UPDATE: Single-stage Voting coming in about two weeks (maybe sooner)?

I think that is a good idea to award undecided questions to the answer with the most votes. This will save a lot of time when it comes to voting, but it might not always give the best answer the tip. Usually if you answer a question late, even if you have a great answer, it will not get many votes.

I'm glad to hear the price is dropping for voting a question interesting. I think that will encourage more votes. I have never been a fan of the whole charging for votes system, but .01 is very cheap and shouldn't be a problem for anyone.My question is, will the current voting system be used anymore?

What happens when a question does not have any answers voted helpful? Then does it go to voting?

I like the idea in theory but ...firstly I LOVE the $0.01 interesting vote A+... but the voting... 1. Won't most all answers never even get one vote? I cant see many people paying even a mahalo penny to insure the best answer of another...especially in the @anonymous category or the single answer questions 2.

Won't there be a few mahalo users who vote and a large group who just never cast a vote? New folks and others with .. not the best intentions.. will either not quite get the reasons for voting and/or just not care a penny to vote at all. 3.

Unhelpful votes? Will they count towards the total votes? I can see many questions decided by one person clicking unhelpful to break a tie or just to disagree with the opinion of the answer..Mahalo Answers Etiquette would be difficult to even come close to regulating as by the time the report was made the question would be decided and everyone would have moved on.. except the jilted answer-er who lost on a technicality.

Edit ~ unhelpful votes should cost mahalo money to cast.. $0.25 or more. 4. I can see this will push for the selection of best answer by each asker.

Good News. 5. What will become of ties?

So many undecideds get stuck in a tie now and if they do in this format the first person to ask another to contribute a mahalo penny to break the tie would win, not because their answer was best but because they were more well liked or popular or connected. Like I mentioned in a perfect mahalo universe of giving, positive community, and fair play this single stage voting seems great and would work fantastically but do you think the values of the entire community will rise up tp the challenges this type of voting presents from an economic and ethical standpoint?

I think I have different opinions compared to most, if not all, of the opinions being stated now. I hope it is not too controversial. Ideal solution should be: single stage voting without the minor cost.

This alone will solve the problem. Adding the minor cost is not helping but may worsen the situation. Disadvantages of putting a cost to voting answer helpful 1.

Disincentive for peoples to vote For peoples who help the community to vote (for examples @balinesecat who voted a lot, maybe hundreds per day), this is disincentive. Some may have spent hours daily to vote. Now the new system instead of thanking them, is incurring an additional cost for them to vote.

Their good-Samaritan deeds (though they receive points for that) are being taken for granted. 2. This may reduce voting.

Being good and vote for free should not be mistaken as “like to vote�. If someone used to vote 300 answers per day for free, he may not feel comfortable to vote 300 and pay M$3 per day with the new system. He will reduce his voting.

If he finds it unfair (I do good and still need to pay, am I an idiot? ), he will even abandon his voting habit. 3.

This is actually making “voting answer useful� To become “tip an answer�. I don’t have the analytics but we can see how often we tip an answer (note: not tip a question).

4. If less vote happens, it will affect number of useful answer. The mechanism of useful answer on top will be disrupted.

Alternative to ponder: (we can brainstorm on this) Incentive for voting There can be many variations for this incentive: 1. First few votes will have M$0.01(amount depends on financial decision of Mahalo) to the voter. 2.

All votes will have incentive (to voter), maybe M$0.001 (too small?) 3. Incentive for voter will be deducted from question's tip. 4.

Incentive for voter to get from future revenue of the Q & BA. For example, the 1st 5 voter will get 0.01 each for the 1st 0.05 revenue of the Q&BA. Etc….

Source of M$ incentive for voter: 1,2: from Mahalo 3: from best answerer 4. From Mahalo, best answerer, asker's future revenue.

I think this is great. But if it's a tie when the time expires? What happens?

If we have 1 question, with 2 answers each of them with 2 votes? How long it takes to get a BA? 3 days?

Thanks @vladis.

1) Single stage voting The idea of using helpful votes to decide Best Answer looks like a very good one. Where the community has already expressed an opinion on which answers were most helpful, it seems redundant to make everyone vote again to pick a best answer as well. There may be a slight downside in that when voting helpful, we know who we are voting for, and may be influenced by friendship or reputation rather than answer quality.

However I don't think that will be a big problem on Mahalo. 2) We'll still need some mechanism to handle questions that got no helpful votes There are plenty of anonymous, untipped or highly specialised questions that get no helpful votes at all. While not much M$ is at stake on those ones, they do make a large proportion of questions that don't get a best answer chosen by the asker and need to be resolved by voting.So it looks like the undecided voting will have to stay, or another mechanism will need to be created.

3) Changes to costs of voting may have unwanted consequences If something costs money less people will do it, if it's free more people will do it. In my view voting things interesting or helpful is a contribution to the community, and a public spirited thing to do. People should preferably not be charged for making a contribution to the community.

