Along with the proliferation of user-driven, social, “web 2.0″ websites, there has been the ongoing development of tools used to manage the interactions of these larger numbers of people. If nothing else, web 2.0 has forced site administrators to figure out novel ways to deal with trolls, flamers, spammers, and bots (not all mutually exclusive categories) to keep the site running smoothly. In the case of many subscription-based sites, the intension is not just to keep the website itself in order, but to attract new users in order to increase advertising revenue and, to a certain extent, investment capital.

One of the most creative ideas I’ve seen is the disemvoweler. Rather than ignoring trolls (which makes them try harder), or feeding them (which is what they want), it simply removes all the vowels in their post. The post can still be read, but it’s humiliating, and it calls them out as a troll without otherwise drawing attention to them. Reportedly, it works quite well in forums small enough to be moderated effectively, and doesn’t give the mods a reputation for being heavy on the ban hammer.

On larger sites where it’s not possible to patrol every divergent thread, various implementations of “karma” have arisen. I don’t participate in any of these social sites, so I have only an approximate understanding of how it works, but from what I can tell, it’s a way for members to rate each other, the idea being that a troll’s comments will be voted against enough times so they sift to the bottom of the rankings and can be dealt with accordingly. Digg allows comments to be dugg down in a similar way, and comments with negative diggs are not displayed by default.

Where there are lists of things to vote on the process for this has also evolved. In its earliest incarnations, Digg allowed sites to be voted up. Makes sense; this is how things have worked since voting was invented. You vote for something. The problem with this model quickly became apparent: it was too easy to spam. You could bust out some schlock—perhaps not-so-subtly advertising some product—and pay a service to digg it to the front page for you. The worst part about this was that it actually worked.

Enter a concept known as the downvote. Users were given the option to to vote a site up or down in the list, and if there was a particularly egregious bit of spam, it was much less likely that positive bot-driven voting would overcome the angry downvotes. Although there are still ways to game the system today (and periodic claims of this happening on a grand scale), it seems to have been effective.

Since seeing this development, I’ve been wondering how it might apply to a democracy. As it stands, every citizen gets one vote per office per election. Traditionally this has been considered as a vote for the candidate of your choice. However, in recent elections, it’s been clear that this is not always the case. As I’ve written about before, in the 2004 US presidential election, I know of a number of people who voted for John Kerry for no other reason than that he wasn’t George Bush.

Whether or not Kerry’s views aligned with their own was rather incidental; more important was that Bush’s views were completely contrary to their own, and that whomever the Democratic candidate was—Kerry, Gore, it doesn’t matter—they were the only other person in the entire United States who could even possibly act as a challenger to the incumbent President. This is often called “voting for the lesser of two evils”.

I’m not going to discuss what this could mean for the United States in the future. It’s depressing, frankly, but nevertheless we’ve reached a point where it is considered a legitimate tactic to vote primarily against someone who doesn’t represent your views rather than vote for someone who does.

“We’ve reached a point where it is considered a legitimate tactic to vote primarily against someone.”

Although this behavior could be considered the a result of a system which is nearly kaput, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t more involved. There are a certain number of people who don’t view a vote as casting for or against anything, but as a way to express an opinion. In one sense, this shouldn’t be surprising, considering the United States is a representative democracy, where the population elects representatives to express their view for them in a smaller legislature. On the other hand, it’s not the way a vote has traditionally been viewed. If nothing else, it makes me wonder if the very idea embodied by a “vote” is not, itself, changing.

If people are going to cast their vote tactically against a candidate, it might make sense to make that a standard feature. There are a number of variations one could imagine which would incorporate both up voting and downvoting, and I certainly don’t claim to have the best version of this, or even whether or not it might work. But I think it’s something to consider.

In its simplest form, every person would still have a single vote, but they can use it to downvote a candidate, rather than voting for a candidate. At first it might not seem like this would change much (just keep voting for someone, even if it’s tactically against someone else). But I think this would appeal to a certain demographic: the people who complain about how terrible the current situation is but without actually doing anything about it.

Sometimes the excuse is “I don’t know enough about the candidates and the politics, so I don’t vote.” This may be true, but many people like this still complain, so obviously they know enough about something to form a negative opinion about it. A downvote is more of a psychological lever than anything else, but it could be an effective one because it gives people the feeling that they are actively tearing down the candidate they don’t like.

More importantly, it means incumbents would have a harder time jerking their constituency around because after a few years in office, they’ve had time to sour in everyone’s minds. As it stands, if the voters don’t like the incumbent’s opponent, either, they often just don’t vote. A downvote would give them the power to express their opinion without endorsement of an alternative, which is what they’re doing in their armchair anyway, except now things actually start to change. And if there’s one thing government can’t do often enough, it’s change.

I believe the idea of a downvote deserves a more detailed look than I’ve given it here, and I also believe it could be a powerful tool in a democracy. Hopefully some future democracy will evaluate the idea properly. Unfortunately that won’t be the US, seeing as how we can’t even bother to count the regular votes correctly.

-Ted