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[Michael]

(Pun, against the title of a no-longer-available Bay12 game, intended).

Recently, I added my fourth suggestion to Eternal Suggestions.  Since I only have three votes, this then forced a hard decision - which one should I no longer support?

But this got me thinking.  It's easy to come up three or more meaningful suggestions for DF, especially if you wish for concrete things rather than vague directions.  If everyone supports their own suggestions as I have been doing, few votes will be available for other peoples'.  Instead of a meaningful ranking, we just get a long tail of 1-vote suggestions.

(It would be interesting to hear the results of a scan of the behind the scenes ESV database, to see what percentage of participants currently have no votes registered for anyone elses' suggestion...)

Barring self-votes would fix this dynamic.  Everyone would understand that a 0 vote count still means the idea is supported by its creator.  But everybody, even those with 3 or more of their own suggestions, would have reason to scan the full list when considering which votes to make.


A simplified example: suppose we had 1 vote each.  Three people make three suggestions: A, B and C.  Objectively, A is better than B which is better than C, but each voter is biased in favor of his own idea.

Under the status quo, each gets 1 vote, from its champion.  No relative information is revealed.

But under the revised system,  A votes for B, B votes for A, and C votes for A.  Then A has 2 votes, B has 1, and C has none.  The suggestions are correctly ranked.

[NW_Kohaku]

Suggested changes to the ESV voting system should probably go in the ESV sticky thread, where all the other ESV debate already is.

edit: Oh, and as you say, if people are mostly just voting for themselves, you would expect to see a long tail of 1-vote suggestions.  Only ranks 227-275 are 1-vote rankings.  The last 8 have no votes at all.

If self-voting were truly an epidemic, it would likely be a much longer tail than that, and instead, the average suggestion seems to have 4 votes, which just means that, with the exception of the really massively popular top 15 or so, suggestions seem to invite a few people who read the thread and liked it, but doesn't keep enough attention or appeal to enough people to attract more votes.