Edward Andrew Robinson

A lot of this post could also be applied to the Ubuntu Brainstorm but since I use reddit (an open source social news site)  a lot more I will make this post about reddit, yet it could apply to any voting site.

I use mainly reddit, and google reader to get my news online. Google reader is great letting me subscribe to sites I am interested in. Reddit is great letting me see what other people think is cool and find new sites that way. In order to decide what topics to show reddit lets users vote up or down a link and the displays the top links on the front page.

reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web — personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you’ll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you.
– http://www.reddit.com/help/

I love the up or down vote system. It is much better than the star system for me (looking through my rhythmbox library most songs have either 4, 5, or zero (unrated) stars) and the up down system seems to work a lot better for me. However looking at just my liked, or disliked votes does not tell the whole story. I have 1000’s of liked votes but less than 50 disliked votes in the 2 years I have used reddit. Looking at a screenshot of my reddit homepage tells an even better story.

Looking at the above screenshot you can clear see that today I have clicked on 15 links but only liked 2 one of which I did not even click on. I feel that this is an important metric that reddit is missing from its stats, looking at the comments of a posted article tells you how many up and down votes an article has got. Maybe at least to start tracking and telling us how many clicks an article got is a good start. Why, well because if you have two sites one has 100 up votes and 100 clicks VS one with 100 up votes and 1000 clicks that info tells you something about the article. What this tells us yet I am not sure but maybe one is a niche article that a small community of people really care about as to read the article and up vote it (for example a colour blind patch for fluxbox, and yes I don’t even know what that would be), but maybe the latter is the release of the next version of ubuntu. I feel that this information could make reddit even better and as an added bonus for those of us who use reddit on more than one computer reddit could keep track of our clicked links for us.

Edit: This has been submitted to reddit. Please up vote it.

APT-URL is one of my favorite programs. The great thing about it is I can keep a list of programs I like on a website and easily install all the program I like on a new box, or point someone new to Ubuntu to the website with all my favorite programs. The problem is that with the personal package archives, letting users run there own repositories on launchpad, and many great programs using there own repository’s you need to add them to your source.list file before you can use any of those great programs.

My solution, let APT-URL add a repository after giving a warning of course. Is this dangerous, sure it is but we can take a similar approach to this that Firefox does, only let trusted websites add to the source.list file. So on a trusted website like launchpad you would get a message like “launchpad.net is trying to add the following repository” compared to a random website that might say “wiki.earobinson.org is trying to add a repository if this is a trusted website please click yes otherwise click no”. This would add some risk but the benefit to the user is huge. Please support this idea by voting for it at the Ubuntu brainstorm.