Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It(theapeiron.co.uk)
theapeiron.co.uk
Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
https://theapeiron.co.uk/please-bring-back-our-downvotes-society-desperately-needs-it-5119e8d7547c
553 comments
> In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion
I wish I saw more consensus - things that are agreed upon by multiple sides - but in practice I tend to see a tyranny of the majority - whoever can win the upvote vs. downvote contest. The winning side rises to the top, while dissenting voices are silenced.
One sensible thing that I thought HN did but I don't see immediately in the guidelines is to suggest that downvoting isn't supposed to be a "dislike" button but is intended for comments that are spam, trolling, etc..
On HN, the first post to gather a lot of replies also seems to rise to the top.
I wish I saw more consensus - things that are agreed upon by multiple sides - but in practice I tend to see a tyranny of the majority - whoever can win the upvote vs. downvote contest. The winning side rises to the top, while dissenting voices are silenced.
One sensible thing that I thought HN did but I don't see immediately in the guidelines is to suggest that downvoting isn't supposed to be a "dislike" button but is intended for comments that are spam, trolling, etc..
On HN, the first post to gather a lot of replies also seems to rise to the top.
IMO there should be 3 voting options
I agree, I disagree, Noise/bullshit
The problem to me is I want to read things I don't agree with but I don't want to read bullshit.
I would especially love to read ideas with an even amount of agree / disagree but a low bullshit amount. Not just sum all this to zero and hide it. That is terrible.
I agree, I disagree, Noise/bullshit
The problem to me is I want to read things I don't agree with but I don't want to read bullshit.
I would especially love to read ideas with an even amount of agree / disagree but a low bullshit amount. Not just sum all this to zero and hide it. That is terrible.
Actually, Slashdot's system was the best, with Flamebait/Troll/Funny/Informative/Insightful options, with only a limited number of votes (they called it "moderation points") available on a given day (this was more complex, you didn't get mod points every day), and a meta-moderation system allowing to rate the way people voted on any given comment.
Since upvoting presumably promotes a post, and "noise/bullshit" presumably penalizes it, what would "I disagree" actually do?
You might say that HN already has this system, distinguishing between downvoting and "flagging".
You might say that HN already has this system, distinguishing between downvoting and "flagging".
It would presumably have a lower weight.
If "Agree" is +1, "Disagree" is -1, "Shit take/bad faith/troll" is -2, and "report" is threats of violence or spam.
If "Agree" is +1, "Disagree" is -1, "Shit take/bad faith/troll" is -2, and "report" is threats of violence or spam.
I agree. Many times well written and relevant comments are down voted because many people have a different strong opinion on that while noise/meme comments climb to the top because they are funny and don't trigger people.
>downvoting isn't supposed to be a "dislike" button but is intended for comments that are spam, trolling, etc.
That rule actually rigs the system in favor of irresponsible voters.
That rule actually rigs the system in favor of irresponsible voters.
The solution to tyranny of the majority is NOT to hide down-voted comments and provide sorting options. Big problem with reddit is that it hides comments below certain threshold essentially silencing minority opinions.
> below certain threshold essentially silencing minority opinions
These are not minority opinions, but unpopular opinions. Just because something is downvoted to hell and hidden, doesn't mean it's a minority.
A minority opinion is one which few people have, not one which is downvoted by the majority.
These are not minority opinions, but unpopular opinions. Just because something is downvoted to hell and hidden, doesn't mean it's a minority.
A minority opinion is one which few people have, not one which is downvoted by the majority.
If you have a forum with 100 people and your opinion is downvoted by 50 your opinion is (within that forum) the minority opinion.
That doesn't necessarily mean this opinion is a minority opinion in the real world. In fact it doesn't even have to mean those who downvoted don't share your opinion, they might have downvoted you for a heap of reasons (maybe you were rude, or they saw your comment as pointless, maybe they downvoted every comment except their own, etc.)
That doesn't necessarily mean this opinion is a minority opinion in the real world. In fact it doesn't even have to mean those who downvoted don't share your opinion, they might have downvoted you for a heap of reasons (maybe you were rude, or they saw your comment as pointless, maybe they downvoted every comment except their own, etc.)
Your second paragraph invalidates the first. What if all 50 of those people agree with you, but are downvoting you for another reason?
Then you might be in an (possible, but unlikely) edge case scenario and should applaude the complexity of reality surrounding us.
The truth is, you can never be sure if your opinion is minority or majority within any online forum just by looking at up/downvotes of one post in isulation.
The truth is, you can never be sure if your opinion is minority or majority within any online forum just by looking at up/downvotes of one post in isulation.
A minority opinion is downvoted by the majority because the majority disagrees with the minority opinion.
>sensible thing that...HN did...is to suggest that downvoting isn't supposed to be a "dislike" button
reddit says that too, as do other discussion forums, to no effect, same as here.
reddit says that too, as do other discussion forums, to no effect, same as here.
reddit has a contested mode that is quite nice to balance the winner take all approach that seems to plague all other systems.
Another thing I have noticed is SO, that remove "karma" for each downvote you action (Note that I have seem that behaviour documented).
Another thing I have noticed is SO, that remove "karma" for each downvote you action (Note that I have seem that behaviour documented).
My experience is that on predominantly (left) liberal communities, that a gun rights topic’s top post will rarely represent the view of gun owners.
Everything else you said resonated, but that part strongly contradicted for me.
Everything else you said resonated, but that part strongly contradicted for me.
This is because the moderators will often ban all disagreeing members. I’m not talking about trolls, but genuine and good faith discussion.
Saying something like you don’t agree that investment properties should be illegal is enough to get you banned in many parts of reddit.
Saying something like you don’t agree that investment properties should be illegal is enough to get you banned in many parts of reddit.
I'm specifically thinking of the CanadaPolitics subreddit which is solidly centre-left, where this happens consistently. Ditto the Ontario subreddit. General issues subs with centre-left politics that shift hard when a subject that was fixated on by an interest group popped up.
Likewise, threads on covid policy were generally supportive of the scientific consensus... Until the subject of keeping gyms closed comes up, where the bro-science faithful would appear to declare all covid restrictions a crime against humanity.
It's not astriturfing or anything malicious, just the natural result of a subject being a disproportionate interest to a highly motivated subset of the community.
Likewise, threads on covid policy were generally supportive of the scientific consensus... Until the subject of keeping gyms closed comes up, where the bro-science faithful would appear to declare all covid restrictions a crime against humanity.
It's not astriturfing or anything malicious, just the natural result of a subject being a disproportionate interest to a highly motivated subset of the community.
But in a leftwing forum most members wouldn't be gun owners, of course the consensus would sway towards them. As they're in much greater numbers. The OP wasn't saying it's a fair portrayal of the entire community, just a majority consensus. I feel the same applies here just as well
Even non-gun-owners are entitled an opinion on guns as they can be used against them too.
Even non-gun-owners are entitled an opinion on guns as they can be used against them too.
I disagree with people being attributed as credible, because I think content can suffer much more from heavy handed moderation compared to being "brigated" by motivated individuals.
Because the latter is easily identifiable. You basically complain that people upvote the wrong opinions, which I would not disagree with.
Credible sources have also spread misinformation. I think the current system is fine and heavy handed approaches and information hierarchies are counter productive. There are great communities without a leadership and hands off approaches. You idea would lead to "Influencers" getting more control on content because those would be the "leaders". Can be good, can be bad. I think the latter would be the more common occurrence.
But people too invested in online communities also tend to do a large amount of damage. An example would be the people at the top of Reddit karma.
If we had "credible" leaders, there would be less room for objections, which I would like to see more often.
Because the latter is easily identifiable. You basically complain that people upvote the wrong opinions, which I would not disagree with.
Credible sources have also spread misinformation. I think the current system is fine and heavy handed approaches and information hierarchies are counter productive. There are great communities without a leadership and hands off approaches. You idea would lead to "Influencers" getting more control on content because those would be the "leaders". Can be good, can be bad. I think the latter would be the more common occurrence.
But people too invested in online communities also tend to do a large amount of damage. An example would be the people at the top of Reddit karma.
If we had "credible" leaders, there would be less room for objections, which I would like to see more often.
But with downvotes, we ensure that only popular opinions get visibility, defeating the entire purpose of sharing ideas within a community.
Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith.
There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes).
Unless you are taking the negative possibilities into account, an all-beneficial 'marketplace' of ideas' does not and will not work.
Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad, then you either improve your product or start losing money. But if you could go a small market with a big sound system and a team of marketing people to loudly insist that your products are the best you would quickly wreck the whole market.
There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes).
Unless you are taking the negative possibilities into account, an all-beneficial 'marketplace' of ideas' does not and will not work.
Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad, then you either improve your product or start losing money. But if you could go a small market with a big sound system and a team of marketing people to loudly insist that your products are the best you would quickly wreck the whole market.
> Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith.
It is more than an idea being ahead of time or stupid.
People need to take a lot of cognitive shortcuts in their model of the world to be able to compute it, which is evidently imperfect. But getting poked holes in one's model is nonetheless painful. Being told you might be wrong, and the realizing you were wrong is painful and scary.
Most people do not use up/down votes, blocks, bans this heavy-handedly because of the expected truthiness of the ideas in question; they primarily do it based on the idea's conformity to their sense of identity and to protect themselves from the anxiety of having been wrong.
And this is not their fault. Polarization is ultimately a failure in integration and having a complex model of the world. But it is work, and it is painful. The more that work is postponed, the more the drift between our models and the reality, making it even more painful to catch up. The tools of discourse we have been given give us the perfect mechanisms for facilitating this avoidance, because they feed on engagement and not the truth. It is like saying "I'll keep telling you sweet lies as long as you don't leave me, doesn't matter how much that hurts you on the long run".
> Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad
Or they could be diverting you from mere hard truths. When it comes to ideas, "comfort" is the wrong metric to optimize for.
It is more than an idea being ahead of time or stupid.
People need to take a lot of cognitive shortcuts in their model of the world to be able to compute it, which is evidently imperfect. But getting poked holes in one's model is nonetheless painful. Being told you might be wrong, and the realizing you were wrong is painful and scary.
Most people do not use up/down votes, blocks, bans this heavy-handedly because of the expected truthiness of the ideas in question; they primarily do it based on the idea's conformity to their sense of identity and to protect themselves from the anxiety of having been wrong.
And this is not their fault. Polarization is ultimately a failure in integration and having a complex model of the world. But it is work, and it is painful. The more that work is postponed, the more the drift between our models and the reality, making it even more painful to catch up. The tools of discourse we have been given give us the perfect mechanisms for facilitating this avoidance, because they feed on engagement and not the truth. It is like saying "I'll keep telling you sweet lies as long as you don't leave me, doesn't matter how much that hurts you on the long run".
> Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad
Or they could be diverting you from mere hard truths. When it comes to ideas, "comfort" is the wrong metric to optimize for.
Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith.
That's where moderation comes in. Honestly, I think good moderation is better for weeding out trolls and terrible ideas than downvotes. All sorts of idiocy makes it to the top of Reddit, for example.
That's where moderation comes in. Honestly, I think good moderation is better for weeding out trolls and terrible ideas than downvotes. All sorts of idiocy makes it to the top of Reddit, for example.
I would have downvoted here instead of arguing with you as I am doing, lol. I disagree. I strongly dislike moderation ( it feels like an unfair boss coming in and using tricky stuff to avoid directly addressing the moderated party. Cowardice. Injustice. Etc…and such lousy grammatical constructions as “you are posting too fast”. Someone inform the HN bot that quickly is an adverb and that fast is an adjective, many incorrectly written street signs notwithstanding.
"Fast" may also be used as an adverb. See: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fast
I have been accused of bad faith arguments when that wasn't my intend.
> There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes).
You don't have to evaluate every comment. You just let it stand and let others that want to invest the time come to their own conclusions. Perhaps you misunderstood the comment, have a different perspective or fail to get the context. This can be true for any comment you read.
> There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes).
You don't have to evaluate every comment. You just let it stand and let others that want to invest the time come to their own conclusions. Perhaps you misunderstood the comment, have a different perspective or fail to get the context. This can be true for any comment you read.
In most cases that’s a cue to re-think how a comment is phrased or to pre-emotively address why most people’s knee jerk reaction to it is too hasty. In some cases, yeah the crowd just isn’t receptive to a point of view but most often it’s a matter of phrasing or another issue that needed a second look before posting.
Usually people think in terms of likes and dislikes, "stupid" and "bad faith" are rationalizations, that don't even need to be provided, because they can't be requested.
When the unpopular opinions are things like "COVID is just the flu" and "climate change is fake", both of which have a substantial contingent that will support them, those ideas getting downvoted into oblivion is not a bad outcome.
Sure. But it's a double edged sword. "You should wear your mask" is getting downvoted (edit: I'm using the term loosely here, I hope it tracks) across the country and responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. We need to engage with ideas we don't like, and be open to persuasion. Downvotes preclude that.
No we don't, and no they don't. If you engage with ideas you don't like and debate them in good faith, and the promoters of said ideas keep just pumping them out (perhaps even using botnets or whatever) while ignoring all your good-faith attempts to refute them, then you are wasting your time.
At some point you have to cut your losses; you stay open to persuasion by people who consistently exploit your willingness to listen, you're being played. Downvotes do serve the excellent purpose of saying 'I disagree with this and am not willing to waste further time on it.'
Downvotes can also be abused. But an easy way to get around that is to make the system fully transparent and then do cluster analysis. If a downvoter or group thereof only ever puts out negative votes or habitually downvotes everything fromeone they don't like, that will show up after a while and people can weight away those negative opinions. Absent transparency, then the incentives to game the system go way up, and system operators usually wildly overestimate their own ability to guard against that.
At some point you have to cut your losses; you stay open to persuasion by people who consistently exploit your willingness to listen, you're being played. Downvotes do serve the excellent purpose of saying 'I disagree with this and am not willing to waste further time on it.'
