As part of the Beta of Performancing Exchange, our free classifieds style job and blogs board, we used an AJAX voting mechanism so that members could rate jobs.
We’ve already had a couple of jobs voted to the homepage by the community, but there were negative comments about the value of a voting system for job offers at the beginning, and i’d like to open some discussion on it’s value.
Personally I like it. A well written, interesting job offer can make it to the Performancing homepage without need for me, chris, or any other admin to decide on it’s worth — the community decides (in fact, i’d like to do this for all posts, including forum/blog/etc..).
It also provides a way for bloggers looking for job to quickly scan and discard those offers with poor scores.
What we need now, is to hear what you think, and whether you like or dislike it and why — and whether we should move the system out onto the rest of the site?
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19 thoughts on “Is Community Voting on Blogging Jobs a Good or Bad Feature?”
I think the comments section are probably a more qualitative area to share with other readers your views on the merits or detractions of a posting.
A vote is a little generic (I’ve read all the previous comments here and understand the gaming potential and agree that it has enough merit to consider that it will happen from time to time.)
I think if you read a posting and feel that it has merit say so and why in a comment.
If you have had a negative experience, then it might be more appropriate to contact performancing and let them know as opposed to flaming a person or company offering a job.
this might tip the scales towards the positive in the comments area, but the purpose is to attract job postings and not chase them away with the threat of a flame out, save the negatives for an editorial review.
I don’t see any harm in the voting button aside from the gaming, I will probably ignore it myself.
Io parlare Italiano perfetto!
Si vous voulez parelez en Francais je fait ca.
Horigato!
And for secrets I still have some funny Kraut dialects and my old Enigma.
Moin Moin!
ROTFLMAO. Funny guy!! After I finishing listening to language podcasts I downloaded and play on my iPod while sleeping, the only posts you’ll see in exchange will be in French, Italian and Japanese. So better start learning a new language, Markus, or you’ll never be able to stay at the top of the Performancing points list.
Hey, it’s moderated voting (remember the Digg conspiracy). Raj is deleting everything he likes and sends those guys links to his e-books “Hundred Hot Hints to get high on Exchange” and “Five number money transfer made easy”.
Just kidding …
Just vote or don’t and we will see where it will get us.
I think the voting feature is more adequate to other articles than for exchange posts. It is dificult to vote for a job post.
I think that if the feature itself can only be used by performancing user then it is ok, and that having the JobBoard
free while it´s in beta is a great thing too.
I don´t know if a post about performancing exchange itself counts as highly relevant but here it is:
http://bloggeratto.blogspot.com/2006/08/performancig-exchange-your-blogging.html
I’d have the Exchange RSS Feed updating on the inside of my eyelids.
Promoting Exchange ads to the main blog is a nice touch, but any blogger looking for work shouldn’t need it.
Your concerns are valid, Brian and TDavid. I think the primary reason for the mechanism is to an alternate way for posts to “automatically” end up on the Performancing home page, based on the number of people who voted on it. Sure, there’s a chance of gaming, but there are two moderators (Ahmed and myself) and Chris and Nick keep an eye out as well. If an exchange posting gets gamed, it gets gone
I agree with Jed. I vote for those posts that I think might be a good blogging gig for someone. However, even if I like it for myself, I vote for it anyway. Fact is, the blogosphere is too segregated, and helping fellow bloggers is a good thing. What goes around comes around, right?
The obvious gaming concerns that others have pointed out aside, I wouldn’t find votes a helpful piece of information for either side.
If I was listing a job, having my listing appear highly when relevant would be my #1 interest as far as the listing part goes. People tend to look at the first page or first few items as we’ve learned, so if your job was page two or buried because you didn’t have as many friends or fans voting it up, then that’s a losing situation for the employer and the prospective employee. Seems like a counter goal to finding the right candidate for the job.
On the other side, if I was looking for employment, I’d be much more interested in the job specs, requirements and duties and the company offering the job than whether performancing readers voted them up.
No offense to the voting skills of fellow performancing readers or the site moderators as I’m sure they’d do a decent job keeping it clean, this just seems like a feature for the sake of a feature to me, not one that makes a huge amount of real world practical sense.
My 2 1/2 rusted pennies.
Like I said, just throwing it out there.
I say vote for the obscure stuff too, since that would really help the one blogger who is perfectly qualified for it.
Brian brings up a good point.
The way I see it, while I might not be interested in a certain job posting, or am not qualified, I vote for the ones I think look like a good idea and would benefit someone like me who was looking for a job.
True, for the actual job hunters, you want to get there first to get the job. But for the job poster, I think the voting should work .
these systems tend to get ‘played’. At the moment it’s fine but if the site becomes as popular as you’d like to think it could – then voting is always open to gaming and difficult to stop in those circumstances. Nice problem to have though.
might I not want to bury the listing instead, to decrease competition?
Are only the looky-loos voting? Would a real candidate say “Hey everyone, this is great, let me make it more prominent so everyone can come compete with me?”
It doesn’t work that way in other industries.
If not, is voting in this context a real indicator of actual relevancy? Or is it just a popularity contest that doesn’t translate to value like it can with other information?
And wouldn’t the real niche opportunities that appeal to maybe only one blogger get lost in the shuffle?
Just wondering.
Agreed, I like it for exchange as well, kind of gives a poster incentive to create a good, clear, well formed post as discussed earlier today.
Thinking of future voting, I’m not convinced forums posts should be voteable, but maybe blog entries should? That way, say I blog about something kick-ass, people like it, then it makes the front page.
+1
Nice voting style Chris 🙂
Despite my first fuzzy feeling about it the votes make sense as there is a function behind it as Nick explains it.
I like to vote articles to the homepage 🙂
Well unlike some other sites that feature voting we are pretty up front about the human editors who are watching like hawks for any “errant” voting/posts …
I think that it is a good system, and I imagine that I will keep thinking it is a good system until somebody gets around to gaming it.
Personally I like it, getting to the homepage by reader votes is a good way for the good jobs to get a little bit extra exposure. It is you guys who will fill these positions so should be you that get to decide which get homepaged right?
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