What if everyone votes?

Answer: we'll have a better president, but let's leave that to another day.

One of the most important things we want to accomplish with our site is to present the most interesting and relevant contents to our users right before their eyes. The less effort required to find the contents they want, the better. To that end, we designed our home page so that it mainly consists of a hot plicks list that is constantly updated based on user activities on our site. Of course, this is nothing new. Sites such as Digg and Reddit have been doing this for ages in the news reporting area.

But we want to do better. One of the problems we have found on sites such as Digg is the concentration of subjects that make the top page. Posts about Apple, iPhone, Ubuntu, Linux, Firefox, and Microsoft sucks make up a big portion of the top stories. This happens because only 5-10% of all the viewers are actively digging contents and thus the top stories will mostly reflect their tastes. Now what if everyone votes? Wouldn't the contents that come out of it be a lot more diverse and useful for the average viewers? We certainly think so.

That's why we have recently started to anonymously gather information while a user is viewing a plick. For example, we would know which slides a user viewed and how long he spent on each of those slides, and much much more. Of course, we never associate that information with a particular user, but given an aggregate view, we can get a pretty accurate picture on whether people liked a plick even if they don't do anything else. So instead of the usual 5% of users, all 100% of our users are constantly helping us to make our site better.