Take any social website like Digg or Stack Overflow that somehow lets users reward points for stories, questions, etc..
What happens is quite similar to the process that lead to the rise of tabloid newspapers that feed only headlines and no content to its readers.
Users are usually smart enough to figure out strategies to maximize their point rewards regardless of whether that strategy harmonized with the goal of the website or not.
I identify the following problems
- People will swamp more general and more entertaining questions with answers. Answering more specific questions requires actual domain knowledge.
- Getting most points is often tied to involving most users. Given a random web crowd this unfortunately means mostly generic, subjective, argumentative and unspecific entries.
As the creator of a social website you have the unique chance to influence social behavior towards a favorable direction. I think that the influence the system has on the behavior of the people far outweighs the initial seed of users.
I'm interested in patterns/solutions that aim to solve this problem in terms of:
- ranking algorithms
- expert systems
- limiting/creating ways of social interaction
- information that is provided/hidden
In particular, given the perspective of Stack Overflow, how could one solve entries like "What's your favorite programmer cartoon" become the most popular entries (I pick this one because it is a good example for the undesired phenomenon).