I'd like to give my opinion as a lowly non-priv member. I definitely think restricting votes to priv+ is a mistake, for the following reasons:
1. The pool of priv+ users is simply too small. The low sample size significantly decreases the usefulness of the post rating statistic, even if the votes are supposedly "better."
2. How many comments are there that go something along the lines of “Stop making comments like ‘that’s so hot’! We have the rating system for that!” Taking away the rating system, and stupid comments are the only way for people to show appreciation of an image, except for adding it to their favorites, which brings me to my next point:
3. I completely agree with Shinjidude and Log in that there are tons and tons of images that I like, but don’t like enough to fav. There needs to be some level between “I don’t care about this image” and “I love this image so much!”
4. Ratings played an important role in terms of feedback. Yes, I agree with whoever said that ratings are just there to boost the e-peen of the user that posted them, but I would posit that that’s a plus. If someone posts a really great picture and it gets up-voted like crazy, we *want* people to say to themselves: “Let me find some more pictures of this quality and post them! Up-votes make feel good about myself!” Similarly, when a post gets hugely down-voted, we want people to say “Wow, everyone hates this post. Guess I better not post shit like that if I want that magical invite someday.”
Now, yes, sockpuppets are a problem. But this is an overkill solution that essentially removes the entire system. What really bothers me though is how fast we jumped to this solution rather than trying something less extreme first. From what I could tell, the multiple vote protection was a joke. I have voted multiple times from the same account on the same IP, so clearly you’re logging neither.
Logging IPs for voting has already been discussed ad-nauseum and ruled out as infeasible. The next best thing, from what I see, is logging usernames. Yes, this is not a perfection solution, as people can of course create multiple accounts. However, I think it would be good enough. The key is that voting would then be able to be traced back to users. Moderators could see something like “Post up-voted by:” and “Post down-voted by:” on the post page and easily see who’s been voting. If a post is suspected to be heavily sockpuppeted, it would certainly be possible to take a look at the voting habits of the recent voters, or maybe even implement something that looks at the voter users of a specific post and looks how many them have been voting the same way on many other posts. Then, warnings/punishment could be doled out appropriately.
Implementation would be a piece of cake. We already have a user/post association for favorites, all you need do is modify the favorite system to include multiple levels of favorites. Instead of fav/no fav, you just have “Favorite”, “Voted Up”, and “Voted Down”. This would be just implementation; the interface would just display a user list for favorites, as it does now, but maybe display the user lists for the other two could be visible to mods, as discussed above. Maybe Fav counts for +2? Whatever.
Again, this solution is not perfect. It’s still gameable, people can still vote multiple times if they really want to. But it’s still better than what we had before, more useful than what we have now, not that difficult to implement, and we haven’t even tried it. There’s no reason to jump to a solution this extreme before at least trying something like this. Does the system really have to be perfect to be useful?
