Promises for Votes?

Hi Paperwad,

The Program Guidelines list the following as "Off-topic":

• Asking others to “vote up” a project.
• Garnering or receiving votes from a voting ring (groups of people who conspire to vote up each others’ projects). People who participate in voting rings will be banned from community activity."

We consider promises to add new features to a program in exchange for votes a form of vote-soliciting. Any programs with comments requesting votes or promising new features in exchange for votes will be hidden from the Hot List.

Hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any additional questions!

I am an adult learner with a lifelong case of low self esteem. I disagree with Khan Academy's prohibition on soliciting votes. Someone with low self esteem who is particularly proud of an accomplishment should not be barred from telling would-be voters something like, "Hey, I think this is the best project I've ever done here. Even if you've seen better ones from others, it would help my confidence if you would please give it a vote. I promise nothing in exchange for this vote except appreciation for your vote."

Or if the individual is shy about asking for votes, I see nothing wrong with an acquaintance of that person, familiar with the person's lack of self esteem, to post something like, "So-and-so has posted what I think is the best project he or she has done here so far. It would really help this person feel better about his or her work to receive some votes on it."

Please understand this, Khan Academy. The people with low self esteem are just the ones for which votes need to be solicited. Please don't make them lose interest in your site because no one knows how important it is for them to get votes!

Hi Regina,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!

I can definitely understand where you're coming from here, but from a moderation standpoint I'm just not sure that such a policy would be very realistic. As soon as we allow one person to ask for votes, that means we have to allow everyone to solicit votes, and there's really just no way for us to vet whether or not someone is soliciting votes for self-esteem or any other legitimate reason.

We do want everyone to feel welcomed in our community, and we want everyone's work to have a fair chance at being recognized and appearing on the Hot List, which is why we prohibit vote-soliciting. Our goal is to have the focus of our computing platform be on the coding itself, rather than on attention-seeking and the votes. Ideally, the community feedback, personal growth, and satisfaction of completing a project should be more important in our community than the vote count.

Again, thank you for sharing your feedback on this! If you have any other ideas or suggestions, please feel free to post them here!

Since I don't code on Khan Academy (I did it for my job for > 40 years), I don't even know what the purpose of the voting is. Maybe the solution is to eliminate voting so that those who don't get many votes will not suffer from low self esteem.

That is actually something that we've discussed before, but eliminating voting altogether raises the issue of program visibility. We use the votes to display programs on the Hot List, and without the votes statistic, it is hard to distinguish between notable/completed programs and low-quality/unfinished programs. This would mean users' programs would be less likely to seen by others, so they'll receive less feedback and praise for their work.