Downvotes can also be abused. But an easy way to get around that is to make the system fully transparent and then do cluster analysis. If a downvoter or group thereof only ever puts out negative votes or habitually downvotes everything fromeone they don't like, that will show up after a while and people can weight away those negative opinions. Absent transparency, then the incentives to game the system go way up, and system operators usually wildly overestimate their own ability to guard against that.
I'd love to see a site like Reddit or HN experiment with using relationship graphs to research this. Start with some fixed points of "this person is a credible source of information" vs "this person is a neo-nazi conspiracy theorist" and examine the networks of people who support them and oppose them, and use that to establish credibility-scoring system-wide and weigh people's votes based on that.
I mean, it would be super-biased but at this point I'm all about systems that are biased in favor of scientific consensus and human rights.
Yes, you could reverse the "credibility" of those paragon users and make a system where the people surrounding the neo-nazi conspiracy theorists are the ones who hold all the power but we already get sites like that without any moderation or voting at all so that would be redundant anyways.
I mean, it would be super-biased but at this point I'm all about systems that are biased in favor of scientific consensus and human rights.
Yes, you could reverse the "credibility" of those paragon users and make a system where the people surrounding the neo-nazi conspiracy theorists are the ones who hold all the power but we already get sites like that without any moderation or voting at all so that would be redundant anyways.
Make it even simpler. Mark yourself as the only source of karma. Then when you upvote people, they also become sources of karma; and when you downvote them, they become sinks (their upvotes might actually subtract karma.) This effect should attenuate with distance from you (i.e. your upvote is +1, the person you upvoted's upvote is +0.9.)
That sounds like a recipe for creating filter bubbles.
It is. But diverse bubbles.
I think this is still better, than just one bubble, even if the intention is a "pro-science" bubble. Because there are not many people claiming to be opposed science. Allmost everyone claims to be "pro-science", even flat earthers. So it still comes down to what the specific mod thinks.
I think this is still better, than just one bubble, even if the intention is a "pro-science" bubble. Because there are not many people claiming to be opposed science. Allmost everyone claims to be "pro-science", even flat earthers. So it still comes down to what the specific mod thinks.
I'm very into that (because I spend a great deal of time studying neo-nazi conspiracy theorists and similar people).
I think platform operators to some extent have to eschew moral judgements and let things play out, eg if a variety of distinct and persistent clusters emerge naturally, and 98% of people in a community make nazis' lives miserable for being in the 'nazi cluster' then it doesn't need any additional help from the platform operator. Of course the nazis will whine 'so much for the tolerant left' but honestly, who cares. The key is that if enough people in a community tag individuals participants in a particular negative way, those individuals can either accept it (and then be habitually ignored) or change their ways.
This isn't always a moralistic dichotomy. For example I post a lot of environmental stories to HN, which are not-interesting to some readers who prefer to focus on pure technology. I'm OK with them ignoring such posts or even downvoting them/flagging if I make too many in a row. Likewise there are many technical topics of wide interest on HN which I find deathly boring, but which I am happy to ignore.
Researchers at Stanford have come up with some results on clustering and conflict in online spaces, which you might find interesting: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
I think platform operators to some extent have to eschew moral judgements and let things play out, eg if a variety of distinct and persistent clusters emerge naturally, and 98% of people in a community make nazis' lives miserable for being in the 'nazi cluster' then it doesn't need any additional help from the platform operator. Of course the nazis will whine 'so much for the tolerant left' but honestly, who cares. The key is that if enough people in a community tag individuals participants in a particular negative way, those individuals can either accept it (and then be habitually ignored) or change their ways.
This isn't always a moralistic dichotomy. For example I post a lot of environmental stories to HN, which are not-interesting to some readers who prefer to focus on pure technology. I'm OK with them ignoring such posts or even downvoting them/flagging if I make too many in a row. Likewise there are many technical topics of wide interest on HN which I find deathly boring, but which I am happy to ignore.
Researchers at Stanford have come up with some results on clustering and conflict in online spaces, which you might find interesting: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
> because I spend a great deal of time studying neo-nazi conspiracy theorists and similar people
Really sorry to hear that. I hope it is a hobby and not your job.
I remember when Nazis where a joke on the internet. That they are not quite that anymore is not completely their own making as there are some people obsessed with them and even start to mirror them. Or others that want to build a profile about standing against the obvious.
Suddenly there is a significant group that denies civil liberties like free speech or freedom of association. Free speech in interesting here, because it seem to trigger those that fear that Nazis are overtaking the internet. To me this is very indicative of reactionary behavior towards a vastly overestimated threat.
Really sorry to hear that. I hope it is a hobby and not your job.
I remember when Nazis where a joke on the internet. That they are not quite that anymore is not completely their own making as there are some people obsessed with them and even start to mirror them. Or others that want to build a profile about standing against the obvious.
Suddenly there is a significant group that denies civil liberties like free speech or freedom of association. Free speech in interesting here, because it seem to trigger those that fear that Nazis are overtaking the internet. To me this is very indicative of reactionary behavior towards a vastly overestimated threat.
What about clustering them by upvote/downvotes patterns (I.e. find the bots) and then “shadowban” their votes? (I.e. make them count as one or in any case a fraction of the total)
Maybe they would be hard to distinguish from regular user clustered because of group thinking , but even in that case I wouldn’t consider it a completely bad thing… :-)
Maybe they would be hard to distinguish from regular user clustered because of group thinking , but even in that case I wouldn’t consider it a completely bad thing… :-)
There could be a collection of more meaningful one-click reactions ("I disagree", "This contains too many errors to address", "I don't like this person", "This is misinformation/abuse/dangerous"). The downvote (and the upvote, too) don't communicate enough.
Yeah.
"Upvote only communities" are more prone to brigading by hyper-motivated cliques or sub-groups.
"Upvote+downvote communities" are more resistant to the above, but also more prone to hivemind.
It's not clear to me that one is better than the other. It is clear to me that both have significant flaws.
Ideally what you really want to promote would be well-reasoned/well-sourced posts from a variety of viewpoints. In practice I simply don't think this can be achieved solely by community voting. It is simply too easy to click an upvote or downvote button for random community members that don't have the incentive to take a more thoughtful approach.
Every successful community I've seen has had some level of strong moderator involvement, including HN.
(The HN mods kill a lot of low-value posts. Because they do their job well, and they do it with a low profile, many folks are unaware of how much moderation they do...)
"Upvote only communities" are more prone to brigading by hyper-motivated cliques or sub-groups.
"Upvote+downvote communities" are more resistant to the above, but also more prone to hivemind.
It's not clear to me that one is better than the other. It is clear to me that both have significant flaws.
Ideally what you really want to promote would be well-reasoned/well-sourced posts from a variety of viewpoints. In practice I simply don't think this can be achieved solely by community voting. It is simply too easy to click an upvote or downvote button for random community members that don't have the incentive to take a more thoughtful approach.
Every successful community I've seen has had some level of strong moderator involvement, including HN.
(The HN mods kill a lot of low-value posts. Because they do their job well, and they do it with a low profile, many folks are unaware of how much moderation they do...)
An idea I've been interested in trying is requiring people to downvote for a reason: "unproductive," "inaccurate," "off-topic."
The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"
The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"
Hahahahahaha.
This is exactly what reddit told its users to do (only downvote due to one of these reasons) - and exactly nobody does it.
People will figure out to downvote for whatever "reason" that maximizes the impact of the downvote real fast; groups of people will make sure to weaponize it too even without coordination.
E.g.: "the comment I hate doesn't have enough 'inaccurate' downvotes to sink into the abyss, so I'll do my job and add one".
The only reason why things are downvoted is "I don't like what I feel when I read it", which most of the time is "I disagree with what this says" or "I hate people who say things like that" (the latter more commonly).
You want people to dislike things for the "right" reasons — but the only way to do this is to filter the people, not the content.
(I've been a mod of a decently-sized subreddit, and a user since 2008)
This is exactly what reddit told its users to do (only downvote due to one of these reasons) - and exactly nobody does it.
People will figure out to downvote for whatever "reason" that maximizes the impact of the downvote real fast; groups of people will make sure to weaponize it too even without coordination.
E.g.: "the comment I hate doesn't have enough 'inaccurate' downvotes to sink into the abyss, so I'll do my job and add one".
The only reason why things are downvoted is "I don't like what I feel when I read it", which most of the time is "I disagree with what this says" or "I hate people who say things like that" (the latter more commonly).
You want people to dislike things for the "right" reasons — but the only way to do this is to filter the people, not the content.
(I've been a mod of a decently-sized subreddit, and a user since 2008)
> This is exactly what reddit told its users to do
I'm not on reddit much these days but when I opened it just now I was able to downvote without choosing a reason? So I do not think it is using the system I described.
The ability of each user to chose what downvote categories they want to respect would be an important part of making the system harder to "game" (to the degree that one is "gaming" a voting system by voting).
I'm not on reddit much these days but when I opened it just now I was able to downvote without choosing a reason? So I do not think it is using the system I described.
The ability of each user to chose what downvote categories they want to respect would be an important part of making the system harder to "game" (to the degree that one is "gaming" a voting system by voting).
Reddit says to only downvote if a comment does not contribute to the discussion, not if you disagree.
So downvoting is an implicit choice of only "good" reasons.
Putting a drop-down list with "good" reasons is as good as displaying a pop-up: "Are you sure you are downvoting for <good reasons>?" - which will be promptly ignored.
Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote.
The only thing you can do with categories is display the distribution / most prevailing category alongside the score (like Slashdot has been doing for decades).
In all of this, you seem to want to control why people downvote.
Instead, examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that.
It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it?
Unless you add categories like "I think the author of this comment is a moron and I hate them", people will shoehorn your categories for this use case.
And if you do that, I'm not convinced the result will be necessarily positive.
So downvoting is an implicit choice of only "good" reasons.
Putting a drop-down list with "good" reasons is as good as displaying a pop-up: "Are you sure you are downvoting for <good reasons>?" - which will be promptly ignored.
Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote.
The only thing you can do with categories is display the distribution / most prevailing category alongside the score (like Slashdot has been doing for decades).
In all of this, you seem to want to control why people downvote.
Instead, examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that.
It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it?
Unless you add categories like "I think the author of this comment is a moron and I hate them", people will shoehorn your categories for this use case.
And if you do that, I'm not convinced the result will be necessarily positive.
> Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote.
If each other user can choose what downvote categories they want reflected on their site, this dynamic doesn't work the way you are describing.
> examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that.
It seems to me like forcing people to label why they are downvoting would be very helpful to examining why people downvote.
> It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it?
I think it worked really well? Like, I wouldn't mind a penis emoji, but it turns out we've got an informal penis emoji and it works great? What do you feel did not work well about it?
It seems like you are thinking that I am thinking that this system would...prevent bad downvotes or make people think twice or...I dunno, be better? I was not thinking that.
The idea is more about forcing people to contextualize their downvotes in a way that can be observed and reacted to by the community at large. It would be a way of talking about why people downvote without making a particular person defend themselves. It would, hopefully, add another layer to the communal sense of why people are engaging in the way they are.
If each other user can choose what downvote categories they want reflected on their site, this dynamic doesn't work the way you are describing.
> examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that.
It seems to me like forcing people to label why they are downvoting would be very helpful to examining why people downvote.
> It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it?
I think it worked really well? Like, I wouldn't mind a penis emoji, but it turns out we've got an informal penis emoji and it works great? What do you feel did not work well about it?
It seems like you are thinking that I am thinking that this system would...prevent bad downvotes or make people think twice or...I dunno, be better? I was not thinking that.
The idea is more about forcing people to contextualize their downvotes in a way that can be observed and reacted to by the community at large. It would be a way of talking about why people downvote without making a particular person defend themselves. It would, hopefully, add another layer to the communal sense of why people are engaging in the way they are.
I don't think that the suggestion was to tell people what to do, but to replace the downvote button with multiple buttons that represent different reasons one would downvote. One of the buttons could be "this is wrong and stupid."
If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes. If I'm reading it correctly, this suggestion would just add more signal to downvotes (even if irt karma they were all the same.)
If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes. If I'm reading it correctly, this suggestion would just add more signal to downvotes (even if irt karma they were all the same.)
I didn't get the impression that the parent comment meant the same, but I fully agree with what you are saying.
>If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes.
My point essentially.
>If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes.
My point essentially.
No idea if they still do but Slashdot used this back in the day. You were given karma points occasionally to pass out and you'd have to select what you were rewarding/punishing.
They still do, and the quality of discourse on Slashdot is about as bad as it has ever been.
No, it was pretty good in the late 90s, very early 00s. Then it got competition from digg and reddit, and lost readership. Only the trolls perservered, and here's the key, without quality conversation, dedicated readers couldn't earn enough meta-karma to moderate. The 'never delete a comment' policy remained for about a decade wherein every story was quickly brigaded by racist, sexist and homophobic slurs, but mostly the n word; with only a handful of diehard commenters remaining.
To this day, I prefer Slashdot's summaries over headline-only aggregators, and I wish other sites would adopt features like the mod-with-reason and karma caps per comment. But they designed the system to limit the power of moderators, and those limits didn't scale with the imbalance between trolls and good-faith posters
To this day, I prefer Slashdot's summaries over headline-only aggregators, and I wish other sites would adopt features like the mod-with-reason and karma caps per comment. But they designed the system to limit the power of moderators, and those limits didn't scale with the imbalance between trolls and good-faith posters
After stopping reading /. every day sometime around 2010 or so I've started browsing it again about once a week or so. There's less discussion than there used to be but it's no better or worse than it used to be - there's certainly far, far less of the pointless noise that took after before I left.
Considering the amount of fuckery people engaged on during the site's heyday its moderation system handled things amazingly well. If you read at a threshold of +1 you'd barely see all the garbage posted there.
Considering the amount of fuckery people engaged on during the site's heyday its moderation system handled things amazingly well. If you read at a threshold of +1 you'd barely see all the garbage posted there.
