The psychology of Praise it! or Skip it

As a system administrator I can see how people praise the cosplay they see. I can also see the stream of praise they provide. (The user itself remains anonymous, of course.). So I can see if a user doles out 1s only. Which has led me to think about the way we praise cosplay on COS or NOT. Here are my observations.

1. The vast majority of people takes their time and provides an honest opinion about a photo. I can see that in a stream of 7, 5, 10, 8, 5, …
2. Some people want to look at photos only and not think about how much they like the cosplay they see, so they go skip it, skip it, skip it, skip it, …
3. Some people seem to settle on one opinion quickly and just keep clicking it, so it looks like 7, 7, 7, 7, …
4. And a small number of people just goes 1, 1, 1, 1, …

Behavior 4 may look highly obnoxious, but it doesn’t matter in the end: Those are too few people, and they’ll get overruled by the majority of people who put in an honest opinion. What can happen, of course, is that the initial praise a photo receives is skewed if a troll passes by who goes 1, 1, 1, 1, … But over time the COS or NOT community will correct this.

What about behavior 3? While not necessarily annoying, it still doesn’t look like an honest vote. One of you pointed out to me that “skip it” doesn’t show how a photo got rated. That’s correct, and we did it on purpose: We wanted to push users towards putting in an honest vote. It now looks like this was a stupid idea, and people go x, x, x, x, … just to see how other people praised a photo without having to have an opinion.

So thanks to the person who pointed this out to us! Thanks to you we’ll change “skip it” to show the praise for the skipped photo in our next release of COS or NOT. (But feel free to use this blog next time rather than email.)

Please keep the feedback coming!