Get Your Vote On
by lacy - September 25th, 2008
In the spirit of all the change and reform being bandied about this election season, we here at Kluster have decided that the best way to bring it about is not through pontification, but by taking a stand, throwing something against the wall and seeing if it sticks. Evolution, baby. As William Edwards Deming, famed statistician and arbiter of productivity improvement, once said:
“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
We’ve been paying close attention to everything that you all have said about our belove
d little baby NameThis and the winners produced by the investing system and algorithm currently in place. First and foremost, thank you. Thank you for all the thoughtful feedback and criticism you’ve shared with us. You’ve challenged us to rethink what we’ve done and change it (blind submissions, uniqueness filters, naming speed limits, etc.) as we collectively gained a better understanding of klusterbot and its whims. Without you, it’s just a few of us stuck in a Ben Kaufman karaoke echo chamber.
That said, we’ve been busier than a one legged arse kicker reconfiguring the klusterbot and I want to take a moment to introduce to you what we hope will be an improvement not only to the NameThis experience but also to the quality of winning names. In a nutshell, we’re scrapping watts and the investing scheme in its entirety and replacing it with a brand spanking new voting system which is intended to facilitate a more democratic process by which names are selected and their supporters compensated for their work.
First a few words about the decision to replace watts and investing. What we liked about it was the inherent risk-reward decision making that it forced users to engage in. Earning a big reward required putting up a large stake of watts in a name. Smaller investments yielded smaller returns, much like the real world. The problem though arose from the fact that (a) only three winners were chosen per project and (b) if you invested in a losing name, you lost your watts.
With hundreds of names being submitted, it was very difficult to consistently invest in a winning name given the sheer quantity of choices. Over time, unless you were exceptionally good at picking winners (or piling on to Troy’s names), your watts disappeared and you were effectively out of the game. What we saw was a disappearing middle class, a population of users being quickly divided into the have-watts versus the have-watt-nots. And when relying on our community to parse and validate the suggested names, we found that the more users playing the game, the better. Thus the decision to switch to a cumulative voting system.
The way it works is simple. For each project, you get 10 times the number of winners in votes to allocate as you wish across the names submitted (for namethis, that would be 30). You can put up one vote each for 30 names in order to spread your risk, or you can really show your support for a name by throwing all 30 of your votes at it. Any permutation in between these two extremes is also possible. They are your votes. Exercise them as you please. Oh, and change them as much as you want until the polls close (i.e. the project ends). You, literally, have nothing to lose and only ca$h to gain.
Once a project ends, the votes are tallied and the names with the most are declared the winners. In terms of rewards, what you earn for supporting a winning name is tied directly to how many votes you put at risk supporting it. If you bet the bank and throw all 30 of your votes at a winning name, your reward will be much greater than if you had played it safe with just a single vote. This, we feel, evens the playing field and encourages greater participation while still preserving the risk-reward structure of watt investing.
Now, for all of you who have had success and earned some watts, don’t fret over them going away. We are also introducing a new system of experience points that tracks your namethis performance much as watts did in the old system … and we’ve even been so kind as to convert your watts for you. The more winning names you submit and support, the more points you get. In time we will be adding new features such as leaderboards and influence levels to namethis in order to bubble up the awesomest of the awesome and reward them for kicking so much bootay.
So, enough words for now. My attention span is waning and caffeine consumption is imminent. Kick this new system around, rock the vote, and earn some cash. As always, spammers and gamers will have a special spot reserved for them on the sole of my shoe when I kick them off the internets. The rest of you, we love unconditionally.
Now go make a difference … and vote.
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- nicolas Acosta: How can I change my password, I had my mac stolen and it had my password saved!!!!!! I would really appreciate any help as soon
- Brad: 5. The NameThis website is in dire need of a FAQ, and probably a forum as well. I have had a hell of
- Brad: 4. In regards to duplicates, I agree with others that this creates a bit of a problem. If the winners were solely determined
- Brad: 3. I've read a bit about the 'blind submissions' and I'm guessing that this is a feature that has subsequently been removed? Like
wow…. cool!! Runs off to see what its all about…
Where’s the unicorns by the way?
how we use to say here in Spain: “a por elllllooooooooooossssssssss”
Cool !!!
I tried it already and the new system us amazing
So the winnings of every project can be different now ? cool xDD
Will we get Experience Points for the winning names that we chose and suggested in the past? I think those 2 things show more about your contribution to NameThis than mere Watts. Because I only had a few watts left, I now only have 32 Experience Points. I feel like I was punished for using my watts.
