[rdwallis]

Built http://www.thealetree.com a few years ago so not related to the current issue. But I'll turn the database on for a few days if people want to try it out.

The source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree

The idea behind it was that the passionate minority on sites like reddit, hn etc tend to drive the discussion on issues because the less passionate majority isn't as inclined to upvote / downvote.

So say you've got a website where a small minority of the users are racists but the racists are very passionate and always upvote racist content. You'll tend to see a lot of racist posts on the site even if the site as a whole isn't racist. And over time the passionate racists will drive out the rest.

Wanted to see if I could solve the above without moderation, while keeping posts completely anonymous.

Probably doesn't work but the idea is that before users vote you divide them randomly into teams. And then when a user submits a post or a comment the team votes on it and only if certain percent of the team like it does it get an upvote. And the passionate racists would most likely end up on different teams so they'd be less likely to be able to get submissions into the public parts of the site.

[studentrob]

Regardless of how you divide people up, the majority vote is the majority vote.

What problem are you trying to solve? I don't see any problem with people voting as long as it is one person, one vote.

[rdwallis]

Imagine a site with users who are all absolute experts in their chosen field. Mathematicians / Writers / Lawyers etc.

The popularity of a post will depend more on how it appeals to the majority than how it appeals to the experts. So the most popular mathematical posts may be posts that the actual mathematicians find mundane but that the writers / lawyers are able to understand. And this is true for all topics in which the non experts out number the experts.

So even though all the people on your site are experts the actual content on your site will be at non expert level, which will attract non-experts to your site who will then tend to vote on content that is at an even lower level.

Eventually the experts find all the content on the site mundane and are driven out.

Abandoned the Ale Tree because I don't think it is a solution to the problem. But there are definite problems with a pure majority vote system. The underlying concept that led me down this path was the difference between a republic and democracy. The Ale Tree was meant to act more like a republic where you elect representatives who vote on issues for you instead of voting on them directly.

[meesterdude]

This is an interesting idea! Why isn't the database turned on?

[rdwallis]

It got a lot of spam. Not sure if that shows that it doesn't work or if it needs a certain threshold of users before it can work properly.

The database is on at the moment so you can try it out. I'll only turn it off if the spam comes back.