Calendar
Network
Feeds
- 14
- Sphinn It!
Only Voting for Already-Hot Stories...
My interest was piqued today, when I spotted one user voting for some 20+ topics in under two minutes.
Looking at the user's voting history, said user has voted for more than a thousand stories since being a member, all of which were already hot when voted for (as far as I can tell).
That's a novel way of looking like a contributor, without putting any effort in at all. Said user has voted for ~50% of all the topics that have ever been hot, ~100% of all topics that have been hot since their join date, and ~0% of topics in the upcoming list. Oh, and ~0 comments either.
There are several other members in this category. It's not a one off. What do others here think of that?
8 Comments
Comments
I was going to Sphinn your post ... but I think I'll wait till it goes hot.
:-)
More seriously ... that's a not untypical consumer behavior. Early adopters buy an iPhone the day it comes out. Others wait six months to see if it will be popular, come down in price, be coll amongst their friends, etc.
Sounds like you found an extreme example, but I'm guessing they only read the hot list, and Sphinn those. They may never even read the What's New list.
The most effective voting is the one which is done while the submission is still within "What's New", IMO. Because its those votes which would bring the submission to Sphinn's front page.
May be I need to update my motto to:
I need all the Sphinn Love I can get, especially when my submissions are still within "What's New"
For example this one:
http://sphinn.com/story/27799 :-)
I guess the question is this: Is there any benefit to having a profile in which every vote you've made has been for an article that has gone popular? If so, then perhaps there needs to be some sort of built-in dampening factor for such situations. (i.e. IF hotvotes=100%, THEN decrease by 50%)
If there is no benefit, then I guess it's just something odd to take note of, but otherwise it doesn't really matter.
I recently wrote a blog piece about this yesturday - http://sphinn.com/story/28051
Is this any worse than people who only vote for upcoming stories on the first page? If you haven't made it into the "Top 10 Most Sphunn in What's New" list by the time you've dropped to the second page, you won't make it. Sometimes you have to go a little deeper to find the gems.
Also, is it any worse than people who only vote for upcoming stories from certain users submits? I guess it's a safe way to only vote good stories without having to actually do the work of reading.
It would be nice if Sphinn had something like Reddit's "Hey, slow down and read the stories" feature.
I subscribe to the Hot Topics feed because that's all I have time for. So I'm sure I rarely vote up anything that's not already hot.
It wasn't just a case of voting only for stories that are already hot, but voting for every single story that had gone hot since they day they joined up. Voting for every story builds vote numbers, but is utterly pointless.