Borda Count

by
in pipedot on (#3JE)
How much do you trust popular websites to maintain your data and online privacy? In this week's poll you can rank them using the Borda Count voting method.

Instructions:
  1. In the box next to each item, put your choice of rank. The site you trust the most earns a "1", the site you trust just a bit less gets a "2", a site you trust even less gets a "3", etc. So "1" is the site you find most trustworthy.
  2. You don't have to rank all 8; you can just rank the ones you have an opinion about. But since there are only 8 choices, you can't input a number higher than that (ie, it's impossible to rank something 9th place in a contest with only 8 places).
  3. Simply be careful not to duplicate numbers!
    Have fun!
[Post edited by zafiro17 2014-04-28 13:54 to clarify the instructions.]
Reply 12 comments

Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-04-28 13:56 (#17K)

Ugh, I didn't find that out until deliberating and making all my selections.

:(

Also, the 1 is most trusted, 8 is least trusted (but yield 8 and 1 point respectively) methodology could be made more clear.

It's this kind of confusion that may have led to inaccurate voting results on another site recently.

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 3, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-04-28 14:00 (#17M)

Howdy, editor here. I also had trouble with the instructions so I've rewritten them so they'll be more clear. Don't want any Palm Beach Florida s on this site. Got to say, I'm learning a bit about tech here on Pipedot, but I'm also learning a bit about voting systems, too!

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-04-28 14:00 (#17N)

...and you fixed it already. :)

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-04-28 14:10 (#17P)

The linked wikipedia article goes into great detail (with samples!) of how points are given. There is also a rather large "voting methods" section in wikipedia that give sample ballots of actual elections. I did find it odd that the name-vote from Soylent had the order swapped. In every ballot on wikipedia, "1" is always the highest priority.

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 2, Interesting)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-04-28 14:18 (#17R)

Reading the comments on Soylent shows there are a bunch of pissed off people who didn't understand the process and wonder if the thing wasn't rigged or stacked on purpose. I don't think it was unfair, just think they could have been a bit more clear in the instructions. Not good to have frustrated voters; it leads to unhappy, angry, violent people .

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 1)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-04-29 00:49 (#18D)

I understood the process just fine, I just thought it was very poorly designed. There was no amount of explanation that was going to make "rank your preferences in order, with the largest integer for your first choice" a reasonable way to conduct a vote.

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 2, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-04-28 14:28 (#17S)

Right, but for what it's worth I do think it was a good idea of zafiro to remove the language about the points in the summary. 1 is 8 and 8 is one, just no. :)

(These are the best damn (and most human-friendly) captchas I've ever seen. Was this your own idea?)

Re: CAPCHA (Score: 2, Interesting)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-04-28 19:19 (#183)

Although I looked at a number of different CAPTCHA systems, including rolling my own, I ended up going with http://textcaptcha.com/

It's simple to implement, accessible (blind people, etc), and much easier than reading a fuzzy/garbled image. :)

Re: CAPCHA (Score: 1)

by renevith@pipedot.org on 2014-04-28 19:27 (#185)

Nice. Seems like a good choice. Hopefully it doesn't become too popular; a look at the sample questions on their site made it seem pretty easy to break if someone devoted their attention to it.

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 1)

by fatphil@pipedot.org on 2014-04-28 22:36 (#18A)

But why Borda anyway? There's no way to say "1" for X, "4" for Y, and "8" for everything else.

Honestly, I have *zero* trust in almost all of those other ones, why should I be expected to distinguish between them?

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-04-29 03:50 (#18E)

There's no way to say "1" for X, "4" for Y, and "8" for everything else.
Actually, that's almost exactly how it seems to work. Type a "1" in "Your website", type a "4" in "Google", leave the rest blank. This will give 8 points to "Your website", 5 points to "Google", and 0 points to all the others. Looks like you can vote as many times as you want (resetting your previous choices), so you can experiment and observe how the results change.

Re: Anonymous Cow Herds Can't Vote (Score: 1)

by fatphil@pipedot.org on 2014-04-29 08:20 (#18F)

Ah, OK, I had misinterpreted the explanation (if high is low, and low is high - what's nothing?). Thanks.