The most popular bargain hunting forum has had a hard time last week when its users revolted over the change announced by the company to the way they calculate deal rating when people vote for the deal on the forum. The change was to remove “negative voting” which according to FatWallet “was often abused and rarely contributes” to a new approach where users could only “boost” (give positive vote to) a deal. Guess what? It produced an uproar and users exodus to the main competitor and forced FatWallet to roll back the changes.
SlickDeals uses a similar voting system but compared to FatWallet it is more user centered. If you are a part of SlickDeals community you usually give users “reputation points” for the good deal they post rather than “give green” to a deal posting (as FatWallet’ers reffer to the positive vote). Yet this reputation based voting system seems to be the cornerstone of the SlickDeals forums community. Users as they gain reputation get certain profile attributes and other perks such as ability to give negative reputation to other users and access to closed areas of the forum.
The idea of voting has been so successful that such newcomers as dealspl.us, dealplumber.com, and dealspy.org have based their entire sites around it and others are eager to catch on. They have certainly learned the lesson from digg.com success!
I’m not sure people on forums can be objective enough to vote a deal up or down, which is why at http://www.daddyodeals.com, we don’t use voting. Good old fashioned comments are still the best way to review deals, in our opinion.