Voting on content

Voting on resources is about the leanest feedback you can set-up for users. It provides a first step to involve users in a community.

It can be done in several ways:

• a vote (e.g. Digg)
• voting up or down (e.g. Reddit, Squidoo)
• a 5-star rating (e.g. Google Groups)

What’s the value of votes? Users may rate quality, but they might as well be voting on interest, relevance, novelty, visual appearance, or even entertainment value. Giving guidance on voting is basically a waste of time - most users will not read it. As a result, votes are a metric that requires substantial interpretation.

Extreme votes (all 1 or 5 stars) give strong signals about reader approval or disapproval. Typically though, voting converges on the 3 to 4 star ratings, and the metric becomes the number of votes, rather than the rating itself. What matters is that readers have responded. The impact is deeper than a page view, but lower than a comment received.

For B2B sites, it makes sense to limit voting to registered users only. It ensures that only your target audience votes, and also improves the homogeneity of the vote. But it limits the voting universe

Voting allows you to make a ‘highest rated’ list, in parallel to the typical ‘most viewed’ list.