I’ve been party to a running conversation over at Mixx.com about voting on news submissions. A majority of the discussion revolved around how to deal with items that aren’t interesting to the reader.

One of the many things I like about Mixx is that there is no “bury this story” feature. However there is a down vote (negative vote) which visibly shows that the item is of questionable value and ideally speaking should cause a user that submits such content to reconsider posting like items (think psychological negative reinforcement). No one wants to post bad items, with the exception of spammers of course, so with this type of voting system should help raise the quality of the content submitted on a user by user basis.

Many Digg users, both active and former, have grown to loathe the bury feature at Digg. The bury feature is often abused and good quality submissions are buried and taken out of the news feeds. At Mixx when you vote down an item it stays visible, eventually showing a negative voting score. This is more disturbing (e.g. bruised ego) far more than my submission completely disappearing from a site.

Anyway, back to the story at hand. The voting discussion mainly revolved around what do to if you aren’t interested in an item. Do you vote it down or do you just move on to the next item? The consensus is to move on to other items of interest. Unfortunately, many users vote items down because they are not interesting. I believe for the most part it is because there are only two choices.

The problem at hand on most, if not all social news sites is how to handle uninteresting items. An idea came to mind about this, instead of a bury button have a “not interested” button (zero score) that removes the item from that users view and leave it visible to other users.

Ultimately, there should be perhaps three choices on news items: vote up, vote down and not interested. This would give submitted items a chance and being seen by those who do want to see such items and not be visible to those who don’t care for them.

Social news users should be able to see all submissions and decided individually what they like, don’t like and could care less about. Of course, spammy submissions deserve removal. Such items should be filtered and acted on by the site administrators or moderators.

This would take the power of removing perfectly good content away from those that abuse such things and allow everyone a chance to read everything that they have an inclination to read.

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