I am making a website with a voting system,
for some background info, this website will hold all types of information from all sorts of people. People would upload things from news, to what they did today, to things they like and find!
Now I am stuck between these two voting systems...
+ & -
This works great on StackOverflow because it is simple and all the content posted are questions/answers so there isn't really much to judge on other than how helpful it is..
But even though it works great here, on a site with all different types of things this will become more inefficient, in my belief.
But my idea for mine is
More People Should Know about this / Important this is like the vote up button pushing the content for more people..
Then there are reactions like
Sad, Funny, Interesting, Clever, Beautiful... etc..
Now With the descriptive ones, I see the advantage as being more descriptive search and getting how people feel about a certain event/news/picture whatever..
The down voting would be like report, spam, misleading etc
This would be to gather more info on what the community thinks about a post.
However, Using the descriptive ones would be nice for an all around site, the only drawback I see is that users will think its too much..
not asking how to build it, just wondering which you would prefer.
What do you think?
I don't get the downvotes, it's a good question. I've had to build several applications that required ratings and it's something to think about.
Single Choice - Easiest to implement, Like Facebook's Like, or Favoriting or Google's Plus One. This is the easiest to code as you just need to identify each user and add to the item's rating count. The problem is that it limit's user feedback and often misleads. As there is no option of down-voting, an item is purely rated by the amount of hits it gets. For Example: A bad post receives 4000 views and gets 400 likes while another receives 300 views and receives 250 likes. Based on the rating/voting system, one may think the former is the better item.
Two choices - Up-Down, Like-Dislike: Though not as easy as single choice, it is also not very hard to implement. It basically creates a percentage which it uses to rate. This is a favorite of mine on smaller projects because it's not hard to code and has higher accuracy than single.
Multiple Choices - The hardest to implement. While it may be more work to code, but pays off. It gives each item tags, which help in organizing/ grouping the items it also attracts views/visits as users follow tags on topics of interest. However, it is not a fully effective voting system, as two items can not be fairly weighed against each other. It is as you put it "helpful" not an actual voting method
Therefore when making a choice, ask yourself what kind of items you have and if you'd like to compare them to describe them; hence voting or helpful
Personally I'd use both (two choices and multiple) as they are no mutually exclusive.
NOTE: When building the voting system do not rely purely on the user votes also take into account other factors: Number of views, visitor geolocation (for user-specific ratings), age of item.
I went and wrote an entire article! smh.. While this may not cover all issues, it's how I implement voting on systems I build. Play around with options and see what works for the particular system.