@justtin that’s an interesting point. My initial reaction was to say that you’re absolutely right, but after thinking about it more, by the previous rules of the game, you were rewarded with watts. What you did with em is kinda on you. Any other opinions on this? My minds not made up either way.
@matt
wasn’t the cumulative watts counted as well ?
I think that since experience points, are experience points of staying here in Kluster I think that would be a better mirror of our experience here in kluster.
Those watts were earned and just lost subsequently.
well that was part of our reasoning to make the change to begin with (the cumulative nature of experience that wouldn’t be “gambled”), but you could also make the case that under the old rules, successful investing would also be a measure of experience and would be reflected by losses of watts as well as earned watts. Still unconvinced either way.
But in namethis it becomes hard to win watts, if you invest watts in good names (in your perspective) it is because you think it is good, if the community thinks otherwise you lose those watts so i think it is unfair if investing in watts you think are good is not part of the kluster experience and as justin said, it is like punishing those who invested in names that didn’t pass the community.
Of course the other reasoning is that, the kluster experience is a community experience.
But then again, I have no clams on the current system as long as everyone is given equal chances to earn, collaborate and equal chances to gain recognition…except maybe for troy who is leading the pack by a looooooong way xDDDD
May I ask a question, or is the slap-Stacy-on-the-wrist-with-a-ruler-fest still ongoing? Just want to be sure I have this straight. So everyone (anyone) can come online and use his/her 30 points to invest however he/she sees fit, yes? The idea is to get us all investing (vs. saving watts for future kluster projects, for example, as some of us, ahem, were doing), right?
So far I think I have it. But here’s the question. Will winnings from voting be tantalizing enough to motivate us to vote for names other than our own (or to risk investing more on others than on ourselves)? In the past, the risk for voting was great (lost watts) in relation to winnings (usually not even as much back as you put out in the first place). I understand that there’s no “risk’ in that sense now, since we don’t lose any watts/XP/points if we invest in names that do not win. But is there incentive, built into the system, to vote in a more community-oriented way? LIke maybe our votes for ourselves don’t do anything to help us win (just up the bucks if we do)?
Or do we just have to play around with this to figure it out?
Really hoping the reward for playing it straight is great enough to encourage true investing in the names we think are best,
Your friend (and ex-fiance),
Stacy
While I’m sticking my neck out, eyes darting around to see if there’s a guillotine nearby, I have to say that (given how difficult it was to actually earn watts investing under the new system) it seems “cumulative watts” are a better indicator of experience than “total watts at the end of the last contest in pre-fabulous namethisness.” Well, cumulative watts less invite-a-friend watts, maybe. Unless the friend was Troy.
Hmmm What if we limit the names that can be suggested even more for people with less than a certain amount of experience points? If ever we suddenly get a spike of too many names.
I really hope that people with experience points are given benefits, because this system pretty much levels the entire playing field even for members who stuck with namethis and kluster the whole way.
@Stacy
I guess we will have to see how everything goes for a week
I think the invite a friend watts were only the watts some people have (I know that more than half of mine are from invite a friend …though I really hoped I got the watts when I invited a lot of people to my private kluster xDDD
This is a better version. And there is no way to know what other people do. It’s ok for me
@stacy first of all, you’re out of the doghouse. We were perhaps a little punchy with the stress of the delayed release. All is forgiven.
As for different ways of counting votes in your own names, I think you have some really interesting ideas. I might want to try some things out, thanks for the inspiration. Regarding cumulative watts vs at-the-time-of-upgrade watts, I think it’s clear we agree with cumulative being a better measure of experience (part of the reasn for the change). The question is what to do with old system watts. The rules were different. We asked you to treat watts differently. I’m not sure ignoring your success at plaaying within the rules of the old game is the best way to go.
@ Stacy. Good question. One idea we’ve thrown around here is to not allow users to vote for their own names. The big rewards, as you know, are reserved for the people who suggest the top 3 names. The rest is divvied up between the supporters of those names. With everyone dropping all their votes in their own names, I can see how the results might skew.
By preventing people from voting for their own names and capping the total votes that can be allocated, you then have to make a choice of what you think the best names really are without the bias that we all have for our own names. If your name is a good one, then the community will vote for it.
