The algo isn't processed in real time either. Seems to update every hour or two
ALso interesting. I assumed it was faster since things hit the incoming page in real time and seem to move around the incoming page really frequently.
The incoming page is just reverse chronological order (top of list is most recent). The algo doesn't affect it. It's like the New page on Hacker News
Mer. Can't reply to dchuk. So it is - good catch. Apparently I can't tell the difference between hot and incoming :)
Actually the algo updates the post score every 3 minutes.
Ah, very cool. Thought it was pretty immediate.
The rankings are clearly not updated every 3 minutes though, they are either only updating the front page rankings every hour or two, or they're caching the front page (caching a voting based front page is non trivial, full page caching is pointless for it for any time beyond even just a few minutes)
I think that having just one VOTE UP arrow is a good idea.
Could you elaborate a little?
Thank you for your comment Ryan. 1. I like how this one arrow looks. 2. I think that MOZ team is technically capable to identify which posts are of low quality without the VOTE DOWN arrow. I read only the posts that get > 10 UPvotes.
"I read only the posts that get >10 UPVotes" you're missing out on some good content.
Hi Slava, Just so you know that Moz is not really involved with this project other than Rand and myself which we do on our own time.
2NEXT DIGITAL: I agree with you but I have little time so I have to filter out what I read.
3. Another arrow will add more complexity to the page, destroying the "zen" look of the website. =)
Ok, now I wish there was a down vote just for #3 (and putting trust into subjective parties to filter is scary)
To add to my comment above, I think the down-vote option would also encourage those to downvote NOT because the article lacked quality but because they disagreed strongly with the author. If you saw a post with 60 ups and 40 downs, it's easy to conclude 'this article is garbage' and skip it when in reality, it was an article with polarizing ideas. Under the current system, you might not upvote it, if you were strongly against the author's views, but you wouldn't flag it either.
This is a specific "code" that they have over at Reddit, to not downvote something just because you disagree with it. It works really well, but the community has to get behind this idea. Our community is passionate enough to understand and respect this, I think.
I think it's a universal law that you shouldn't bash someone's work just because you disagree with them or aren't personally fond of them but in the heat of things, these rules and codes are out the window. As annoying as 'haters gonna hate' is, there's some truth to it. I notice this bias in sports columns all the time. I believe the upvote/flag system - when used properly by the whole community - brings 'read-worthy' content to surface. I just find it hard to believe this to be the case with up/downvotes/flagging.
I'm not a downvote fan myself. An alternative which has happened here is a constructive criticism comment about a thread you disagree with. Upvotes of such a comment are defacto downvotes of the article.
I understand the argument against a downvote button, however I don't think upvotes of a critical comment "are defacto downvotes of the article." The problem in my eyes is that bad content ranks high on Inbound. Critical comments do not solve this problem.
So the SEO community wants a downvote button thinking because upvotes can be gamed downvotes can't. Remember what happened when Google started penalising links? Negative SEO emerged. Imagine what will happen to Inbound.org if a downvote button was ever released. The flagging system is the only solution, a downvote button will simply change the gaming (downvote everyone on page 1 and upvote me).
Simple solution to that could be a downvote allowance? The downvote would purely be a play for more accountability. It works very well on Reddit, I don't see why it couldn't work here (once we're seeing more traffic & participation).
Well, I think the request for down votes comes into play because the number of votes needed to hit the top of the front page is so small. Ten votes in an hour or two will (on a typical day) guarantee a top 3 position. It then takes a really long time for enough new stuff to get submitted/voted up to push down the junk. The flag button was, until recently, really unclear. It looks like everyone assumed it was explicitly for spam or breaking the rules on crazy self promotion. Nice to see that it's also supposed to be a catchall for poor content. So, in short... we're already got a down vote button. It's just called Flag.