It sounds like you both agree that mod-with-reason alone didn't save Slashdot's level of discourse :)
You got downvoted for this which I find ironic. Imo, sharing an opinion also shouldn't equate downvote. Adding a comment that contributes nothing to a discussion on the other hand, maybe something like "I agree with that." with nothing more added of substance, should equate a downvote since that sort of post doesn't further discussion, the thread ends there.
I like your explanation. Makes a case for premium paid Twitter tweets to feature downvotes as part of its thread to only allow for consensus based discussion.
> Without the downvotes, the top post is often misinformation or just trash. Because a small, motivated group pushes it up
Nonsense.
A small group has a small impact, so as soon as there is more than 1 post, a bigger group will quickly “win”.
Nonsense.
A small group has a small impact, so as soon as there is more than 1 post, a bigger group will quickly “win”.
This comment should have been the article. It is clearer, better reasoned, and more interesting. I mean: thumbs up!
So post more quality content.
Perhaps the model simply isn't rich enough. Right now, we model posts as either belonging to the good bucket or the bad bucket, and do various things (upvoting, downvoting, AI, ...) to guess the "right" bucket. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that a system based on polarization results in polarization?
Which is not to say that just adding complexity is the right fix. Sure, you can add dislike + disagree + ijusthateyourguts buttons, or force votes to be justified (funny/incorrect/disagree/...), or whatever. But it's not obvious what's worth the overhead (UX-wise), and if it ends up boiling down to just finding more nuanced reasons to toss things into one bucket or another (or even a single score), I'm not sure if we're any further ahead.
Perhaps clustering is a better model than polarized buckets? As in, this comment belongs to the set of things that left-leaning people seem to support. This other comment belongs to the conspiracy theory #1 cluster. (The system would likely not know or care what the clusters mean.) If you choose to engage with the idiots who love cluster A, you can do so, and if you want their noise out of your feed then you can do that too.
You'd still need to decide what input signals will enable this -- you could do it with just upvotes and correlating users' activity across a site, but you would need to evaluate that in terms of what best supports the model (clusters instead of buckets).
And clusters aren't the end-all be-all either. A racist, misogynistic comment that also says something that group X strongly agrees with isn't going to be fully described by being in the "jerk comment" cluster. But we have to deal with a low-dimensional approximation in order for any mechanism to be worthwhile.
Which is not to say that just adding complexity is the right fix. Sure, you can add dislike + disagree + ijusthateyourguts buttons, or force votes to be justified (funny/incorrect/disagree/...), or whatever. But it's not obvious what's worth the overhead (UX-wise), and if it ends up boiling down to just finding more nuanced reasons to toss things into one bucket or another (or even a single score), I'm not sure if we're any further ahead.
Perhaps clustering is a better model than polarized buckets? As in, this comment belongs to the set of things that left-leaning people seem to support. This other comment belongs to the conspiracy theory #1 cluster. (The system would likely not know or care what the clusters mean.) If you choose to engage with the idiots who love cluster A, you can do so, and if you want their noise out of your feed then you can do that too.
You'd still need to decide what input signals will enable this -- you could do it with just upvotes and correlating users' activity across a site, but you would need to evaluate that in terms of what best supports the model (clusters instead of buckets).
And clusters aren't the end-all be-all either. A racist, misogynistic comment that also says something that group X strongly agrees with isn't going to be fully described by being in the "jerk comment" cluster. But we have to deal with a low-dimensional approximation in order for any mechanism to be worthwhile.
Perhaps I misunderstand your idea, but this clustering sounds like exactly the thing to drive polarization. Put me in my comfortable bubble where I only see content and comments from like-minded people, and I'll be increasingly unable to understand where people outside the bubble are coming from. The only thing I see about those people is ragebait about how awful and stupid they're being this week, written by other people I agree with. Even if I start on the edge of a cluster or in the overlap between two clusters, the feed will likely drive me towards one or the other.
That's how I feel with YouTube's aggressive recommendation system -- I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. It's a radicalization pipeline where I touch some innocent surface-level stuff and YouTube goes, "hmm, well, of the people who liked that, our most highly-engaged users who click through videos all day long REALLY like THIS" and wants me to become that person.
That's how I feel with YouTube's aggressive recommendation system -- I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. It's a radicalization pipeline where I touch some innocent surface-level stuff and YouTube goes, "hmm, well, of the people who liked that, our most highly-engaged users who click through videos all day long REALLY like THIS" and wants me to become that person.
The clustering could possibly be leveraged into an anti-polarization tool, if you start promoting the content within each cluster that is the least objectionable to opposite clusters. Basically, show leftists the leftist content that rightists like the most/dislike the least, and show rightists the rightist content that leftists like the most/dislike the least. I assume this system for countering echo chambers would require good clustering.
Somewhat related to this, I recently watched a video essay on VR Chat and one of the takeaways was how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet (think around the dawn of Web 2.0 and before). There's no recommendation systems or an algorithm partitioning people into isolated spaces. It's just a bunch of random strangers browsing through uncurated rooms. And, as the author argues, that lends itself to a much healthier environment where people are exposed to and more understanding of those outside of what would otherwise be their bubble.
I definitely feel some nostalgia for those days.
To be clear, it's not like VR Chat or even the early internet were completely bubbleless. But without an algorithm dividing people, it was just the path of least resistance to ... explore. Click on links and see where they go. Would you end up on some neo-nazi forum sometimes? Sure. But you were just as likely to end up on a Pokemon fan page. It was far more random and diverse. As you point out, that's different today with these algorithms driving people directly towards radical content.
I definitely feel some nostalgia for those days.
To be clear, it's not like VR Chat or even the early internet were completely bubbleless. But without an algorithm dividing people, it was just the path of least resistance to ... explore. Click on links and see where they go. Would you end up on some neo-nazi forum sometimes? Sure. But you were just as likely to end up on a Pokemon fan page. It was far more random and diverse. As you point out, that's different today with these algorithms driving people directly towards radical content.
I know what you mean. Tangentially, I also liked the experience of gaming (FPS) more when you would choose a server from a list, which was hosted by some person or group other than the game company, and you played with whoever else happened to join, from outright beginner to expert. Often on community-created and self published maps that wouldn't meet the quality standards of a game company, but could be much more varied and novel. The players would be a mix of one-time visitors and some regulars who you could expect would be on every night or a few nights a week. One such server in TF2 was like the bar from Cheers to me for a couple years in my late teens. The modern experience of matchmaking is simpler to jump into, less intimidating, but it's empty and lifeless. Like candy vs. a meal.
Anyway, back on the social media thing, I fear there is no reason for it to change. Success, for a recommendation algorithm, will always be defined as what keeps you on the site, scrolling and clicking. Success for a person, we can be fairly sure, is not that. So we will always be fighting the algorithms to try to keep our own "engagement" at the level that is good for us, not good for them.
Anyway, back on the social media thing, I fear there is no reason for it to change. Success, for a recommendation algorithm, will always be defined as what keeps you on the site, scrolling and clicking. Success for a person, we can be fairly sure, is not that. So we will always be fighting the algorithms to try to keep our own "engagement" at the level that is good for us, not good for them.
The bubble-ization I see today is less "I am intolerant of your alternative subjective views! The Beatles are totally better than the Rolling Stones!" and are more often a struggle of information vs. willful disinformation.
So many of today's "bubbles" don't even involve subjective ideas; they involve willful distortions of facts such as anti-vaccine propaganda, flat Earth theories, and the like.
The internet population itself was kind of... a single bubble back then. It was way less diverse than the general population.
Early internet discourse was dominated by tech-savvy folks at universities, and folks working in the tech/engineering sectors. Therefore users tended to be male, white, college educated, young, technologically savvy, and economically upper/middle class.
We were less likely to see the walls between bubbles because we were in a single bubble.
So many of today's "bubbles" don't even involve subjective ideas; they involve willful distortions of facts such as anti-vaccine propaganda, flat Earth theories, and the like.
how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet [...] a
much healthier environment where people are exposed to and
more understanding of those outside of what would otherwise
be their bubble
The internet population itself was kind of... a single bubble back then. It was way less diverse than the general population.
Early internet discourse was dominated by tech-savvy folks at universities, and folks working in the tech/engineering sectors. Therefore users tended to be male, white, college educated, young, technologically savvy, and economically upper/middle class.
We were less likely to see the walls between bubbles because we were in a single bubble.
I was going to speculate this could be a phenomenon of audio chatting as I've seen clubhouse described in a similar way. But then I remembered the toxicity of many multiplayer video games with voice chat.
> I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole.
I do not think it is productive to a healthly discussion to link wanting to end discrimination against men with incels or Jordan Peterson
I do not think it is productive to a healthly discussion to link wanting to end discrimination against men with incels or Jordan Peterson
Well, that might be an example of how my perception is swayed by these recommendations. There are probably plenty of people out there making YouTube videos purely advocating for equal treatment in things like the draft, or allocation of child custody in divorce, or whatever.
But if I were to watch a few of their videos I suspect I would be swamped with recommendations for other videos which are more in line with what I was referring to. Stuff made by and for men who are bitter and resentful of women and spend a lot of time online seething about it.
I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair.
But if I were to watch a few of their videos I suspect I would be swamped with recommendations for other videos which are more in line with what I was referring to. Stuff made by and for men who are bitter and resentful of women and spend a lot of time online seething about it.
I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair.
>I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair.
and another example of how such algorithms can influence collective thought.
I'm sure there are people who do the same with other equality measures as more divisive content of the same vein like "you're a fucking white male" is gonna be more likely to show up until the viewer links it with social justice entirely.
and another example of how such algorithms can influence collective thought.
I'm sure there are people who do the same with other equality measures as more divisive content of the same vein like "you're a fucking white male" is gonna be more likely to show up until the viewer links it with social justice entirely.
I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it.
But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid, and it's worse when multiple people decide they want to play that game and then the site software decides you get less rights than everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would I participate in that?
It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.
If downvotes don't matter, if I should ignore them, then they should not exist. I'm tired of sites that build in pathological behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The world is not binary.
But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid, and it's worse when multiple people decide they want to play that game and then the site software decides you get less rights than everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would I participate in that?
It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.
If downvotes don't matter, if I should ignore them, then they should not exist. I'm tired of sites that build in pathological behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The world is not binary.
It sounds like you have a lot more fear and assumption than experience here. In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted you? Are you sure you weren’t just wrong and didn’t know it? I’ve been wrong in good faith and gotten fairly downvoted for it far, far more often than I’ve been unfairly downvoted to death for something innocuous or positive and helpful.
I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it’s just not a common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an extremely high ratio of ups to downs.
> Why would I participate in that?
This is a good question, but you’ve constructed a straw man version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on how to start and run a business, for the threads where world experts and relatively famous people participate and comment, for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full side of things. Good luck friend!
I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it’s just not a common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an extremely high ratio of ups to downs.
> Why would I participate in that?
This is a good question, but you’ve constructed a straw man version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on how to start and run a business, for the threads where world experts and relatively famous people participate and comment, for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full side of things. Good luck friend!
Look, for what it's worth I agree. In my experience, HN is welcoming of my viewpoints. My karma is over 9000, so I'm not worried if a few comments get downvoted.
But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They perceive a difficulty in contributing to the conversation because they're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still a legitimate concern for them and for many other people who lurk and don't participate in the conversation directly. And there are plenty of lurkers. In my limited experience of receiving visitors from HN on my website, the number of clicks is 100x the number of comments on the thread.
And this is exactly why Facebook doesn't have a downvote button. It's trivial to add it. I've even seen it implemented in internal versions. But it only takes a couple of bad experiences of being downvoted for a user to get turned off from the platform. TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.
What's more, this experiment of having downvotes does exist. It's called reddit. Plenty of people use it. If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great. Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?
But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They perceive a difficulty in contributing to the conversation because they're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still a legitimate concern for them and for many other people who lurk and don't participate in the conversation directly. And there are plenty of lurkers. In my limited experience of receiving visitors from HN on my website, the number of clicks is 100x the number of comments on the thread.
And this is exactly why Facebook doesn't have a downvote button. It's trivial to add it. I've even seen it implemented in internal versions. But it only takes a couple of bad experiences of being downvoted for a user to get turned off from the platform. TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.
What's more, this experiment of having downvotes does exist. It's called reddit. Plenty of people use it. If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great. Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?
> TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.
I don't see that this follows. Limiting participation is not just compatible with democratic systems, it's crucial. Democracy-the-system (the thing being "saved") has long built in safeguards against untempered application of democracy-the-concept. Constitutions, "upper houses", multi-branch government, representative democracy itself: the idea that the untempered whims of the masses are not a stable basis for govt is practically foundational to democratic systems.
Downvotes are even more egalitarian than the proxies that eg govt uses to temper pure democracy. This can make them a double-edged sword: they deter bad actors from causing disproportionate damage to a community (eg a troll starting a flamewar has a sizable blast radius), but they do so by the standards of the community. If the community's norms are "bad" by your definition, then deterring deviation from them is a bad thing. But there's no axiomatic basis for defining what "good" norms are, and the community's views (via downvotes) is a principled mechanism (again, the principle behind democracy).
IMO, the lack of any accountability feedback loop in downvotes alone means that it's a tough sole basis for a healthy community. The best fora I've been on have been on Reddit[1], combining the presence of downvotes with the "constitutional" approach of clearly-defined conversational norms (primarily civility and intellectual charity) and rigorous enforcement.
[1] I have a rule of not naming this family of subreddits on HN or other fora, because maintaining the community quality is a delicate balance and the average HNer would both find it attractive and utterly ruin it in large enough numbers.
I don't see that this follows. Limiting participation is not just compatible with democratic systems, it's crucial. Democracy-the-system (the thing being "saved") has long built in safeguards against untempered application of democracy-the-concept. Constitutions, "upper houses", multi-branch government, representative democracy itself: the idea that the untempered whims of the masses are not a stable basis for govt is practically foundational to democratic systems.