Haven’t thought this all the way through so would appreciate feedback from you all to kick this idea around some more.
@ Matthew Cua
The idea of replacing watts with experience points basically changes namethis from a zero sum game in which a user’s loss was another user’s gain to a non-zero-sum game where everyone is essentially climbing a ladder, the difference being in how fast based on their penchant for picking winning names.
The zero sum nature of watt investing pitted users against each other in a competition where people basically played themselves out of the game. One bad investment could wipe out all of your watts despite having, say, picked winners in every other contest. With experience points, we are tracking how successful you have been in voting for winning names. There is no penalty for picking bad names. And you are always in the game. Like I said earlier, its like climbing a ladder. The better you are at spotting the good names, the quicker you will climb.
Over time, those people who consistently pick (and suggest) good names and take a bigger risk (i.e. allocating more votes to winning names) are the ones who will sit atop the ladder.
In terms of what to do with those experience points, that will be one of the areas we will address in future releases. Your thoughts and ideas are much appreciated.
More thoughts on this very interesting idea …
What does the community think about ignoring any voting for your own name in terms of “investor” split, since you’re already getting the monetary reward for winning anyways, and simply increase your experience points for risking your votes on the name that won? That seems to make the most sense to me.
Sorry … shoulda added a little more info to the last comment …
So if you vote for your own name, you can’t increase the money you could win by being both an “investor” and a namer. You only get the naming portion of the winnings. But you can increase your experience points in the end by being a successful voter.
I guess the issue here is whether this will incentivize voting behavior that’s truly for the best name and not for your own names.
@ Matt — Oh, thank goodness. I just hate it when we go to bed angry.
@ Lacy — I like the way you’re thinking. Not investing in our own names would force us to support good ideas that just happen not be be ours. I believe it would result in even better names; certainly it will help build a stronger and more social community . The only addition I might suggest is that, if we SUBMIT any names, we are required to INVEST all thirty points. In other words, we can’t hold back our “votes” in the hope of preventing someone else from winning. Oh, wait. I’m just so full of ideas I might be back in the doghouse real soon. But… If you reveal, after the fact, how people voted (not an announcement; available by search only), it might prevent potential point-dumping — investing in “bad” names in order to advance one’s own chances of winning.
One last point, which I alluded to in an earlier comment. There is a big difference in my mind between the name I think is the BEST name and the name I think will win. In several cases I’ve actually predicted the winning name based on the way I perceive the community to move, and have fought the (selfish) impulse to vote for that name even though I didn’t think it was the best name for the client. I know it’s niggling (probably more a 5.0 fix), but it would really help to incentivize putting the client first, perhaps — as I know you have considered — via client input or, as I think it was Shawnee who suggested, having some kind of after-the-fact tip jar where the client can give $ or at least props to the name he/she liked the best, if it differs from the one the crowd picks.
@Stacy.
That’s a good point about holding votes back to give your own names a better shot at success. And there really isnt much we can do to require people to vote. One consequence of not voting however, is not accumulating experience points. So maybe there is some way to incentivize experience points in a way to encourage honest voting. Presently you get points for suggesting a winning name as well as supporting them. People who suggest winning names and vote for them will rise to the top quicker than those who abstain from voting. Rewarding the voters in some way seems to me like a counter-balance to the tendency for withholding your votes in hopes of increasing the chance of success for your names.
@ matt
(btw i still can’t get over that we have the same name woot !) Anyway, I really support that you don’t get investor money for voting on your name.
@stacy
The idea of throwing in a name or voting is a tough choice…a really tough choice. maybe a cap of 5-10 votes for your own name is good enough ?
@lacy
I have a question, how are experience points earned in this situation ? Does a certain project have a certain exp (like killing a monster in Final Fantasy) or does the total amount of votes in a project contribute to it ? or both ?
And i dunno but, showing off your Experience points maybe a bit detrimental in namethis. It can turn out to like what we had before, people voting on ideas on people with higher experience points than good names. Though on the other hand it shows how “experienced” the namer is, i guess a few weeks of this will clear this up.
I do agree with stacy that maybe a “4th prize” can be given by the client to the name he/she liked best, if it differs or even if it does not differ from the winning name. makes the client feel they are also part of the process, making namethis an experience for them. (more clients = more projects)
@cua
There are two ways to earn experience points. By suggesting winning names and voting for winning names.
If you suggest a winning name, you get 100 points for 1st place, 50 for 2nd, and 33 for 3rd.
