UPDATE 11th August: vote quotas have now been removed.
In order to encourage thoughtful voting, caption.me now has quotas on the number of votes that can be placed in a given week.
The vote quota is calculated every week and is:
40 + finder points from previous week
Example:
Caption Quotas
There’s also a subtle change to caption quotas too. They’re now calculated with a voting bonus based on finder points ranking as opposed to voter ranking. See: quotas
Feedback
This is a new feature and is open to tweaking, so please let me know how you feel about it, and any improvements you’d like to see. Thanks!
- I’m happy with the new voting quotas
- I’m unhappy with the new voting quotas because the quotas are too low
- I’m unhappy with the new voting quotas because the quotas are too high
- I’m unhappy with the new voting quotas (other reason) - please comment
- Don’t mind either way
3 Likes
Here’s a few thoughts to go with my vote.
One of the conventions on the site that has developed over time is that it is unethical to post large numbers of captions if they are not matched by at least an equal number of votes. With a limit of 40 votes some captioneers would no longer be able to do this every week.
In any case I think 40 votes is far too low. I tried to vote for a caption this afternoon and was unable to do so because I had already used 46 votes. All these votes were ‘thoughtful’. Now I won’t be able to vote for something I like on Friday and Saturday.
I can understand why you have brought this in Chris but as far as I know it has only happened once (at least in recent memory).
Generally, I think we should be encouraging people to vote as much as possible. For one thing it keeps new members interested if a few are going their way. Presumably, one of the aims of the site is to attract as many members as possible. The more people posting the more laughs we get.
5 Likes
I agree with Dave Bryan. 40’s too low.
If I was to vote three times for each picture every day during the week, I’d need 63 votes.
I’d recommend playing around with rationing 100 votes tops a week. At least that’s 5 potential votes or less for captions with each picture. It’s just there’s usually about thirty odd captions per pic (it’s been a while since we’ve jumped to double pages)
I only say this because I don’t know if voting will dwindle, but I’m game for trying 40 if we try it out for a week or so.
6 Likes
I agree 40 is too low for the reasons above. Would a Super Vote then deduct two from your score? I understand the principle of careful voting but I think the scheme as it is could impact voting full stop (as in withholding votes so, as Dave says, you don’t end up vote-less by Thursday.)
I did a quick sum just using the top 5 voters from last week and, under the new regulations, we would be 302 votes poorer. 
4 Likes
Thanks @Dave_Bryan, @Glyn_Evans and @Al_Overy for the feedback, and to those who voted.
Bear in mind that many quotas will be higher than 40, as they’re boosted by finder points - and with a bit of care and timing, everyone can get their hands on finder points.
But let’s settle this by doing a vote to find the quota size that everyone feels most comfortable with:
- 30
- 40
- 50
- 60
- 70
- 80
- 90
- 100
- 110
- 120
(tap above to pick the weekly vote quota you’d like to see, bearing in mind finder points will be added to this number)
1 Like
I’ve always been a proponent of more balanced voting among members, but the problem with a vote quota is that it will prevent the big voters voting big, but not encourage the small voters to stop voting small. On the contrary, it will give them a reason to continue voting small.
Our regular big voters are thoughtful voters (even though they may be a lot more generous on what they consider voteworthy). It’s actually the regular small voters that sporadically go on thoughtless click-fests. Unfortunately, a vote quota won’t affect them. In fact, they’ll probably welcome it.
That said, I do think more thoughtful voting in general would be a plus. There is a lot of voting for dupes or very similar themes that I think could be avoided. So I’m in favour of some sort of vote quota. I just don’t think it will worry the worst of the voters.
As to how to encourage the small voters to vote more generously and thoughtfully, I have no idea. Algorithms cannot easily detect rubbish voters, even if they stand out like dog’s balls to us as humans. Moderators could sanction poor voters, but put humans in the loop and things become subjective…
I don’t think there’s an easy solution, and sadly I doubt the rubbish voters will have the personality types that will allow them to start thinking about other people and voting with more consideration.
6 Likes
I agree with you James, and very well put. There’s definitely a danger of putting people off voting, and that would hurt the site.
The problem I’m trying to tackle here is blocks of scattergun voting that devalue the psychological reward of receiving votes.
There haven’t been many episodes of this until recently, but I heard from a captioneer this morning who was excited to see her score rise, but then felt disappointed when she realised the votes were part of an obviously indiscriminate block from the same voter. The votes came so fast, the voter couldn’t have even read the captions.
I think the finder points algorithm works well (with some caveats). It’s consistent, in that the same people tend to do well every week. And those who vote indiscriminately are readily identified by the algorithm.
2 Likes
For sure, Chris, the Finder Point algorithm works very well in identifying the best voters, I’m just not sure it will necessarily identify the worst. Indiscriminate voters presumably need only throw their votes at those captions that already have votes to circumvent being identified under the Finder Point system.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree that those with the best Finder Points should be given the most voting power.
2 Likes
I’ll try to ensure supervotes don’t subtract from vote quotas, as there’s already a quota system for supervotes themselves.
1 Like
There seems to be a strong tendency for people to vote a lot at the very beginning of each contest and after that not much at all. For a caption to win you have to get a lot of votes right away at the start of the contest. Captions added later have less chance of being seen at all. Maybe there is some way to counteract this trend.