Downvotes are even more egalitarian than the proxies that eg govt uses to temper pure democracy. This can make them a double-edged sword: they deter bad actors from causing disproportionate damage to a community (eg a troll starting a flamewar has a sizable blast radius), but they do so by the standards of the community. If the community's norms are "bad" by your definition, then deterring deviation from them is a bad thing. But there's no axiomatic basis for defining what "good" norms are, and the community's views (via downvotes) is a principled mechanism (again, the principle behind democracy).
IMO, the lack of any accountability feedback loop in downvotes alone means that it's a tough sole basis for a healthy community. The best fora I've been on have been on Reddit[1], combining the presence of downvotes with the "constitutional" approach of clearly-defined conversational norms (primarily civility and intellectual charity) and rigorous enforcement.
[1] I have a rule of not naming this family of subreddits on HN or other fora, because maintaining the community quality is a delicate balance and the average HNer would both find it attractive and utterly ruin it in large enough numbers.
Imagine thinking your comments are so influential that a mere mention from you will cause a massive influx of crass HN-ers into your beloved subreddits.
Lol, good one. I think it's a holdover from when the forum was a lot tinier, and discussion (especially on the topics it focused on) was a lot more suppressed in most other internet fora. While I don't understand your assumption that "influence" is required to spread awareness, you're probably right that the impulse is anachronistic now.
OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one person like you was prevented from ending up on that forum, it's worth it 1000x over.
OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one person like you was prevented from ending up on that forum, it's worth it 1000x over.
Please be generous with your comments. You don’t have to be crass to ‘ruin a place’. I’ve seen it happen just from sheer numbers. Even if the influx measurably improves the signal to noise ratio, just having more signal can make a place exhausting to participate in. Not wanting to risk any advertisement can be a very prudent thing to do.
I was being exactly as generous as I needed to be. This was a person who went out of their way to tell this thread "I belong to bunch of lovely subreddits and I'm deliberately not mentioning them so 'the average HNer' doesn't join". It wasn't even related to their point. They went out of their way in a footnote (!) to rub in the fact that we're so terrible.
> It wasn't even related to their point.
Your comment says:
> If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great
My comment did the exact thing you had already complained about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the reason for this gap.
It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly because you can't follow the conversation well enough to remember what you wrote in your previous comment.
Your comment says:
> If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great
My comment did the exact thing you had already complained about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the reason for this gap.
It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly because you can't follow the conversation well enough to remember what you wrote in your previous comment.
FWIW, I agree and I hear both what you're saying and what @crazy_horse said. My perspective is coming from having lived through that perceived difficulty and hesitancy and come out the other side. @crazy_horse isn't there yet. I was terrified of downvotes early on, and I admit sometimes they still bother me. One of the reasons HN gates the downvotes, I believe, is so that you have time to go through the process of introspecting and reflecting on how you're handling yourself before you start reacting negatively to others.
For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access to the downvote button. The result is that I think more carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases over the years where the downvote button did good things to a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time and some downvotes.
Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy and using the downvote button every once in a while, because over time I can see some of the upside to the downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other people do it so I don't ever have to.
For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access to the downvote button. The result is that I think more carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases over the years where the downvote button did good things to a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time and some downvotes.
Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy and using the downvote button every once in a while, because over time I can see some of the upside to the downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other people do it so I don't ever have to.
They’re also positing a conspiracy against them, with people making multiple alts to downvote their comments. It’s more than just fear: it’s an empirical claim.
That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more likely.
That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more likely.
And I'm not endorsing this idea of them being persecuted.
But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting privileges to accounts in good standing but even then it's not easy.
But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting privileges to accounts in good standing but even then it's not easy.
I've actually had someone message me on Reddit (years ago) with several alt accounts that a reply I posted in a programming-related subreddit was wrong (it wasn't), and they were right, and they'd be mass downvoting my account. This was back when reporting actually did something I guess, because a couple of the alt accounts did get banned a few weeks later. Later another new account messaged me a censored screenshot of their bank account with a few million dollars in it and saying some crap along the lines of "I earned this money by selling a software startup, so I know more about C++ than you".
That's only one time I definitely know I was getting downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now how do I know it hasn't happened several times since except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough ego that they need to PM me proof of it.
That's only one time I definitely know I was getting downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now how do I know it hasn't happened several times since except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough ego that they need to PM me proof of it.
Oh it does happen. But it isn’t the norm in my experience, both personally and in the communities I mod. I rarely see sensible comments having negative karma.
And my own innocuous comments tend to be “1” rather than anything negative. If downvotes rings were more common you’d expect more negative karma comments.
And my own innocuous comments tend to be “1” rather than anything negative. If downvotes rings were more common you’d expect more negative karma comments.
This is an idea I've been interested in since it came up last month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27582145), but I don't personally feel strongly enough yet to land on either side.
That being said, for all its faults, I would expect that reddit does indeed have more productive discourse than most other (non-HN) social media platforms, particularly Twitter with its enforcement of shallow/short-form comments. /r/the_donald is obviously an extreme example of an alt-right cesspool, but it's not obvious that it was less polite or constructive than the equivalent communities on other platforms.
That being said, for all its faults, I would expect that reddit does indeed have more productive discourse than most other (non-HN) social media platforms, particularly Twitter with its enforcement of shallow/short-form comments. /r/the_donald is obviously an extreme example of an alt-right cesspool, but it's not obvious that it was less polite or constructive than the equivalent communities on other platforms.
"Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?"
I have never visited that subreddit, but since the rest of the world, downvote button or not, was also not really involved in a constructive exchange of ideas on that topic - I do not see the point here. Emotional topics are hard to discuss, if the people involved use it to vent out emotions and to evangelize.
I have never visited that subreddit, but since the rest of the world, downvote button or not, was also not really involved in a constructive exchange of ideas on that topic - I do not see the point here. Emotional topics are hard to discuss, if the people involved use it to vent out emotions and to evangelize.
Fewer people participating is the goal.
Fewer of the wrong people, yes.
This site is every bit as echo chamber, “curated”, and intentionally suppressive to anything but a specific viewpoint.
If anyone doesn’t think so, go make steel man arguments against climate tax policy and let’s see how that goes for you.
The up/down vote system is the tool to implement ideological purity. And here the gray/fade system is a bandwagon signal.
This is all known, to people on the outside of the “target audience”.
This site is every bit as echo chamber, “curated”, and intentionally suppressive to anything but a specific viewpoint.
If anyone doesn’t think so, go make steel man arguments against climate tax policy and let’s see how that goes for you.
The up/down vote system is the tool to implement ideological purity. And here the gray/fade system is a bandwagon signal.
This is all known, to people on the outside of the “target audience”.
I agree with the GP commenter. It's not about everyone being against you. All it takes is just a couple people, or even one.
I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can tell the responder did not even read your full comment... Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating on it.
Should I care less? Definitely. But that's not so easy for me. So more than half the time on HN I'll write a full comment, read it back, and then decide not to post it because it's not worth whatever incorrect response it will get. I don't comment on Reddit at all anymore because it's not worth it.
I've been waffling on whether or not it's even worth posting this comment, haha.
I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can tell the responder did not even read your full comment... Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating on it.
Should I care less? Definitely. But that's not so easy for me. So more than half the time on HN I'll write a full comment, read it back, and then decide not to post it because it's not worth whatever incorrect response it will get. I don't comment on Reddit at all anymore because it's not worth it.
I've been waffling on whether or not it's even worth posting this comment, haha.
I agree with @dahart.
The political threads were a special beast, where any comment that revealed your political leanings would get a deluge of downvotes from the opposition. The Tesla and Apple threads sometimes get a bit of this too. But the vast majority of my experience is that the downvotes I've received were well-deserved. Maybe I was just misinformed and propagating misinformation. Maybe I was trying and failing to be funny - and thus didn't contribute to the conversation or cultivate curiosity.
Low effort / incorrect comments don't bother me a great deal. Usually someone else comes along and downvotes those. If it's a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, I'll attempt to engage, if I think there's some value in putting the effort in.
With experience, you do get a feel for when comments just are not worth bothering with. If they are low effort / failing to contribute, downvote and move on with your life.
A community is very much the sum of the contributors, with spirit that stems from the guidelines and moderation. Without individuals putting something in, something more than what detractors try to take away, it couldn't exist and thrive.
The political threads were a special beast, where any comment that revealed your political leanings would get a deluge of downvotes from the opposition. The Tesla and Apple threads sometimes get a bit of this too. But the vast majority of my experience is that the downvotes I've received were well-deserved. Maybe I was just misinformed and propagating misinformation. Maybe I was trying and failing to be funny - and thus didn't contribute to the conversation or cultivate curiosity.
Low effort / incorrect comments don't bother me a great deal. Usually someone else comes along and downvotes those. If it's a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, I'll attempt to engage, if I think there's some value in putting the effort in.
With experience, you do get a feel for when comments just are not worth bothering with. If they are low effort / failing to contribute, downvote and move on with your life.
A community is very much the sum of the contributors, with spirit that stems from the guidelines and moderation. Without individuals putting something in, something more than what detractors try to take away, it couldn't exist and thrive.
So like I think this is kind the authors point. Downvote isn't going to solve everything but it is a tool that let people signal to one another of something being a miss. You can have spammers that downvote everything but like thats also detectable and can signal biases. In response to spammers, there is away to cancel out those biases with upvotes. And if there are spammers on both sides you'd expect to arrive close to 50/50 in which case that signals something to a read. If its 80% negative that also signals maybe we should understand why this is bad or why its to be avoided. However without a balancing force whats the difference of +50 and +1000? Both are positive even if the +1000 has 1000s of negative comments not everyone has the time to engage on a topic completely and +/- give a quick way to understand the content that should be engaged with on a deeper level because it is divisive. Without the tool not only would you never know the difference but you can never know the difference without engaging every topic at max effort which no person can do
I feel you on this. I rarely post online because there's about a 50% chance I'll run into hostile replies written in bad faith. Also, as I've gotten older, I've gradually grown into the realization that I don't need to justify my opinions to Internet randos. :)
(Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value of time has become very ruthless.)
(Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value of time has become very ruthless.)
32 minutes in and this has enough downvotes to be greyed out.
Way to prove his point internet rando's.
I can't downvote and don't care to, but have an upvote on me for expressing a valid opinion, which was proven true in less than an hour.
Way to prove his point internet rando's.
I can't downvote and don't care to, but have an upvote on me for expressing a valid opinion, which was proven true in less than an hour.
One problem on HN is, that downvotes aren't limited to the comment but include the commenter.
This is a reliable way to identify low value contributions this is less of an issue in a relatively small environment like hacker news where you can in most threads without grave difficulty read all the comments and every story on the front page if you like.
In larger scoped things you will have much more content than anyone could possibly consume and most of it is bad. Keeping score is a way of avoiding everyone having to go through the same pile of drek. Keeping score is only half as effective if you can only up vote. Consider two tallies of several contributions. First two bad contribution neither sufficiently bad to be worthy of being banned.
Contribution A: Imagine 100 people viewed, 10 people liked it, 70 people hated it 20 were indifferent.
With down votes: -60 Without: 10
Contribution B: 10 people liked it, 10 hated it, 80 indifferent.
With down votes: 0 Without: 10
Now consider a positive contribution C with fewer votes 10 for and 1 against.
With down votes: 9 Without: 10
Now something outrageous that attracted a ton of engagement based on how bad it is. Maybe they said we should raise corgis and kitties as meat animals! 980 votes to the negative and 20 to the positive.
With down votes: -960 without: 20
Without down votes A B and C are identically scored despite B being worse than C and A being much worse. Even worse D despite being horrible is scored the highest!
Not applying the karma of a comment to the commenter has similar downsides. You would be throwing away good useful information your users have given you.
In larger scoped things you will have much more content than anyone could possibly consume and most of it is bad. Keeping score is a way of avoiding everyone having to go through the same pile of drek. Keeping score is only half as effective if you can only up vote. Consider two tallies of several contributions. First two bad contribution neither sufficiently bad to be worthy of being banned.
Contribution A: Imagine 100 people viewed, 10 people liked it, 70 people hated it 20 were indifferent.
With down votes: -60 Without: 10
Contribution B: 10 people liked it, 10 hated it, 80 indifferent.
With down votes: 0 Without: 10
Now consider a positive contribution C with fewer votes 10 for and 1 against.
With down votes: 9 Without: 10
Now something outrageous that attracted a ton of engagement based on how bad it is. Maybe they said we should raise corgis and kitties as meat animals! 980 votes to the negative and 20 to the positive.
With down votes: -960 without: 20
Without down votes A B and C are identically scored despite B being worse than C and A being much worse. Even worse D despite being horrible is scored the highest!
Not applying the karma of a comment to the commenter has similar downsides. You would be throwing away good useful information your users have given you.
That's a feature, not a bug.
I think it depends on the website. I used Reddit between 2012-2020 and I believe that website's community was ruined by the upvote/downvote system.
For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for agrees/disagrees, then the comment sections can get ugly.
I believe HN thrives despite the upvote/downvote system because this website is a little more mature than others.
For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for agrees/disagrees, then the comment sections can get ugly.
I believe HN thrives despite the upvote/downvote system because this website is a little more mature than others.
Reddit's comment quality is actually better than it used to be, though I don't understand what changed. It's true that the #1 comment on every post used to be wrong or a series of unfunny jokes, and then maybe #2 was good.
Currently their main problem (which is unsolvable) is just that everyone uses it and so there's new teenagers to ask trivial gender war questions on AskReddit every week.
Currently their main problem (which is unsolvable) is just that everyone uses it and so there's new teenagers to ask trivial gender war questions on AskReddit every week.
It doesn't hurt that new users also can't downvote by default, and that it takes nontrivial contributions to get that ability.
The HN downvote is also for disagreement
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
I think the downvote brigading is getting more frequent.
Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them.
Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.
Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them.
Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.
Submission flagging is the main place it happens and I personally wish HN will not treat flagging as downvotes, or would just call it downvotes, or would have some sort of penalty for obvious cases of mis-flagging.
FWIW every time I have ever flagged something on HN it’s been a fat finger mistake on mobile. Probably a drop in the bucket but worth considering that the signal is still polluted even with perfectly good faith user behavior.
