What was the first website to have an up-vote/down-vote system?

September 5, 2013 7:20 AM

I was debating this with some friends earlier. Sites like digg (the old digg) and reddit used a user voting system to determine the popularity of the article or post. What was the first site to do this?
posted by dep to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Hot or Not? October 2000.
posted by Rock Steady at 7:24 AM on September 5, 2013 [3 favorites]

I think Slashdot's karma system was in place before 1999, when they introduced meta-moderation. A quick google doesn't lead me to the Rob Malda interview I want to find where he talks about creating the karma system.
posted by gauche at 7:28 AM on September 5, 2013 [4 favorites]

I don't have time to look any further, but the links or discussion in this FPP might be useful to you.
posted by gauche at 7:37 AM on September 5, 2013

Best answer: I was invited to be a moderator of the karma system on slashdot back when there were only about 500 "mods", which was I think in 1998. I think it was the first "popularity" model, but Amazon's up/down vote for reviews and eBay's feedback system predated karma on slashdot and my bet is that one of those two was "first" if you accept them as the same thing.
posted by Lame_username at 8:38 AM on September 5, 2013

I'm pretty sure Slashdot's karma system predates them all. There's probably some niche site that can claim "First!", but I think /. was the first one that was even close to mainstream.
posted by mkultra at 9:22 AM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

Thirding Slashdot.
posted by zug at 10:51 AM on September 5, 2013

Fourthing Slasdot.
posted by DreamerFi at 1:25 PM on September 5, 2013

There were a lot of experimental group-reputation systems proposed in the mid-1990s, often framed as a way to make Usenet's increasingly large traffic volume more tractable (or sometimes as a spamfighting or moderation technique). Slashdot's was the first widespread implementation of something like that that I remember, but there were doubtless several experimental implementations in restricted settings (eg, single universities or CS departments) before that. The idea was very much in the air at the time, though usually in a somewhat more sophisticated form than the "upvotes minus downvotes" implementation you see in places like reddit.
posted by hattifattener at 2:10 PM on September 5, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks for all the replies.
posted by dep at 7:40 AM on September 7, 2013