Idea #163 – Algorithm for Weighted voting on websites!

Ever experienced an article being voted down on Digg within seconds? Or ever exspirienced not getting that quality likes you exspected for something on Facebook or YouTube?

Thing is, everybody has ONE vote, just like old school democracy, but that is not totally fair on the internet is it? I don’t think so, therefor I thought of a weighted voting system. Votes value depends on the relation, if your momma likes something you do, well, doesn’t see always? So should that be a low value of high value vote? I’d say that because its a close relation it has value, but being your mom, makes her not objective, but that would depend, if your momma in an instant votes positive on ANYTHING you do, her vote shouldn’t count as much as if it was my mom, cause she would seriously downgrade if what I had made was crap, so not all mom votes can have the same value, in other words, my idea is for Facebook, Digg, Google+ and other social network-services, is to make a algorithm that weights the value of the single vote. Let me try and give an example.

You post a picture of your High-School class on Facebook and you get:

• 10 likes from people that are not in your network but know somebody else on the picture that you tagged.
• 30 likes from friends that ain’t family.
• 10 likes from family
• 10 likes from people you tagged on the photo.

So you got 60 likes, but lets try and add value to them:

• the 10 people you don’t know, should count more, because they REALLY liked that you posted the picture, and therefore they didn’t give a vote because they like you or know you, but because the photo was of actual value to them. So each of there votes counts as 1,5.
• a regular friend on facebook, liking something you post is natural, so should count as 1, and being your friends, we assume that eventhough some of them are more likely to like what you do, we consider it to not being significant in the value.
• families can be deadly honest or deadly dishonest in there opinions on what you do, and therefore the value of the 10 family votes should depend on the size of the share of what you post on Facebook, that they “like”. And a signifikant amount of time could be for an example 30 days. But naturally a familymember being close, there opinion should count more, unless your momma is the ultimate Cheerleader, even when you suck! Therefore a mom that shouts “Halleluja” nomatter what you upload, should actually end up giving “dislikes”.
• the friends you tagged on the picture are all with a “like” approving that you posted the picture and confirming the history of your friendship, also they accepted that you tagged them, so they are in this case not only friends, they are friends with something at stake, therefore there votes should count more.

So whats the “like-algorithm “:

1. Not in network = + ½
2. Regular friend = 1
3. Family member = [amount of posts last 30 days]/[likes] – 5
4. Friends on picture = [Regular friend] x 2

This is just an example, but with the ability to mark which friends on Facebook that are family or co-workers or whatever, and with Google+ being based on circles, it makes sense to start making the votes weighed.

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