I’m entering grey beard territory, been on HN for years, and I still don’t know what the [-] button does. Is it a downvote? Or does it just collapse the parent so I can read more without clutter? You’d hope downvote UI would be more explicit.
You don't have the ability to downvote.
It's a down arrow right below the upvote (up arrow).
[-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also unvote if you change your mind on your vote.
[-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also unvote if you change your mind on your vote.
[–] collapses the comment and all children.
When logged in, I have upvote buttons on all comments, and I believe downvote buttons are enabled at over a certain amount of karma.
When logged in, I have upvote buttons on all comments, and I believe downvote buttons are enabled at over a certain amount of karma.
It happens to me whenever I say something critical of any given specific country. USA, China, Russia, I get hammered with downvotes and flags. Make a positive comment, hammered with upvotes. It's frustrating.
If you say anything positive or negative about something people hold as part of their identity you're going to get a response. I think it's better that you get votes, instead of a bunch of emotional comments.
No, it is better to get comments, even emotional and not well written. Because with comments I might understand where I was wrong, or at least know where exactly my opponent disagrees with me, because it I could have written a wall of text, not every sentence of it is wrong.
Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the opponent is not interested in productive conversation, so I move on.
And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this is not the place where I'd like to participate in discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful dispute and the extending each other world view.
A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.
Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the opponent is not interested in productive conversation, so I move on.
And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this is not the place where I'd like to participate in discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful dispute and the extending each other world view.
A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.
A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.
If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.
edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is automatically dropped from the front page.
If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.
edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is automatically dropped from the front page.
> Because with comments I might understand where I was wrong
Someone can disagree with you without you being wrong. If you think they are wrong in their response...what good is being done? If you both have intractable positions then more discussion on the topic is just lengthening scroll bars.
Additionally if I disagree with you or just think you're wrong I don't owe you any explanation of that. You don't have a right to my time because we disagree. It's not my job to convince you. I may choose to reply to you (as I obviously just have) but it's my choice entirely. You may reply back to me and I may never ever read it, I don't have any requirement to do so.
Someone can disagree with you without you being wrong. If you think they are wrong in their response...what good is being done? If you both have intractable positions then more discussion on the topic is just lengthening scroll bars.
Additionally if I disagree with you or just think you're wrong I don't owe you any explanation of that. You don't have a right to my time because we disagree. It's not my job to convince you. I may choose to reply to you (as I obviously just have) but it's my choice entirely. You may reply back to me and I may never ever read it, I don't have any requirement to do so.
Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC / Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as an expected behavior, despite it being relevant to many "I thought Enterprise had more control than thins!" conversations.
I could see that happening if you are presenting it as a solution to some problem and the downvoters perceive it as an unrealistic alternative. As far as I’m aware it isn’t that easy to obtain.
>Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC / Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as an expected behavior
Just to be clear, you expect to get downvotes when mentioning LTSB? This does not match my experience, and I also made several LTSB mentions.
Just to be clear, you expect to get downvotes when mentioning LTSB? This does not match my experience, and I also made several LTSB mentions.
Well, my comment is already at -1, so yes.
Ideological issues get people to use downvote. Technical discourse is more civilized, upvotes are more likely than downvotes.
I agree, as long as you realize that vim/emacs, static/dynamic, frontend/backend, etc., are all Ideological issues, and not technical ones. :-)
...and jokes are generally not treated well either, unless it's Friday.
...and jokes are generally not treated well either, unless it's Friday.
This isn't my experience. I occasionally make pretty strong statements about traditionally polarizing technical topics, and I find that people are a lot more likely to respect differing opinions than when talking about, eg, urban planning or politics.
Absolutely my experience too, tech is not really controversial.
But discussions on health, religion and culture that is where the downvotes are used.
If you can accept that premise, then HN is a great place to be. Reddit is just not in the same league when it comes to thoughtful, well-articulated discussions where you get some great insights.
But discussions on health, religion and culture that is where the downvotes are used.
If you can accept that premise, then HN is a great place to be. Reddit is just not in the same league when it comes to thoughtful, well-articulated discussions where you get some great insights.
> tech is not really controversial
Unless it is a topic about Rust and how it is better or worse than C++.
Try to make a claim C++ is better, and nobody is going to read your bullet point explanations, you just get tons of downvotes.
(I'm not claiming anything is better or worse in this comment, I only present an example.)
Unless it is a topic about Rust and how it is better or worse than C++.
Try to make a claim C++ is better, and nobody is going to read your bullet point explanations, you just get tons of downvotes.
(I'm not claiming anything is better or worse in this comment, I only present an example.)
Weird. Saying the same thing a few comments down earned me several down votes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27983945
>In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted you?
If you write a comment that is against what the majority of the site beliefs you will be downvoted. If you agree with the majority you probably won't have experienced this.
I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.
I don't know that it is a specific group of people who do that, but it is consistent enough that I can pretty much count on it happening every time, and clearly since it earned more upvotes than downvotes the community did consider the comment somewhat valuable.
Granted you get hammered much harder on r/politics or r/news, but the problem is the same.
The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure they understand the community[0].
[0]: No democracy permits people to move there and vote right away. For native born citizens they have to wait 18 years to get the vote.
If you write a comment that is against what the majority of the site beliefs you will be downvoted. If you agree with the majority you probably won't have experienced this.
I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.
I don't know that it is a specific group of people who do that, but it is consistent enough that I can pretty much count on it happening every time, and clearly since it earned more upvotes than downvotes the community did consider the comment somewhat valuable.
Granted you get hammered much harder on r/politics or r/news, but the problem is the same.
The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure they understand the community[0].
[0]: No democracy permits people to move there and vote right away. For native born citizens they have to wait 18 years to get the vote.
> The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure they understand the community[0].
Even if you could objectively review that, HN doesn't have a rule against downvoting for disagreement, pg decided it was acceptable very early on and it hasn't been changed. (although plenty people think it should)
Even if you could objectively review that, HN doesn't have a rule against downvoting for disagreement, pg decided it was acceptable very early on and it hasn't been changed. (although plenty people think it should)
> I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.
This down-then-up pattern happens on all sorts of topics here. Almost everything I post gets a few downvotes within two minutes or so, then inevitably crawls back upward as people actually read what's said. One change suggestion I'd have for HN is to disallow downvotes within some time of posting, like 30 minutes, give people a chance to read it, and decide whether it is truly not contributing to the conversation.
This down-then-up pattern happens on all sorts of topics here. Almost everything I post gets a few downvotes within two minutes or so, then inevitably crawls back upward as people actually read what's said. One change suggestion I'd have for HN is to disallow downvotes within some time of posting, like 30 minutes, give people a chance to read it, and decide whether it is truly not contributing to the conversation.
That solution is absolutely horrible. Now you’re asking a moderator to decide what has merit and what does not. Who are they to decide? If I down vote something, I don’t want someone coming behind me and saying you know what this down vote doesn’t have merit, so I’m going to ban him. Imagine if we did that in the workplace. Your disagreement doesn’t have merit so I’m going to exclude you from now on from these meetings. The older I get the more I feel that the people who are upset about their comments getting down voted, somehow need their opinions validated, or maybe it’s anxiety, but there’s something deeper going on beyond just a comment on a message board. What you’re suggesting is completely counter to a democratic society.
I am not proposing this for a democratic society, but for a message board. The goal of a message board could be to be democratic, or it could be to fulfill the idea of the guy paying to keep it running.
I assumed the latter, because those places tend to be places worth sticking around, and because this is definitely where HN falls in.
I assumed the latter, because those places tend to be places worth sticking around, and because this is definitely where HN falls in.
> If you write a comment that is against what the majority of the site beliefs you will be downvoted.
I don't think this is a regular occurence on HN. But on reddit? All day every day.
Personally, I often upvote posts I disagree with, because it is a good discussion starter or just generally a good comment/discussion/disagreement.
I don't think this is a regular occurence on HN. But on reddit? All day every day.
Personally, I often upvote posts I disagree with, because it is a good discussion starter or just generally a good comment/discussion/disagreement.
Agreed. It’s very out of the norm on HN.
On Reddit though, it’s the standard.
On Reddit though, it’s the standard.
In the default subs sure, but if you're subscribed to those shitholes you get what you get.
Every sub has its sacred cows that you can’t question. It just takes a while to figure them out sometimes.
The default subs are really toxic, for sure, but it seems like the 'shithole threshold' is a sufficiently large subscriber count. Especially when the subreddit gets the attention of the admins and powermods get pulled in.
Or even small subs that are against the prevailing opinions of the plurality of the userbase of all of reddit.
Those regularily get called out as "bad", "toxic" or "hateful". Or banned.
Which actually is the reason I got rid of my reddit accounts.
Those regularily get called out as "bad", "toxic" or "hateful". Or banned.
Which actually is the reason I got rid of my reddit accounts.
Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if I desired, or even just for some user subset.
This is different from Facebook or YouTube recommendations in that I get to experience the same diverse amount of content, but things particularly interesting to people I trust will be indicated without censoring all the rest of the content.
This is different from Facebook or YouTube recommendations in that I get to experience the same diverse amount of content, but things particularly interesting to people I trust will be indicated without censoring all the rest of the content.
It’s probably not popular, but I always thought that Slashdot had the best voting system for comments or was at least on the right track.
SD has, for lack of a better term for it, a time problem.
If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The cap SD system only works if the group of people posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people want to punish in some way. When the real vote should have been a disagree 0.
Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.
If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The cap SD system only works if the group of people posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people want to punish in some way. When the real vote should have been a disagree 0.
Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.
I used to think that, but /. comments devolved into dumb jokes around 2003-2005. Which I think is the main reason that hn down votes jokes so aggressively. I do like the meta-moderator system. however, without holding back mod points to begin with there is no incentive to do it.
I haven’t visited /. for years so maybe out of date, but IIRC this was largely helped by separating voting from type - so even if a comment gets a lot of upvotes for being funny, my personal settings of “ignore funny comments” means I still get a decently high-quality signal, which is something I’ve not seen anywhere else
I know why people don't like them and I get that you are correct that it got pretty absurd on /. around the time period you mentioned.
But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.
But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.
Good the main issue with jokes is they're the text equivalent of a Meme pic or "look what I did" type post. Easy to consume content with little actual meat. They attract upvotes easily when accepted because of that lack of substance.
Without a culture that rejects them, they, by nature, rapidly overwhelm most communities in content if a voting system is present.
Without a culture that rejects them, they, by nature, rapidly overwhelm most communities in content if a voting system is present.
No way, that guy is the best.
> hn down votes jokes so aggressively
"if you insist on taking up my class time making jokes, please see to it that they are funny."
"if you insist on taking up my class time making jokes, please see to it that they are funny."
In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering).
I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) on content but each individual could set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to personalize how that other user's vote contributed to their view of the overall score.
It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see how people would react.
The idea of whitelisting users to even count their contribution at all had not occurred to me, but I might take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as well, since you brought it up.
I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) on content but each individual could set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to personalize how that other user's vote contributed to their view of the overall score.
It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see how people would react.
The idea of whitelisting users to even count their contribution at all had not occurred to me, but I might take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as well, since you brought it up.
The problem with whitelisting users or even attenuation is that you would be able to determine the vote counts of individual users. But perhaps votes being publicly ascribable to users is not a problem. I think they're public by default on twitter.
Another interesting feature would be to set vote significance based on a subset of users from a given subforum. In reddit terms, this would be, maybe you trust the content or membership of a given subreddit more than you do the subset of all users, so you set the website to filter on `r/foo` user upvotes instead of `r/all` user upvotes.
There's a lot of potential here to let users craft their on miniverse of relevance and information filtering.
Another interesting feature would be to set vote significance based on a subset of users from a given subforum. In reddit terms, this would be, maybe you trust the content or membership of a given subreddit more than you do the subset of all users, so you set the website to filter on `r/foo` user upvotes instead of `r/all` user upvotes.
There's a lot of potential here to let users craft their on miniverse of relevance and information filtering.
edit: this comment initially made claims that it looked like HN was removing climate change related content from the front page. I still believe this to be the case, but don't really have strong enough evidence to back it up. I'll wait until I have something more convincing before posting about this again.
Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.
Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.
Do you have any examples of downvote-bombing simple claims that climate change is real? I'd be beyond surprised to find out this phenomenon is real, even just based on the demographic prior of HN.
No worries if not, I get that it's not a trivial ask to dig up an example.
No worries if not, I get that it's not a trivial ask to dig up an example.
Not climate change. But three days ago this is a bit strange. Article regarding to anti-vax and astroturfing. First submission flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946430 Lots of comments saying it is being artificially vote inflated. Second submission more objections https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951293 stating conspiracy voting. Not sure what to make of it. And just one example.
Thank you for the links, but I was asking about the (since-edited-out) claims that these comments were being downvote-bombed. Submission ranking is considerably more complicated, and is not what I was asking about.
Things generally don't stay on the front page for long. Your claim sounds pretty paranoid.
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HN was the way you describe. But I think that it is becoming less so. I feel the difference from, say, five years ago. It's not the same. It's more strident, less thoughtful, more reacting by reflex.
My own suspicion is that, as HN has grown, it has become more influential, and therefore more worth manipulating, and therefore more people are trying to manipulate it rather than just participating in it.
My own suspicion is that, as HN has grown, it has become more influential, and therefore more worth manipulating, and therefore more people are trying to manipulate it rather than just participating in it.
I find it amusing but people will go downvote unrelated stuff once you offend them. I can tell because I’ll get a flood of downvotes across unrelated comments when I make a controversial post.
Of course that’s all fine. I have no right to participate in this community and the community has a right to behave how it does.
Or perhaps I’m just miscalibrated and I’m saying totally douchey things here (only provided for example reasons):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952366
Of course that’s all fine. I have no right to participate in this community and the community has a right to behave how it does.