For voting, it’s based on how many votes you allocate to the winning names. If you put all 30 of your votes in a first place name, you get 100 points. If you put one vote to a 1st place name, you get 3 points. The risk you take is proportional to the reward you receive. For 2nd and 3rd place names, the algorithm is the same, except that there are less points to be earned.
So for example, if you allocate all of your 30 votes in a 2nd place name, you will earn 50 points. 30 votes for a 3rd place name = 33 points. And fewer votes in a winning name equates into fewer points.
Make sense?
@ Lacy — I mentioned it because I’ve noticed that successful namers tend not to vote for other people very often (and not in quantity), because the current system discourages it; if you vote for someone else’s name, you could be damning your own.
It will be interesting for you all to watch and see if everyone does invest mostly in this/her own names, which will be entirely possible now that we have a constant supply of “influence/points.” I’m hoping it will even out in the wash, and the two or three points we throw toward someone else’s names will make the difference. (I know there are people who come on JUST to vote, and that does help.)
But if I ran the world (and why not, really?), we would not be able to vote for our own names.
Oh, and I agree with Matthew Cua that experience points will likely bias voters. I know they’ll bias me, despite my efforts.
The debate is on. Go, Obama!
@lacy don’t reveal all 11 herbs and spices in our original recipe!
@ matt, i made no mention of the secret fibonacci sauce
We were just kicking around an idea at Kluster HQ and thought you guys might have some opinions on it. What would you think about rating each voter based on how many times they voted for their own names vs. how many times they voted for other people’s names and using that to modify their influence. The idea would be to make altruistic voters more influential then people who only voted for themselves while still letting people vote for themselves in the case that they indeed have the best name.
@ Matt — that’s an interesting way to look at it! And at first I was kinda grooving to it. But then I realized it’s maybe unfair to people whose names really ARE the best; why should top namers be made to look greedy for self-investing when their names are actually among the best? More to the point, this changet might have the unintended consequence of giving more influence to bad namers, who wouldn’t vote for themselves anyway. Is there a correlation between good naming and good voting?
You know, I’m not sure “altruism” is what we’re going for here (although I’m all for it in general): I think we’re going for the best names.
Follow me for a second down the yellow-brick road of not being allowed to vote for our own names. If we’re can’t, we’ll vote for the best names that aren’t ours. At the same time, if our names are just super-dee-duper, everyone else (who can’t vote for his/her own names, either) will vote for ours. It’s win-win! And we all get to be freed up of the double-edged sword of deciding “to invest or not to invest” in our own entries, or being numerically declared “greedy” if we happen to like our own entries best (and let’s face it, it’s human nature).
So I guess my vote would still be not to reward “altruism” but to do everything you can to make sure the best name gets picked. To my mind, the best way to do that is not to let us support our own entries beyond perhaps a token point or two.
Come on, klusterbunch; weigh in! I’ve got to go help Sisyphus with something!
*weighs in*
I think the idea of not voting for your own submission and being forced to use all 30 points is a good one . Big fat BUT though, how can that work with timing, as a better name might come after your having to allocate them AND how will the poor coders make that a reality.
I think the fact we have a great deal of voters now, makes it null and void having to make you spend your points in the hope that yours will be a deciding factor. Im sure the guys could code in ZERO VALUE for any points you put on your own name, and then you have wasted your chance to invest in other winning names and you cut your own throat.
/2c
@ Alison — Unless I misunderstand, and it’s entirely possible, the kluster crew has done something really amazing with the points. You can add and subtract them — take votes away, even — up ’til the last minute!!
Can’t help with the coding problem. But these guys is smart.
indeed, change your votes as much as you want until project ends
@lacy
thanks for the explanation for experience points
@stacy
Although I can see the opportunities of not being allowed to vote on your idea and since you don’t earn investment points in your own name anyway, I still believe not allowing people to vote on their idea is a bit flawed. because there is a chance that the person may not vote anymore to any name. Then people will be more inclined to “game” the system, since they can’t vote on their ideas they will either ask a friend(s) to vote for his name just to feel safe.
