There was interesting discussion on decentralization recently about moderation (so it wasn't quite off topic): is rating easier on Hot or Not? or Pick the Hottie? (These sites let users rate pictures of people: Hot or Not? by grading a picture on a numeric scale of one to ten, Pick the Hottie by picking one of two displayed pictures.) A creator of Hot or Not? agrees with Clay Shirky's assertion that, since we are
fantastically good at choosing between 2 or more very similar things,
Pick the Hottie's bubble sort method is easier to use, though it steers the website into being
a competition, which is something [they] do not want to do.
When I used Hot or Not for a while, I automatically developed a comparative system: all the previous pictures built a baseline for rating, so all my ratings were actually relative to each other. That is, distributed ranking without distributed context is meaningless (or at least perhaps less useful).
Pick The Hottie's method would be equivalent to comments on Slashdot, instead of being +1ed and -1ed, really being "rated up," with Move Up, Leave Alone, and Move Down options. Framing it in the Slashdot context only makes it more obvious that every news/discourse/whatnot site I know with ratings uses some hacked-on numeric rating method. From the user's perspective, though, Slashdot's moderation system already isn't numeric: one can only rate something +1, 0, or -1, so it's as if there aren't numbers involved.
It would be interesting to see a news/community site CMS pop up that uses bubble-sort moderation rather than numeric rating, just to see if it's programmers using numbers just because numbers are one of computing's big hammers.