Or perhaps I’m just miscalibrated and I’m saying totally douchey things here (only provided for example reasons):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952366
I'm just speculating here, I don't think your linked example comment was downvoted because it was douchey or because you offended people in other comments. In my experience, comments like your example are downvoted because they're "obviously" wrong or irrelevant, which is of course very subjective. Clearly you don't think your own comment is obviously wrong or irrelevant, but you were rebutting "people don't want to send cryptocurrencies in their messaging app" by pointing out how useful you find Venmo: an app that is popular for sending non-crypto legal tender.
FWIW I didn't downvote your comment when I encountered it days ago, but I do notice that comments that have very basic logical flaws in them tend to be downvoted without replies. Downvotes aren't just a tool to enforce civility. This is just my assessment of your comment, I hope you take it in the good faith that I intended.
FWIW I didn't downvote your comment when I encountered it days ago, but I do notice that comments that have very basic logical flaws in them tend to be downvoted without replies. Downvotes aren't just a tool to enforce civility. This is just my assessment of your comment, I hope you take it in the good faith that I intended.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. Have hit my rate limit again. FWIW the comment was upvoted and left so for 36 h or so before I made my other comment on “real engineers” being worse than software engineers because they kill people (which was rather flamebaity).
I don’t want to transform this into a discussion of the original but I specifically intended to mean that to imply that the whole thing is that crypto functions like M3 and that value transfer is the underlying goal, legal tender just being a tool. After all, we use IOUs commonly (Splitwise exists on this principle) and they aren’t legal tender. I felt there was enough there to make the connection.
But anyway, if you think it is a logically incorrect comment, that’s on me to communicate better. Thanks for the feedback.
Anyway, I can’t have this discussion any more with you, because I have to save my comments for the most information transfer (I have an account rate limit).
I don’t want to transform this into a discussion of the original but I specifically intended to mean that to imply that the whole thing is that crypto functions like M3 and that value transfer is the underlying goal, legal tender just being a tool. After all, we use IOUs commonly (Splitwise exists on this principle) and they aren’t legal tender. I felt there was enough there to make the connection.
But anyway, if you think it is a logically incorrect comment, that’s on me to communicate better. Thanks for the feedback.
Anyway, I can’t have this discussion any more with you, because I have to save my comments for the most information transfer (I have an account rate limit).
> is not even close to the norm here
Maybe not here, but he said here and Reddit. It's definitely the norm on Reddit.
Maybe not here, but he said here and Reddit. It's definitely the norm on Reddit.
> In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience.
My experience on HN is that it desperately hangs on the words you choose and the threads you visit. The lower the barrier to entry (social subjects for example) the more delicate and convergent things become.
My experience on HN is that it desperately hangs on the words you choose and the threads you visit. The lower the barrier to entry (social subjects for example) the more delicate and convergent things become.
Yes lower barrier to entry topics are expected to increase the noise, and also the number of participants, which makes patterns easier to see, right? Possibly lower barrier to entry also correlates with lower expertise too. I'm not sure this is unique to HN at all, and haven't noticed it being any different or worse here than elsewhere. I think we have lots of words and phrases and platitudes to categorize and comment on how people behave, one that comes to mind immediately is bike shedding, or the Law of Triviality.
> then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got
In HN you can send an email to the mods so they can take a look. Also the site may detect it automatically (the details are unclear, it's part of the secret sauce).
> because I'm not sufficiently ideological
Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.
Try to stick to technical threads, preferably if they have less than 100 comments. You will be happier.
In HN you can send an email to the mods so they can take a look. Also the site may detect it automatically (the details are unclear, it's part of the secret sauce).
> because I'm not sufficiently ideological
Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.
Try to stick to technical threads, preferably if they have less than 100 comments. You will be happier.
I think you're missing the point of what the guy is saying ... He's not asking for tips and tricks to live happier in a downvote world. He's saying, I think, that downvotes are conversation stoppers and does not help us get to the bottom of things and they should not be the default were people form communities.
> ”Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong”
Maybe there should be a separate URL to view recent comments with <1 points?
/graycomments, or /controversial, or something like that.
I’d certainly use that to sprinkle some upvotes. There are often high-quality comments that get downvotes early for whatever reason. It has a discouraging effect even if it gets corrected over time with more votes.
Maybe there should be a separate URL to view recent comments with <1 points?
/graycomments, or /controversial, or something like that.
I’d certainly use that to sprinkle some upvotes. There are often high-quality comments that get downvotes early for whatever reason. It has a discouraging effect even if it gets corrected over time with more votes.
> Avoid political threads.
Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political", this is quite impossible to do.
Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political", this is quite impossible to do.
I haven’t heard that new catchphrase to date.
There’s an old joke about the Network OSI layer: What are layers 8 and 9? Political and Financial.
I think the context with things like that refer to internal business politics and having diplomatic conversations versus State or National Politics.
Avoid religion and politics in general seems like solid advice as it’s too emotionally charged for most people to discuss purely logically. (Also, there are too many x factors and most politicians are relatively short term (speaking of USA here).
There’s an old joke about the Network OSI layer: What are layers 8 and 9? Political and Financial.
I think the context with things like that refer to internal business politics and having diplomatic conversations versus State or National Politics.
Avoid religion and politics in general seems like solid advice as it’s too emotionally charged for most people to discuss purely logically. (Also, there are too many x factors and most politicians are relatively short term (speaking of USA here).
everything is political
Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere. People will try and justify it with walls of text about the oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue intersects with their politics.
Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere. People will try and justify it with walls of text about the oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue intersects with their politics.
It's not new; it's a variant of the 60s feminist activists' pronouncement that "the personal is political" or "the private is political".
Everything is political now. Remember a year ago when you couldn’t wear a red hat in public without fear of someone attacking you physically? People are being canceled, fired from their jobs, ostracized in their communities, because they dared to have an opinion that differed from the mob. It’s all political now, and there’s not much we can talk about that someone isn’t going to try to make it political.
This isn't a new phrase that came out of nowhere, I've seen it in use for a few years now. I believe it became more mainstream with this Ted Talk; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=171flckdKic
Name a subject or domain that involves people which isn't "political".
Me taking a shit? :)
Is it right for you be taxed for using the sewer system? What are the environmental impacts of the massive scale of human shit having to be processed in treatment plants? Why does the government prevent me from shitting wherever I want, infringing on my freedom? First they take away your rights to shit on your neighbour's porch, then they take away your rights to see your kids on weekends. Stepping stones to tyranny.
You're demonstrating that everything can be made political by those who want to take it on a political tangent.
Not OP, but yeah, that was the point. Humans are social, thus political, animals.
That just means there’s a political element to human interaction, not that everything is political. Astronomy is about the cosmos, not politics, but astronomers engage in politics like everyone else. There’s an entire world outside of humanity, and some people are not interested in turning that into more human bickering, which you can easily find in explicitly political and news discussions.
People being allowed to look at stars is a political issue. I’m a big astronomy fan and I’d like more money to go to astronomers to do more research. That’s political…
If only there wasn't a political party who though legislating who can use what bathroom. Now your shit is political too.
Pipes to flush your shit into aren’t there because it’s a good idea to have them. They’re there because somebody made a political decision to require them.
My love of my partner and my nephews and nieces. My enjoyment of art. My appreciation of the natural world. You can do a political analysis of those things, but they are not intrinsically political. Of course, some on the left believe that there is nothing that isn't political. But I don't think they're correct.
For lots of people around the world the ability to love their partner is a very political thing - homosexuality being illegal in a majority of Africa, and punishable by death in parts of the world.
We could quibble about this, but I don't think that makes their love political. The repression is external to their love of each other, not part of it.
In fact, it would be a diminishment of their love to analyze it purely through a political framework—which is one reason many people don't like "everything is political". It diminishes many of the most important aspects of our lives.
In fact, it would be a diminishment of their love to analyze it purely through a political framework—which is one reason many people don't like "everything is political". It diminishes many of the most important aspects of our lives.
> The repression is external to their love of each other
It’s not very “external” when the police are breaking down your door to force themselves into the middle of your activities. It’s something you need to be constantly aware of - if you want to have love at all, then you need to thread it through the government’s loopholes; if you do it in public, you are “an activist”.
It would be nice if “love” and “government” could be cleanly separated - but for queer people, that seems to be a fantasy that only straight people have the luxury of believing in :/
It’s not very “external” when the police are breaking down your door to force themselves into the middle of your activities. It’s something you need to be constantly aware of - if you want to have love at all, then you need to thread it through the government’s loopholes; if you do it in public, you are “an activist”.
It would be nice if “love” and “government” could be cleanly separated - but for queer people, that seems to be a fantasy that only straight people have the luxury of believing in :/
You made it 4 words into your reply before using veiled political language regarding your relationship with whomever you are romantically involved with. "Partner" became common in the mid 80s because it was a way for gay people to refer to their love interests without revealing their gender.
You say that art and love aren't political, but that's only useful when trying to split hairs about the subject.
You say that art and love aren't political, but that's only useful when trying to split hairs about the subject.
You're missing the distinction I am trying to make. The language may be political, but my love for my partner is not the same thing as the language I use to describe it. It's why this conversation is important: we are not merely symbol processing units, we are human beings with perceptions and feeling that are not entirely mediated by language and politics.
That may seem to you as if I am splitting hairs. For me it's one of the most important distinctions in the world, and one that is lost when we insist everything is political.
That may seem to you as if I am splitting hairs. For me it's one of the most important distinctions in the world, and one that is lost when we insist everything is political.
I'm not missing anything.
You sit there and you tell us that there are things that you enjoy that cannot be described in a political manner. Nobody has ever suggested that your love for anyone is directly political.
Where you can live, who you can openly love, what jobs you can hold, what education you can have, what art you can view, and who you can fraternize with... these are all impacted, sometimes substantially, by political decisions.
Love is not some tangible item that sits apart from the rest of lived experience. It is created and nurtured THROUGH that lived experience. You love your partner in the way that you do because you have the freedom to do it. Your perception is colored by the free society in which you live, and by the attitudes of the people within that society.
I have a black friend from high school... a nationally celebrated former athlete, who started dating another high school classmate of mine in college. As soon as they were able, they moved away. She was a white girl with a black man, and even people they had grown up with were uncomfortable with the pairing. Her friends literally sat her down and informed her that her kids would look like her father, and didn't want her to experience the sort of emotional distress that a parent of a black child suffers when living in society. The negative attitudes of people around them at the time forced them to leave the state.
Most of my gay classmates also moved away, all to California, for similar reasons.
You sit there and you tell us that there are things that you enjoy that cannot be described in a political manner. Nobody has ever suggested that your love for anyone is directly political.
Where you can live, who you can openly love, what jobs you can hold, what education you can have, what art you can view, and who you can fraternize with... these are all impacted, sometimes substantially, by political decisions.
Love is not some tangible item that sits apart from the rest of lived experience. It is created and nurtured THROUGH that lived experience. You love your partner in the way that you do because you have the freedom to do it. Your perception is colored by the free society in which you live, and by the attitudes of the people within that society.
I have a black friend from high school... a nationally celebrated former athlete, who started dating another high school classmate of mine in college. As soon as they were able, they moved away. She was a white girl with a black man, and even people they had grown up with were uncomfortable with the pairing. Her friends literally sat her down and informed her that her kids would look like her father, and didn't want her to experience the sort of emotional distress that a parent of a black child suffers when living in society. The negative attitudes of people around them at the time forced them to leave the state.
Most of my gay classmates also moved away, all to California, for similar reasons.
You're spot on. All of the things the GP mentioned have people literally fighting political battles to continue enjoying them. I find the GP's thinking common with people who haven't experienced friction doing "normal" things most people take for granted.
Was the art you're enjoying created in a vacuum? Art is often extremely political.
Disagree, downvoted! /s
Aside from political discussion, I see that opinion (say os or console X is better than Y) also bring downvotes.
I find that asking questions and giving facts (not a wrong one) won't get downvoted and stay at 1 at worst.
Aside from political discussion, I see that opinion (say os or console X is better than Y) also bring downvotes.
I find that asking questions and giving facts (not a wrong one) won't get downvoted and stay at 1 at worst.
The ground you walk on is not political. If folks learn to take it easy, we'll be in better shape.
I have been downvoted in technological threads, just expressing my past experience on docker. Should we avoid those as well?
More accurately, everything is ideological at its core. I say this as science.
Even tabs vs spaces is an ideological battle. And so is for and against downvoting. I am against downvoting because I am against censorship and for free speech.
And to then say "avoid ideology" or to be modding a platform based on a "no ideology" ideology is like being against meaningful conversation on a conversation platform.
So we are left with excessive pampering and everyone walking on eggshells. Whenever something gets ideological, we can't handle it and so we censor it. Or hide behind a downvote. All because we're not allowed, and hence have had no practice.
The platform that can handle political discourse without breaking will be the next great social media platform. We owe it to ourselves to build it, instead of pretending this is already it, whatever your platform of choice.
Even tabs vs spaces is an ideological battle. And so is for and against downvoting. I am against downvoting because I am against censorship and for free speech.
And to then say "avoid ideology" or to be modding a platform based on a "no ideology" ideology is like being against meaningful conversation on a conversation platform.
So we are left with excessive pampering and everyone walking on eggshells. Whenever something gets ideological, we can't handle it and so we censor it. Or hide behind a downvote. All because we're not allowed, and hence have had no practice.
The platform that can handle political discourse without breaking will be the next great social media platform. We owe it to ourselves to build it, instead of pretending this is already it, whatever your platform of choice.
> Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.
I upvote everyone on this bases. In reddit for example, If I sort by controversial more often than not it just someone with an equally dumb or smart but different opinion.
Discussing stuff in the Internet is difficult, and requieres a very good moderation, something that IMO HN does a good job, for what I've seen.
Reddit is the wild west of subs, there are good and bad mods, but once a sub becomes too popular it's just impossible to avoid vote brigading.
I've also been administrator for a number of forums, and it's basically volunteering job. If you're not paid or getting a profit from it it's very hard to justify the work and the headaches that require to moderate a community.