1 Like
Chris, perhaps it would be a good idea to raise the voting quota to 150 for the rest of the week. This would solve your immediate problem and give a considerable number of us a chance to vote for Friday and Saturday captions.
2 Likes
Yes, admittedly it was harsh to implement the new quotas midweek without warning.
So, I have just set the quotas at 150+FP for this week.
Next week’s quotas will be set to whatever comes out of the vote
2 Likes
I don’t know about everyone else, but I found last week brutal. The quota has curtailed the big voters, but, as expected, the small voters are not filling the void. For example:
8 active Captioneers gave zero votes last week, and while the worst 12 voters posted 119 captions, they only managed a total of 9 votes between them.
That’s just rubbish. Perhaps the vote quota should be raised (at least temporarily) until some way can be found to get the small voters to contribute?
5 Likes
I’ve just seen quotas have been set at 40, which I didn’t expect as I thought I’d set them to 80 - I’ll get that sorted.
The issue of indiscriminate voting seems to have cleared up in recent weeks, so perhaps we should set the vote quota higher, say, 100?
- Less than 80
- 80
- 100
- More than 100
- Don’t mind
1 Like
I couldn’t agree more. I have just returned from a couple of years break. Why did I have a break?..because of the low levels of voting across the board. It is disappointing to see the top captions maxing out at 4 or 5 votes; that either says the pictures are poor, the captions are poor OR people are not voting. I strongly suspect that in the majority of cases, it is the latter. Shouldn’t we be promoting voting, not restricting. So what if we occasionally have scatter voting, the best captions will rise to the top regardless (only if voters are encouraged to vote freely) and maybe some less regular scorers will pick up some votes along the way (which is good for retention). The site is driven by captions, the more votes that are cast, the more people will be encouraged to engage with the site and enter more captions. Caption quotas are there to ensure the best captioneers have more opportunity to post, thus theoretically increasing the quality of captions. Reduce the votes, then the scores and ratios reduce. Once these reduce, captioneers caption quotas reduce. In theory this should lead to fewer but better captions, but in reality people will just stop interacting with the site as they receive less votes and their quotas reduce. The prevalence of duplicate captions or similar themes in captions is a caption entry problem not a voting problem. All that said, thanks for you continued hard work.
7 Likes
Well argued, Leroy. That’s by far the best posting I’ve read on the subject.
2 Likes
For now I have updated this week’s vote quotas to 100+FP, but I’ll keep an eye on the poll to see if it should be higher.
Retaining people that write poor captions has a negative effect on the site though - it means for every photo there might be hundreds of captions to read through, which may mean people vote even less (it’s just impossible to read all the captions and vote fairly)
But I do get your points @Leroy_Brown, and I have just raised the quota.
3 Likes
Thanks Chris and totally agree with your feedback. Again, it does seem like primarily a caption entry issue rather than a voting issue.
1 Like
Conscientious voting is really time consuming. I often used to spend over 5 minutes on a photo making sure I didn’t miss something funny or clever. Willie, Glyn, Michael Winner and Scrijjy (to name a few) have all clearly spent many hours deliberating over what they felt were good captions and voting for them even when they hoped one of their own captions might do well. Unfortunately I’ve reduced my voting for captions on zero because I don’t want to reduce my Finder’s score, now it affects my quota. There were many captions last week I would normally have voted for but didn’t as either I thought no-one else might vote for them or there wasn’t time for them to get additional votes. Is it possible to tweak the Finder’s score so the longer a photo has appeared the less of a negative effect on a Finder’s score voting for a caption can have? Apologies to James (twice over) and Karyn by the way as I completely forgot to vote on the cacti and giraffe photos.
A way of encouraging voting across the board would be to calculate people’s caption quota in the usual way but then to cap it at the number of votes they cast the previous week (except for people in their first week). So if someone achieves a caption quota of 50 having put on 30 captions the previous week but only cast 5 votes then their quota would be reduced to 5. If they had cast 55 votes then their quota would be unaffected and remain at 50. The only occasional problem would be when someone has been on holiday the previous week but I think the benefits would outweigh this occasional downside. You can’t stop someone scatter gun voting to comply with this of course, although only allowing a maximum of 10 votes on one photo would at least force them to vote on more than one photo. Such voting is easy to notice anyway and a few polite words ought to be enough to stop it I would hope.
Just to clarify: I know a caption put on 2 days and 23 hours after a photo appears has in theory another 3 days to receive votes but in reality nearly everyone has stopped voting on captions for this photo and are thinking about the next photo to appear. I think being first to vote on captions close to caption submission closing time shouldn’t have a deleterious effect on a Finder’s score.
2 Likes
Lol. I used up my vote quota by the eighth photo on Monday. I actually found it quite refreshing not being able to vote for the rest of the week, although I’ve caught up now that quotas have been renewed.
Chris, I do like the fact you’re trying out these things on the site.
One thing I’d maybe recommend that might make things a bit fairer, would be to reduce caption quotas for those that don’t vote that much.
If you vote for only five captions a week, shouldn’t you only have five captions to use the next week? Put in what you get out.
Or reduce captions quotas to 21 a week for everyone so you can only place one per photo. It would then save on scatter captioning and I’m aware that the site relies on content. This would help in creating more thoughtful captioning as the quotas on voting were meant to create more thoughtful voting?
1 Like
