Editing Transaction costs/Brainstorming (section)

=== Rating of Comments/Stories ===

Some of the earlier forms of user contribution to website was in the form of rating and moderation information. This can come in several forms including binary raiting ("good" or no comment) or in up or down ratings (e.g., [http://digg.com Digg] or [http://reddit.com Reddit]). [http://slashdot.org Slashdot] style rating asks users to rate contributions from other users by raiting them on a scale of -1 to +5 and giving the option of attaching a multiple-choice justification. Other forms of rating (e.g., eBay style feedback) may give simple users the ability to give simple (e.g., 1 line) free-form feedback or longer form feedback.

These different methods have higher and lower usability costs associated with them. It is extremely easy to click a button and more difficult to select something form a list.

One could run an experiment that swapped in different methods of making an identical contribution on a site that already practices raiting (e.g., selecting a score between one and five) with different usability costs associated. I would expect to see an increase in the modes that were easier (one click) over methods that required two or three clicks.

General thoughts:

* Different stories or comments might elicit more or less feedback.  Ideally, this would need to be run in parallel so users were asked to rate identical content in different ways.
* Again, this falls back into usability space which has the potential to be "fuzzy" in that it has different effects on different groups of users. Perhaps, because the action is so small, this effect is minimized compared to some of the other wiki examples.
* Contribution in this case be tightly controlled so that each contribution is of exactly the same size (e.g., one rating point). The effect of even small transaction costs would be large because the size of the transaction cost is large next to the size of the contribution.  It would be very hard to measure the effect of these on similar larger contributions.
* Since the effect that contribution might be higher or lower depending on the number of other contributors (people might be more interested in rating a comment that was previously unrated), this should be controlled for.
* A very simple model might include: a select box where users select something. a Reddit/Digg style button, a text box wen people enter, etc. The cost (in time) of each of these methods would be counted in a usability study or based on the number of clicks necessary to make a contribution.
* It should be clear to users what the cost are up-front.