Popularity Voting - Post Announcement 6231

[Kyphis the Bard]

The recent changes to the popularity poll made in Announcement 6231 have, to my perspective, made the popularity poll even more frustrating to engage with. I've personally never liked the idea of giving a "disliked" vote to someone, and feel like I'm arbitrarily downvoting people because I have no option not to.

To combat this, I'd like to propose a change to how the votes are actually carried out - instead of voting one person up and one person down, why don't we use a ranked voting system? Pick three names from the list, and place them in the order of most liked (value of say 3 to the first choice, two to the second, and 1 for the third).
I do recognize being able to say you dislike someone is valuable, so we could perhaps also have an optional option to rank upto three people negatively (-3 through -1), with the option to not fill out all three slots (so you might vote -3 for one person, -1 for another, and leave -2 blank but the system still accepts it as complete).

Thoughts? Something like that would probably take slightly longer to complete, but only by a few seconds and we'd no longer have to say we don't like people that we in reality just don't have an opinion on (while still having the option to express our selves if there are actual issues in the community).
Does anyone have alternative ideas on the popularity voting?

Edited July 28 by Kyphis the Bard

[Ivorak]

I like this proposal. It solves the problems of 1) the same votes always going to the same players, and 2) having to decide which player to "dislike" when there are no active players in the list who I actually dislike (I usually end up choosing at random amongst the player names I don't know well, which I'd prefer not to be forced to do, especially since sometimes those might be newer players).

I would also like to bring attention to the karmic cantrips proposal I wrote up at https://miscellaneum.wordpress.com/2023/03/19/popular-≠-interesting/ (section at the end, quoted below). Could be a standalone alternative, or the cantrips (and the reasons given) could be included along the player names as context. This could help with creating a more timely reputation system as well (e.g., I could vote based on the ratio of blessings to hexes a player has received in the past month, and whether or not I agree with the reasons given, rather than a long held grudge or rather I think they picked a cool name at the time of account creation, etc.)

 

Quote

Karmic spell system – Each active player gets 3 blessings and 3 hexes a week that they can cast on other players. Maybe they also need to specify a category and write a short reason as to why they’re casting each blessing/hex. These blessings/hexes need not do anything at the time they are cast, besides entering the reason for the use of this cantrip in a log for later perusal in the Log Review Room. Main differences between this and current system, is that each karmic cantrip is a reaction to a particular action and that caster shares a note on why they’re blessing/cursing the other player.

For example:

:Ivorak blesses Nonavar for his guidance of a fresh arrival from Gateway Island

:Ivorak curses Ravanon for their poor trading etiquette and foul mouth