I would make the tips entirely optional. Maybe I would keep the default setting at 1c or 5c, but I would allow the option of choosing to vote without adding any tip. On voting questions interesting, I don't know that the difference between 5c and 1c will be as significant as the difference between "costs something" and "free".

Psychologically charging anything at all engages a different mindset in people, and the theory that "it hardly costs anything so people won't mind" doesn't often pan out in practice. Much the same thing applies to helpful voting.At the moment most of us use a helpful vote to say "good job" to the answerer. And we get a nice kick out of people voting our answers helpful for that reason.

Because of that we are generous in voting answers helpful, and we often vote several different answers to a question helpful. If we're being charged to vote, we'll be more selective. Maybe we'll only vote one answer helpful where before we might've voted three helpful.

Overall that'll mean that the warm friendly glow we get on Mahalo from praising and being praised will diminish a little.My suggestion here.... To vote interesting, leave the default team tip at 5c but add options for 1c and 0c. To vote helpful, set a default tip of 1c but allow options of 0c, 2c, 3c, 4c and 5c as well. When deciding best answer on votes, if questions are tied on votes, take the one that has gotten the highest total tip from helpful voting.

That way, everyone is enabled to give as many votes as they feel are deserved, regardless of their cash position. And people can also express the strength of their appreciation of an answer, as well as the fact of it.

I'm not sure I understand. ---------------- Anonymous has asked an old question One person answers it No one votes for the Q or A interesting Does it automatically get NBA after three days or will there still be a way to vote for them? --------------- Are you going to *make* Black and Brown belts vote for a certain number of questions each day?

What's going to happen to the back log of questions/answers, especially those without interesting votes? Are you automatically going to NBA all of them? What is the incentive to vote for old questions?

Besides points which don't make money but still confuse the hell out of new users...... What is the system you are putting in place for disputing votes? To me I think this will make voting less transparent because sometimes these Q/A can go past in a few hours.... while the US sleeps people scam :) Well see I guess...I'm sure it will make Mahalo money.

Here we go again! The rich controlling the vote... and get richer! King Arthur: Well I am king.

Dennis: Oh, king eh? Very nice. And how'd you get that, eh?

By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. I look forward to seeing how this works...

I like these changes a lot. Here are some suggestions for tweaks. 1.

Provide one button for "default M$0.01 vote" for both voting an answer helpful and voting a question interesting. Clicking this will result in a single-click vote. 2.

Provide a separate button for "Vote more than default amount" for both voting an answer helpful and voting a question interesting. Clicking this will result in a dialog box which will allow a member to vote with higher amounts, providing more money. 3a.

Instead of adding tips for "interesting question" to the question tip only, split the amount evenly between the asker and the question tip (unless it is an anonymous question, in which case the whole tip should be added to the question tip). This will reward people for asking interesting questions. 3b.As an alternative, add a separate button on the question to tip the asker for an interesting question.

4. When someone votes up an answer with M$0.25, this will weigh as much as 25 votes of M$0.01 each.5. When an Unanswered Question gets its first answer, start a 72 hour clock, allowing more people to add their (potentially better) answers.

Once the clock runs out, use the system mentioned in the question above to decide on a Best Answer. If there are no votes, post the question and answers in a featured area called "Please Vote on These Questions" and leave say 10 featured questions there for 1 day, after which cycle them out.

This is a wonderful plan, Jason. I know you and staff and the members here have worked on how to institute this for a long time. Congratulations on having it come to fruition.

This should help immensely in getting some of those undecided questions decided.

A bit off topic but I have a suggestion to add somewhere in the profile a list of questions that we voted for. We voted for them interesting and may like to read them later. Even more, we paid to vote for them ( little or more), so it's like paying for something and not have it.

And if somebody says there are too many lists, you can take out "unhelpful answers" or "helpful answers".

I am interested to see how it will play out and impact voting on old questions. My concern is that people may want to spend less time voting on helpful answers to older questions. This may be easy to offset by pointing out that you may tweet one question to get 10 votes.

That is my only concern and it is a minor one. I believe that this makes the payments more dynamic and a bit more fun. Now that my helpful votes have more value I think I will spend more time looking at questions and seeing what the helpful answers are.

It is going to be interesting. It will also reduce the spams I guess. Then, how do you deal with the answers that didn't get any vote at all?

What about NBA? Some times , if the answer is not up to the standards of Mahalo, users click NBA. Mahalo is bringing more new ideas.

If I don't visit a day, I am missing a lot of information. I am proud to be a black belt user of this great site.

There are a ton of highly tipped questions that have decisive amounts of votes but with no winner.It seems to me that processing the last month or so of questions would free up a bit of stuck capital and get people more interested. Splitting the money on ties is an AWESOME idea. When it comes down to ties, especially when there are a ton of votes on something - sharing the prize is the most objective thing to do.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.