A limit of 5 or 10 is much better, at least psychologically they feel that their name (that they really love) has some votes in it.
and can we delete our own names as well ? sometimes I click the submit button a bit too prematurely
It’s becoming immensely frustrating watching one person being continually rewarded for the cumulative efforts of the community here. Three more first place wins to Troy? How did this happen? I think there’s a “sociological” problem within the community now that’s becoming increasingly amplified; people aren’t even voting the best names; they’re just voting Troy’s names knowing it’s likely that they’ll win the small change. At least that’s the only reason I can come up with why the mediocrity keeps winning. My previous postulation that the namethis algorithm prefers quantity > quality might not even be applicable given these new circumstances. Can you guys PLEASE shed some more light on the process by which it chooses winners? All variables, please — you don’t have to provide precise numbers. . . maybe I’ll reverse engineer some kind of theorem.
@shawnee obviously there’s all sorts of different variables at work with the new system. i don’t know if it’s terribly fair to judge it simply after the first couple of projects. from looking at the blind submission old system vs. non-blind submission, troy still seemed to be winning at close to the same rate. maybe the community really likes his names. if you look at the archive page, it’s clear he proposes more names then any other user. that certainly gives him the greatest chances.
Looking at the particular projects in question, Shawnee. It seems the community is more conservative then you are, baby naming wise. I don’t think you can read too much into Troy winning for Isaac.
I think the blind submission system has not been requested to figure out if Troy was still winning a reasonable amount of projects, but to give everybody who is honestly voting on the best names (in his/her opinion) a much more better feeling … I miss it.
@shawnee congrats on the 3rd place win.
@martin we think we’ve created a system which is rewarding “honest” voting better then the previous system. because voters no longer run out of “currency” (watts) and have no penalty for unsuccessful investing, we’re hoping this will incentivize voting for the best names over the most likely to win names.
I understand that you might disagree. Let’s give it a week or so (and there will likely be a couple of fixes between then and now anyways) to see how it plays out. The blind submission option is always available.
@ Matt and Martin — I miss blind submissions, too. I really liked not thinking about whose name it was. (I try, I really do, to overcome my bias toward faves, but it’s hard!) I’m also not sure the blind submissions were given a really clean shot; we “went blind” while we were in the middle of quite a few projects. Plus we had the crawl revealing all. Plus we could look up people’s watts and see where they were investing…
But I’m enjoying this new experiment. It’s fun to have points to “blow” without negative repercussions!
P.S. One thing that would be cool if we DID go back to blind submissions would be for us to be able to see where we had invested so we could write people and say “you was robbed” or whatever. Heck, I wish we had that now! I used to be able to check back at my watts usage to see what I’d invested in (and/or suggested!); no longer.
Thanks for considering things.
Aahchewz reminds me of Auschwitz, as in the concentration camp. Didn’t the client specifically request no negative connotations? I guess, unfortunately, the algorithm isn’t sophisticated enough to understand things like connotations.
sorry! maybe shouldn’t have pointed that out. . . i am just trying to think of other words that begin with the “A” and end with the letter “Z”. . . probably doesn’t help that they both also contain the letters “C” “H” and “W”. . . . poor little algorithm, i can teach you how to be sophisticated.
@ Shawnee — I’m going to do it, too…OnTourPreneur is brilliant. Really love it. But I didn’t vote for it because the client said specifically he/she didn’t want “entrepreneur” referred to in the name. Can anybody think of a way not to penalize (in terms of experience points, among other things) people who try to play by the rules?
@Stacy — I didn’t catch that they requested no referral to the word entrepreneurs until after the contest because it wasn’t part of the main info. There have been a couple of contests where that was the case. OnTourPreneur was pretty good, though. Oh, and while I’m typing this comment, I should mention that I think the klusterfck blog needs a favicon. Does HTML code work in comments? hmm. . . lets’ see if this works:
gah! fine, here’s the link: http://zentu.net/indie/klustercon.png. it’s 32 * 32 for now, but can be resized to the 16 * 16 if you wish.
@ Shawnee — I thought that might have happened, and I agree the name is awesome. And you’re right — it’s happened before. So when you’re tutoring our favorite little algorithm, put in a word for filtering/pseudo-moderating or even (maybe?) a little window that opens when you re-log onto a contest so you can see there are not just new entries, but new client input.
@ stacy
the new client input bubble when you enter is a great idea !! and the comments page could also be highlighted if there is a new comment(s)
I must be blind or something… I don’t notice who submits the names, I just read down and vote for what I like if I like one. Sometimes I don’t like any and I don’t vote.
I especially don’t vote for anything if it violates the client’s wishes, even if it is a super duper name….
*shrugs*