In fact that's the main reason I've closed or sold the communities I had. In the end, there's not a lot of people who is willing to have reasonable and educated discussions, and nobody can do it all the time, so IDK, hope someone else has the energy, I don't.
From the communities I had, there's only one left. It has not a lot of users, yet I need time and energy to learn programming while I keep going to my current job and juggle with my life, so I'll probably experiment with it to automate moderation in some way, hopelly not making it miserable for the users.
I upvote everyone on this bases. In reddit for example, If I sort by controversial more often than not it just someone with an equally dumb or smart but different opinion.
Discussing stuff in the Internet is difficult, and requieres a very good moderation, something that IMO HN does a good job, for what I've seen.
Reddit is the wild west of subs, there are good and bad mods, but once a sub becomes too popular it's just impossible to avoid vote brigading.
I've also been administrator for a number of forums, and it's basically volunteering job. If you're not paid or getting a profit from it it's very hard to justify the work and the headaches that require to moderate a community.
In fact that's the main reason I've closed or sold the communities I had. In the end, there's not a lot of people who is willing to have reasonable and educated discussions, and nobody can do it all the time, so IDK, hope someone else has the energy, I don't.
From the communities I had, there's only one left. It has not a lot of users, yet I need time and energy to learn programming while I keep going to my current job and juggle with my life, so I'll probably experiment with it to automate moderation in some way, hopelly not making it miserable for the users.
> Avoid political threads.
It's not the political threads that are a problem. There seems to be a few companies that you can't contradict in any way on the threads that repeat their mantra. It's usually not even the large ones, so it's very surprising when you get in a discussion that's quite visibly on a bad sideline, you point a technical flaw, and get downvoted into the minimum, just to have your comment go back up by the long tail of people upvoting unfairly greyed comments. (And you only discovers the "culture sponsor" if you go back and read the comments again.)
I imagine that's also unavoidable in a forum where a number of people that breath those mantras through the day frequent. I don't think there's any manipulation going on (except for workplace propaganda), but that does make technical thread political too, and it's probably very disorienting if it's a technical subject you care about.
Anyway, I don't think HN has any penalty for accumulating downvotes. So I don't think there's any improvement to make here.
It's not the political threads that are a problem. There seems to be a few companies that you can't contradict in any way on the threads that repeat their mantra. It's usually not even the large ones, so it's very surprising when you get in a discussion that's quite visibly on a bad sideline, you point a technical flaw, and get downvoted into the minimum, just to have your comment go back up by the long tail of people upvoting unfairly greyed comments. (And you only discovers the "culture sponsor" if you go back and read the comments again.)
I imagine that's also unavoidable in a forum where a number of people that breath those mantras through the day frequent. I don't think there's any manipulation going on (except for workplace propaganda), but that does make technical thread political too, and it's probably very disorienting if it's a technical subject you care about.
Anyway, I don't think HN has any penalty for accumulating downvotes. So I don't think there's any improvement to make here.
> I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it.
Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means they're not experiencing any harm.
Nothing you can say can hurt me == I have an unhealthy habit of suppressing my negative emotions
Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means they're not experiencing any harm.
Nothing you can say can hurt me == I have an unhealthy habit of suppressing my negative emotions
Hey, wanted to respond to your comment because mine could come off as unhealthy.
I simply mean that I'm old enough, have experienced enough that there are very few people in the world that can say something which I haven't already been told or I haven't imagined myself. Some rando on the net can't possibly hurt.
But yeah, I don't mean to suggest suppressing your feelings.
I simply mean that I'm old enough, have experienced enough that there are very few people in the world that can say something which I haven't already been told or I haven't imagined myself. Some rando on the net can't possibly hurt.
But yeah, I don't mean to suggest suppressing your feelings.
Respectfully I don't really agree that this is a thing. There is an element of discerning that a person is just a jerk, misguided, dumb, or just shitposting without consequence due to anonymity or whatever and learning to disregard their opinions as irrelevant. That is, a lot of internet randos fall into this category.
But I also think if people don't trigger a warning as someone worth shunning that their criticism affects us, especially irl.
But I also think if people don't trigger a warning as someone worth shunning that their criticism affects us, especially irl.
Experiencing a negative emotion is not always, or even most of the time, the same thing as being hurt.
I think that's going to fall into an argument of semantics.
Can you give an example?
Can you give an example?
I mean, I experience several negative emotions (frustration, anger, etc.) reading the average comment thread on the internet, but to say that I am “hurt” by them would be a grotesque exaggeration …
The scientific process leaves no room for emotions what so ever. Errors in the scientific process could have devastating results. If you can not separate your emotional well beings from the truth go and do something where your feelings are of no consequence.
If you can't separate "separating emotional well being from the truth" and "acknowledging you have emotions" you should go and take a vacation.
To an academic, they are never wrong, you just don’t understand. The more you try to argue will get swatted down as hateful.
My main issue with downvotes is they are almost always used incorrectly. Including here at HN. They are not meant to be an "agree/disagree" button, but rather a way to filter out content that is not relevant to the discussion at hand. Disagreeing does not mean it is irrelevant, especially if it is well written and in good faith. We should allow all viewpoints that are put forward with proper intentions.
Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if you agree with it or not.
Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if you agree with it or not.
They ARE meant to be a disagree button
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
I was not only referring to HN but the many communities that employ up/down voting. And for the record, I disagree with pg's take. Here is Reddit's official stance on downvoting:
>Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.
https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...
I feel following this advice leads to better communities with more diverse and more useful conversation.
>Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.
https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...
I feel following this advice leads to better communities with more diverse and more useful conversation.
> My main issue with downvotes is they are almost always used incorrectly. Including here at HN. They are not meant to be an "agree/disagree" button, but rather a way to filter out content that is not relevant to the discussion at hand.
Says who? And why should anyone listen to them? There seems to be a lot of talk about how it's not being used as designed, but absolutely no one provides any evidence to support that there's "One True Way" to use voting buttons.
Says who? And why should anyone listen to them? There seems to be a lot of talk about how it's not being used as designed, but absolutely no one provides any evidence to support that there's "One True Way" to use voting buttons.
Sure, that may be technically correct and in practice people downvote for any reason they choose. Nothing can stop them. But if they were used to promote viewpoints and better discussion, the end result would be better communities.
As for the "says who?", for example, that is Reddit's official stance on voting, which I quoted elsewhere in this thread.
As for the "says who?", for example, that is Reddit's official stance on voting, which I quoted elsewhere in this thread.
You've said it would lead to better discussion. I'm not convinced that's the case. I think flagged and grey comments being filtered out actually helps conversations more often than not. Can we empirically determine which will lead to better communities? Based on my experience than nearly every single community with lax moderation (official moderation and community moderation) turns into a cesspool. There's a reason you're here for conversation after all and not on 4chan.
In my experience flagged comments are typically off topic or abusive. I don't recall ever seeing a flagged comment that was an honest attempt at discussion. As for grayed comments that are an honest attempt at discussion? Very common. I upvote heavily downvoted comments that didn't deserve it almost daily here. I've also been the victim of massive downvoting merely because I present a viewpoint that the hive-mind doesn't like. If you're only interested in a single viewpoint and don't want to see all sides to a topic, then sure, this system is great. I like seeing more viewpoints and perspectives.
Maybe what's needed is explicit Agree and Disagree buttons, with indicators, to skim off such pollution of up/downvotes-as-QC?
That would be an interesting experiment. Make it a 2D axis... Agree <--> Disagree, and Low Quality <--> High Quality. Only allow voting on one of the options.
... left and right vote in addition to up and downvote?
Do not specify any rules nor instructions about when to vote left and when to vote right, but too much votes in either direction and the comment starts getting hidden.
If you disagree with the trend where any particular comment is going, figure out the horizontal direction you should click by yourself.
edit.
I think there is no need for up/downvotes after this system is implemented. Some secret amount of horizontal votes in either direction is good (counted as upvote). Too much over the limit and the extra is counted as a downvote. Hide the score from voters. Ban comments that attempt to discuss the score of any comment. Now everyone has a reason to be a bit more careful when voting (...except when a comment is obviously too left or right).
Do not specify any rules nor instructions about when to vote left and when to vote right, but too much votes in either direction and the comment starts getting hidden.
If you disagree with the trend where any particular comment is going, figure out the horizontal direction you should click by yourself.
edit.
I think there is no need for up/downvotes after this system is implemented. Some secret amount of horizontal votes in either direction is good (counted as upvote). Too much over the limit and the extra is counted as a downvote. Hide the score from voters. Ban comments that attempt to discuss the score of any comment. Now everyone has a reason to be a bit more careful when voting (...except when a comment is obviously too left or right).
There are some opensource, reddit alternatives that might be willing to implement this. https://lemmy.ml/ comes to mind. You could suggest it there and it might fall upon open ears.
I would suggest you email that idea to dang. I'd like to see it tried here.
Hold on, HN has downvote buttons? I don't see them. Are they for mods?
HN's voting system is a bit complicated. They will remove the downvote button for various reasons. For example you can't downvote replies to your comments, only upvote. I think also if you are a newer user, you can't downvote.
> If downvotes don't matter
Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it.
Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.
Downvotes are of even less consquence.
Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.
Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it.
Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.
Downvotes are of even less consquence.
Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.
> Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything.
I think this should be true to individuals, in regards to the ownership they feel over their online account and the content they create.
But I do not think this is (or should be) true in regards to an online community. Because I think sites like Hacker News and Ars Technica have relatively healthy comment ecosystems, where the content of the comments is valuable and contributes immensely to the store of knowledge these sites contain.
(Notably, Ars Technica has a more obvious, perceivable liberal political bias which I happen to agree with, so I'm sure the value of that community is divided, whereas I think Hacker News is more politically balanced.)
I think this should be true to individuals, in regards to the ownership they feel over their online account and the content they create.
But I do not think this is (or should be) true in regards to an online community. Because I think sites like Hacker News and Ars Technica have relatively healthy comment ecosystems, where the content of the comments is valuable and contributes immensely to the store of knowledge these sites contain.
(Notably, Ars Technica has a more obvious, perceivable liberal political bias which I happen to agree with, so I'm sure the value of that community is divided, whereas I think Hacker News is more politically balanced.)
Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.
This is one of the more frustrating parts of the whole thing. I try not to care much about votes, but when a "throwaway comment" gets 50+ upvotes, while a carefully thought out, heavily researched, link/citation supported post with a lot of "meat" to it gets no votes at all, or even a downvote... that's just kind of grating in some sense. Well, it is to me anyway.
This is one of the more frustrating parts of the whole thing. I try not to care much about votes, but when a "throwaway comment" gets 50+ upvotes, while a carefully thought out, heavily researched, link/citation supported post with a lot of "meat" to it gets no votes at all, or even a downvote... that's just kind of grating in some sense. Well, it is to me anyway.
But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you? Again -- votes don't matter. I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain.
Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)
Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)
Again -- votes don't matter. I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain.
The parent post made an assertion, but did not really justify that assertion. Sure, it's easy to say that in some abstract sense "down votes don't matter". I believe that myself, in that sort of abstract / hand-wavy sense. But real life experience shows us that down votes do matter to people - at least some people, some times, in some situations. Why? I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not going to pretend to understand the deeper aspects of that. But it seems self evident to me that it's related to the other evolved responses we humans have, related to peer approval, social status, recognition, embarrassment, etc.
But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you?
In the specific case I mentioned, I think it's largely about the mismatch between expectations and perceived subjective sense of "right/wrong" and reality. I expect random throwaway comments that just say "taxation is theft" to get downvoted. But when I spend 30 minutes doing research, looking up citations, and crafting a carefully composed response to something, to try to make a point or provide a useful reference to help somebody and then that gets down voted, it triggers that instinctive "unfairness reaction" that we have. Or that's my approximate theory anyway.
Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes?
I think because a downvote is a form of disapproval, and it's done in public, and it correlates to our desire to avoid being shamed / embarrassed, especially in front of others.
The parent post made an assertion, but did not really justify that assertion. Sure, it's easy to say that in some abstract sense "down votes don't matter". I believe that myself, in that sort of abstract / hand-wavy sense. But real life experience shows us that down votes do matter to people - at least some people, some times, in some situations. Why? I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not going to pretend to understand the deeper aspects of that. But it seems self evident to me that it's related to the other evolved responses we humans have, related to peer approval, social status, recognition, embarrassment, etc.
But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you?
In the specific case I mentioned, I think it's largely about the mismatch between expectations and perceived subjective sense of "right/wrong" and reality. I expect random throwaway comments that just say "taxation is theft" to get downvoted. But when I spend 30 minutes doing research, looking up citations, and crafting a carefully composed response to something, to try to make a point or provide a useful reference to help somebody and then that gets down voted, it triggers that instinctive "unfairness reaction" that we have. Or that's my approximate theory anyway.
Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes?
I think because a downvote is a form of disapproval, and it's done in public, and it correlates to our desire to avoid being shamed / embarrassed, especially in front of others.
I appreciate your response, even if my question was perhaps 50% rhetorical.
Of course I can understand the psychological part of it, but that's what I contest here.
You write an insightful message in a forum. Perhaps 5,000 people read it, 100 upvote it, 200 downvote it, and let's say that 5 reply with disagreement or trolling.
So in the end you find yourself frustrated with the 100 downvotes and the 5 trolls. It's irrational.
I can understand how people who profit from likes, upvotes and comments in forums and social media can care about their "Internet points". But for an individual person to care if their post has any kind of vote or to track the number of likes, sorry, I don't think that rationalizing it is any beneficial, productive, sensical.
Of course I can understand the psychological part of it, but that's what I contest here.
You write an insightful message in a forum. Perhaps 5,000 people read it, 100 upvote it, 200 downvote it, and let's say that 5 reply with disagreement or trolling.
So in the end you find yourself frustrated with the 100 downvotes and the 5 trolls. It's irrational.
I can understand how people who profit from likes, upvotes and comments in forums and social media can care about their "Internet points". But for an individual person to care if their post has any kind of vote or to track the number of likes, sorry, I don't think that rationalizing it is any beneficial, productive, sensical.
