Here's a few things I understand: This is not the first post ever in the history of NG that discusses the voting system. I did my homework and saw that there were over 100 threads in the forum that discussed 0-voting alone. EVERYBODY complains about it, and on the same token, it happens to EVERYONE, no matter what media or genre they submit to. A lotta people say "the voting system doesn't matter and those who care about just suck at life," but that's just a way to shut up the people who annoyingly complain and compile thread after thread about zero-voters because their grand opus didn't stay on top for more than 30 seconds. I think many agree that the voting system can be used as a method to gain advice, learn from mistakes, and improve the overall quality of everything that comes to this site, but the number itself, on the scale from 0 to 5, should also represent the quality of a piece of work. THAT's where most people get butt-sore over it: When their work is sitting at a 2.7 instead of a 4.5 because some random person that they don't even know comes by and gives it a low score because they're trying to gain experience and just haphazardly click (with the audio and art portals it's totally different, because there's absolutely no reason for the community to spend their time there, unless they need a song for their flash, in which case they just go to the top-scoring songs; nobody wants to scroll through 100 pages of crap just to find 1 song that might actually be epic but was voted on unfairly in the beginning, knocking the life out of it from the get-go). Just the fact that people have been complaining about this stuff for years on end tells me that there is a flaw in the system. I'd say before the decade's over, the people who run the site need to do something about it - in essence, a new beginning.

In my own opinion, the voting system just isn't fair. First, the fact that people can vote without reviewing tells me it's just a gimmick to rack up your experience points so that your vote is worth more. Second, the fact that voting is weighted based on how much you've voted in the past leaves the door wide open for bad behavior. It's extremely easy to get away with too because the only way you can flag people is if their work is dishonest and plagiarized; the system tried to implement protection for submitters, but it doesn't counteract the voting flaws whatsoever.

I think it's also interesting that a site dedicated to providing free media would base its system of giving an opinion on assumptions. They assume that people will be honest if they have a high voting privilege, but that's not necessarily true; people are still people. They assume that an item that is flagged by someone with "great experience" knows exactly what they're doing. They assume that high-level voters will vote for what they like, and that they control the site. Do you catch my drift? Dishonesty and anger is rampant throughout any online community (WoW, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube are all perfect excamples), but the assumptions and power that people can get on this site promote the bad behavior even further. In fact, I can almost guarantee that someone will bash this exact post that I'm putting up just because they can. It's utterly inevitable, and personally I don't mind. I just expect it because a good 50 to 60 percent of the people using this site don't give a shit about anything because they're bored and have nothing to do. They don't realize that this is a place to submit a work of art and gain an underground fanbase. A few great and popular things have come from this site that are now a part of everyday life after all, including Alien Hominid, ParagonX9, Madness, etc. Why should dishonest people hurt the honest ones who are trying to achieve a piece of fame?

I don't know what good it does explaining what could be done to cut down on the dishonesty, seeing as this post will be erased from the attention of the site in mere minutes, but something needs to be said. I would say instead of voting on a scale of 0 to 5, we could vote "Thumbs Up," "Thumbs Down," and "Thumbs Sideways," because you can only feel 1 of 3 different things when you vote for something: You either love it, hate it, or don't particularly care for it either way. The scale on the review is obsolete, because you could technically be dishonest there if you wanted, voting 10 on your review but 2 or 3 on the actual quality of the work. I don't know if this bugs many people, but when a song has, say, 10 votes but no one has reviewed it yet, or it has 30+ votes and only about 4 bothered to leave anything behind, tells me that people just piss their time away here; if a person wants to have an opinion on your work, they should be willing to leave a comment about it for your own betterment. Users should also have the ability to flag the dishonest people and get rewarded for it, which would force users to either leave a funny, helpful or critical comment - there is no reason to leave behind something stupid or retarded. In theory, the weighted voting makes perfect sense, even though there will be those people that naturally abuse it, but I think a shrunken scale would allow the honest ones to neutralize the negative effects better, especially with the threat of people who could catch you abusing. In essence, the better-quality stuff would have more thumbs up, while the lower-quality stuff would have more thumbs down.

The greatest flaw in the whole system is how fast new content cycles through the list. It makes sense that there are hundreds of submissions that come onto the site, but they only get a few minutes in the limelight. In order for new submissions to undergo a fairer process, they should be cycled through the registry for at least one day, and then voted on that way. The final score for the submission by the end of the day reflects its placement within the genre. This allows a submission to more easily be fairly judged.

Alright, that's pretty much it. I realize that any system is going to have its flaws because of dishonesty, but it's minimizing the potential for misconduct that's key. As of right now, the site allows for too much bad behavior.