I can totally appreciate the desire for a downvote button. I've wanted one myself plenty of times. However, here's what I'd say about it: - the negatives of having one far exceed the negatives of not having one in my experience and opinion - the flag/spam link does something relatively similar (so if you feel like something actually doesn't belong on inbound.org, that's the one to use) - each of us believes we'll use the downvote button responsibly and be generous to the community. In practice, this doesn't happen, and it's sad - here's a traffic graph of inbound.org since launch: http://moz.com/rand/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/inbound-org-traffic.gif basically, traffic's been pretty steady, but July had a slight dip (38,973 visits in July vs. 39,464 in June); August's actually trending up (not including jobs.inbound.org) - Dharmesh and I obviously are not as active here or with new features, growth, marketing, etc as we should be. We're in the process of hiring a part-time GM (general manager) for the site and contracting regular dev/design hours to make improvements. Once that's settled, we'll post a thread about it and would love contributions Personally, I still get huge value from this site. I see 3-4 articles a day I'd never find elsewhere. I have somewhere to share stuff I personally like that's lightweight and less temporal (like Twitter), and I like most of the discussions here (rare gossip crap aside). Obviously, no one's obligated to come here, and even with minimal improvement effort, I'm really impressed that the site has nearly ~5K uniques that return regularly (5X+ each month). I agree it's underserved and we're working to fix that, so really appreciate your patience and support. I'll ask Dharmesh to chime in as well with his thoughts.
Thank you Rand, for your participation and transparency. Hopefully this post has started some healthy discussion on what will be good for Inbound.org in the long run, and I'm sure we as a community will continue to make suggestions :)
I love it - the negativity surrounding suggesting something negative could overall lead to the positive! :-)
I agree that we shouldn't add a downvote button. It *might* help, but it likely won't. We took a lot of inspiration from Hacker News, and they've built out a great community without the need for an downvote button -- I think it can work. I'm super-thrilled that we'll be getting a GM for inbound.org. It will be great to get someone awesome that thinks about how we can best build inbound.org into the great community resource that all of us want it to be. I think all of you folks (the community members) should be proud of what *you* have built -- it's actually quite rare for a new community to come together that quickly. Clearly, we want to make it even bigger -- but even what we have now is actually quite remarkable. Thanks to everyone for your continued support.
Hehe, I love the fact that the most popular posts on Inbound.org of late are posts about Inbound.org! :-) ...Not to give anyone any bright ideas or anything... It's true though. The only exception was the controversy around iAcquire, the comments sections of which then discussed the fact that it was on Inbound.org and whether it should've been or not. Personally I find it all fascinating.
Signs of a community trying to organize itself :) We're getting there.
I'm not for the downvote, but maybe additional ways of tagging content. Internet marketing posts tend to fall into a few categories (beyond the available categories of Inbound): tutorials, case studies, industry news, interviews, rants, outings and blatant self-serving spam. I'd be inclined to click through a post that had +6 votes and was labeled "tutorials" than a +17 post labeled "advertisement" by the community. But I guess that's also what the flag feature is for :)
There definitely needs to be more upvotes. There isn't hundreds of high quality inbound marketing posts on a given day. You can't expect inbound.org to run like Reddit. The people who use the site regularly should actively vote an article they read up if they think it is good content, at least until there are more members to take the burden of quality control off of a few. I like inbound, these aren't your normal popular blogs on here, and it's usually content that I'm not going to find otherwise. This site should really be SEOcontent.org, it's obvious that the readers prefer posts on SEO. It's also unclear of the skill level here, and what difficulty level represents the readers. I have a great SEO article from this week, but withheld it because even though it covers something an average inbound marketer may not know, a beginner SEO should and would know it already. Even though I read SEO articles, about half of my general community (which could be summed up nicely as an inbound marketing community) does not. You may want to extend your marketing to other disciplines if you want to make it truly an inbound marketing site - then there may be enough popular content among the readers to make sure that "What's Hot" changes daily. Then again, how many SEOs want to read articles about wooing users on Pinterest? All questions that the community has to figure out together.