| You raise an interesting point, since most of what circulates about crowd wisdom these days is the Surowiecki book citing Galton's study. What you mention here is more like the Spiral of Silence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence I don't think voting in its current form is good. I am much more fond of a prediction market-esque, or virtual economy (the specific term eludes me at the moment) implementation. Nevertheless, here is a possible way to answer your question about the aim. A hypothetical case would be, users upvote in appreciation (or to bookmark), with the side effect that more appreciated items float higher, and receive greater visibility, acting as a filter. The catch is that it's to the benefit of other users. To that, I'm not entirely sure why it works (as in, why it became popular). I don't click arrows much. I clicked yours because I appreciate your reply, 3 days after :-) Which shows another glaring problem. Current voting mechanisms let these votes go stale. I'm upvoting on something 7+ days old. You will receive a point but not know the context of it. Anyhow, that's another topic. Thanks again, for following up. Don't agree entirely, but a good point nonetheless. |