I agree that it's irrational for the most part. But even understanding that on a cerebral level still doesn't stop it from being slightly annoying / frustrating / whatever at times. The vagaries of human nature, I guess...
Downvotes matter because they often tie into visibility. On HN, a few downvotes make the post fade out so it is difficult to read. On Reddit, two downvotes collapse a post so that its text becomes hidden.
This means on these platforms downvotes are a weaponised tool wielded by someone who can destroy the effort that went into post with but a mouse click.
This means on these platforms downvotes are a weaponised tool wielded by someone who can destroy the effort that went into post with but a mouse click.
Then such forums where your posts can be manipulated so easily are a lost cause, and there's no point in getting frustrated about them.
I whole heartedly disagree.
Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down votes the first few comments would have an even bigger advantage than they do now.
[1] just like this comment I am leaving, which probably would have been better with just a down vote.
Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down votes the first few comments would have an even bigger advantage than they do now.
[1] just like this comment I am leaving, which probably would have been better with just a down vote.
Downvoting to disagree is my knee-jerk reaction, too. But in most cases it's not as helpful as leaving a comment.
Any time I leave a comment, there is usually at least some thought and effort behind it, and a downvote without explanation doesn't teach me anything, or persuade me to change my mind.
If I don't know the reason for the downvote, my frequent assumption is "this person has poor reading comprehension, or isn't very bright, and just didn't understand what I'm saying. People often dislike things they don't understand. I guess it's true what they say: judge a man by the people who disagree with him."
That's completely unfounded, sure, but lacking any additional information, it's as valid as any other conclusion about why I got downvoted. Maybe I've made some obvious error, but how would I know? In general, getting downvoted tends to make me less respectful of other people on HN, and more confident in my own (flawed) reasoning, compared to getting a thoughtful disagreement.
Any time I leave a comment, there is usually at least some thought and effort behind it, and a downvote without explanation doesn't teach me anything, or persuade me to change my mind.
If I don't know the reason for the downvote, my frequent assumption is "this person has poor reading comprehension, or isn't very bright, and just didn't understand what I'm saying. People often dislike things they don't understand. I guess it's true what they say: judge a man by the people who disagree with him."
That's completely unfounded, sure, but lacking any additional information, it's as valid as any other conclusion about why I got downvoted. Maybe I've made some obvious error, but how would I know? In general, getting downvoted tends to make me less respectful of other people on HN, and more confident in my own (flawed) reasoning, compared to getting a thoughtful disagreement.
> it scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power
How do we get from "I am being downvoted" to "malicious and petty people"? That looks like an issue. You said you have no problem being wrong, twice, but immediately assume anyone who downvotes your comment is malicious, when it could be a signal that your comment is just not hitting the right notes.
How do we get from "I am being downvoted" to "malicious and petty people"? That looks like an issue. You said you have no problem being wrong, twice, but immediately assume anyone who downvotes your comment is malicious, when it could be a signal that your comment is just not hitting the right notes.
> But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it)
/snip
> It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.
I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact, it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of exposure.
I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture. This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters. Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general, downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and not worth complaining or even thinking much about.
Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but".
[1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with them
/snip
> It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.
I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact, it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of exposure.
I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture. This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters. Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general, downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and not worth complaining or even thinking much about.
Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but".
[1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with them
It's especially bad on a site like HN - an account only gets a downvote capability if they've received what is it, 400 upvotes? - so you're assured that every downvote you receive is someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote (or are a serial link poster getting link karma upvotes).
There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.
There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.
I’ve been using HN for a few years now, mostly lurking but commenting every now and then, and I’m creeping up to the downvote privilege threshold. (I think it’s 500, not 400.) I wouldn’t describe myself as “someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote,” I think it’s more “someone who says little things over many years and some people have upvoted them here and there.” In other words, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that your description of HN matches everyone’s experience, and not everyone with downvote ability is the same type of person.
HN has a certain discussion parameters and moderation system on purpose. The goal on HN isn’t to allow open ended discussions on all topics. I for one appreciate that we can talk computers and technology here and that the moderators keep the average level of the discussion high. If I want politics and other garbage I’ll go somewhere else. I have never experienced any issues here. Been here a looong time. Don’t be edgy and contribute positively to discussions with curiosity and you will do fine.
There are many threads here about the politics of technology (big tech, open source vs closed source software, cryptocurrency and finance, the fabrication industry and China, etc) and there are also plenty of threads about politics unrelated or tangentially related to computers (off the top of my head, housing and homelessness, the schooling system, and climate change get discussed here not infrequently). HN isn't for just computers and technology, but rather for anything that sparks curiosity.
With that being said, the moderation here is very excellent and generally keeps the quality of discussion somewhat high, so I agree with your central thesis.
With that being said, the moderation here is very excellent and generally keeps the quality of discussion somewhat high, so I agree with your central thesis.
I agree. I guess it’s just not dogmatic. Moderators and HNers are very strict about being constructive on more political topics.
Just for the record, the reply to this comment by bopbeepboop that was downvoted to "dead" status is a good example of the type of downvoting I disagree with.
I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I have no control over the behavior of others on this site. I'm just putting that out there.
I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I have no control over the behavior of others on this site. I'm just putting that out there.
About bopbeepboop: The comment was not flagged, the account is banned. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26735029 near the end of the tread, the post by dang
A good trick is to go to the comment history, and search until you find the last streak of not dead comments. It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine), and enough vouch unkill the comment. In the case of bopbeepboop it looks like many of the comments were vouched.
A good trick is to go to the comment history, and search until you find the last streak of not dead comments. It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine), and enough vouch unkill the comment. In the case of bopbeepboop it looks like many of the comments were vouched.
OK, I guess I was working under the assumption that the comment was dead because it was downvoted enough times. My bad.
That’s the story.
In actuality, even factual and cited posts will get you shadowbanned if your opinion is contrary to the mainstream (on HN) narrative.
I think it’s more “conforming” than “constructive”.
In actuality, even factual and cited posts will get you shadowbanned if your opinion is contrary to the mainstream (on HN) narrative.
I think it’s more “conforming” than “constructive”.
I was thinking that the downvote brigade (to use a reddit term) is actually promulgating a type of ideological conformity litmus test on HN users.
If you post/comment in a certain manner you get upvoted and break into the potential downvoters. Otherwise, you stay in purgatory of the middlings.
If you post/comment in a certain manner you get upvoted and break into the potential downvoters. Otherwise, you stay in purgatory of the middlings.
On HN in particular, I don't know how downvotes could be made any less psychologically impactful, short of completely hiding comment scores on even your own posts. Comments you posted never change color while you're logged in, so all you ever see is a little number, and the minimum score of -4 prevents massive pile-on situations.
I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.
I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.
> I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological,
As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted.
Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions.
Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias.
Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.
As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted.
Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions.
Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias.
Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.
> But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological
I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained me at doing. Comment and walk away.
By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most any forum, including Reddit.
Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting pattern, that process might be discouraging.
My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here. That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try.
I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained me at doing. Comment and walk away.
By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most any forum, including Reddit.
Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting pattern, that process might be discouraging.
My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here. That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try.
Maybe you can't respond to this, but I'd like to know if that's not less satisfying. I don't get much pleasure from just having my day ("shouting into the void") what I'm really here for is engagement, and the high-quality responses I get (or sometimes just acknowledgement). Without feedback there's nothing in it for me.
" It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try. "
I agree to that.
But do not agree to just leave comment and leave approach in general. Then it is not a discussion anymore. You will never experience if there are any counterpoints to your opinion/facts, if you do not read replies to your opinions/facts. But if you experienced you get too emotional ... so aybe better this approach, than the furiated insulting one I guess.
I agree to that.
But do not agree to just leave comment and leave approach in general. Then it is not a discussion anymore. You will never experience if there are any counterpoints to your opinion/facts, if you do not read replies to your opinions/facts. But if you experienced you get too emotional ... so aybe better this approach, than the furiated insulting one I guess.
It's a good feedback system. Just because I and you don't get it, doesn't mean someone was indifferent to the post. It's meant to filter out discussions that are uninteresting. Just got to deal with if one isn't that interesting. Adding posts on top of that would be counterproductive.
I often raise somewhat controversial opinion and topics. Very rarely do I see clusters of downvotes, and I'm not surprised people are against my own ideas. Otherwise they would be common! It also mirrors society outside academia. It happens that later upvotes changes the score significantly. Such is it with all change.
Without some skin in the game, it's all spam and trolling otherwise. What might look strange in a mod system, might under analysis turn out to be well designed.
For all forums there is an adaption phase, before getting what people expect from posts.
I often raise somewhat controversial opinion and topics. Very rarely do I see clusters of downvotes, and I'm not surprised people are against my own ideas. Otherwise they would be common! It also mirrors society outside academia. It happens that later upvotes changes the score significantly. Such is it with all change.
Without some skin in the game, it's all spam and trolling otherwise. What might look strange in a mod system, might under analysis turn out to be well designed.
For all forums there is an adaption phase, before getting what people expect from posts.
There are a few interesting "alternatives" to the standard downvotes we see. For example:
* "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g., "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on e.g., Lobsters.
* Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3 downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or some random forum...
I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that though.
* "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g., "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on e.g., Lobsters.
* Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3 downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or some random forum...
I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that though.
Personally I think you're taking things too seriously, even though you're right. I enjoyed "The Great Online Game"[1] recently (1 comment), which stages this engagement as play. Although I would like to see my karma go up faster, that's not the point of the play for me. Unfortunately a lot of ludicrous, non-contributing, downvoting schmoes are part of the game. It's ok, it's still- for me- for fun, and I don't feel the need to adjust myself or my strategy of play because of the directed, biased negativity about.
To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems: Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online, understand each other, and build our own defensive & observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, & growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece of understanding this web ought be able to encompass.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488
To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems: Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online, understand each other, and build our own defensive & observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, & growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece of understanding this web ought be able to encompass.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488
> I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got
It doesn't even need to be 4 accounts. Just a single lazy downvote can be infuriating due to the asymmetry in effort and influence.
The root cause is downvotes having been made into a combination of multiple things; yes it is a shortcut for expressing disagreement, but it is also a metric used for decreasing the salience of a point (e.g. in HN). Imagine how much of history of science, religion, philosophy would be lost if disagreeability of a point alone was a good heuristic for its attention-worthiness.
Additionally, since downvotes are an expression of disagreement, they are just opinions that have privileged representations in the UI, but they can't be disagreed with like other opinions. It does not build dialectic, it kills it by not allowing responses.
Ultimately we are trying to dynamically build a model of at least attention and content value based on collective intelligence that can articulate on 2 dimensions.
My humble proposal would be double the size of dimensions; have up-down votes for dis-agreement, which require justification, which can be responded to, and back-fore votes for salience dynamics, i.e. foreground if "I think more people should read this" and background if "I think people shouldn't waste time on this idea".
It doesn't even need to be 4 accounts. Just a single lazy downvote can be infuriating due to the asymmetry in effort and influence.
The root cause is downvotes having been made into a combination of multiple things; yes it is a shortcut for expressing disagreement, but it is also a metric used for decreasing the salience of a point (e.g. in HN). Imagine how much of history of science, religion, philosophy would be lost if disagreeability of a point alone was a good heuristic for its attention-worthiness.
Additionally, since downvotes are an expression of disagreement, they are just opinions that have privileged representations in the UI, but they can't be disagreed with like other opinions. It does not build dialectic, it kills it by not allowing responses.
Ultimately we are trying to dynamically build a model of at least attention and content value based on collective intelligence that can articulate on 2 dimensions.
My humble proposal would be double the size of dimensions; have up-down votes for dis-agreement, which require justification, which can be responded to, and back-fore votes for salience dynamics, i.e. foreground if "I think more people should read this" and background if "I think people shouldn't waste time on this idea".
This really is an interesting problem, and I'm not sure if there's an answer. Sometimes I think the whole idea of HN/Reddit type sites is just doomed to ultimate failure. Dunbar's number is every bit as real in a digital space as it is in a physical space.
I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. So instead of a global channel, your primary feed would come from your pod of 150ish that you would interact with more directly. This would mirror the concept of a village. Then maybe there would be another tier, the "region" if you will, where a single top post of the day from each village would get posted, then maybe a larger "nation" type area where the top post from each region over a week would get posted weekly.
This system would let people spend most of their time with like-minded people, which is exactly what people want as exhibited by downvote behavior, but still allow for a degree of cross pollination of thought.
Zoomed out, it seems like there really are two types of social media networks. The first is the hyper niche one where the entire conversation revovles around the topic and nothing but the topic. But once you leave your niche and become a more general site, cultural and idelogical alignment becomes a much bigger driver than topic and interest alignment.
I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. So instead of a global channel, your primary feed would come from your pod of 150ish that you would interact with more directly. This would mirror the concept of a village. Then maybe there would be another tier, the "region" if you will, where a single top post of the day from each village would get posted, then maybe a larger "nation" type area where the top post from each region over a week would get posted weekly.
This system would let people spend most of their time with like-minded people, which is exactly what people want as exhibited by downvote behavior, but still allow for a degree of cross pollination of thought.
Zoomed out, it seems like there really are two types of social media networks. The first is the hyper niche one where the entire conversation revovles around the topic and nothing but the topic. But once you leave your niche and become a more general site, cultural and idelogical alignment becomes a much bigger driver than topic and interest alignment.
Completely agree and basically proposed the same system last month here[0]. I also made a comment matching yours about topic based communities[1].
An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time.
With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen.
Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions.
So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough.
I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625
An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time.
With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen.
Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions.
So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough.
I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625
> I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities.
joinmastodon.org may interest you
joinmastodon.org may interest you
Isn't that Reddit? I'm not sure you can cut a "village" over the internet population in any way that doesn't breed harmful behavior. Reddit is on the most harmless end of those possibilities, but it causes problems there too.
Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your comment?
Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your comment?
My guess is it was downvoted for calling out that what people really want is to be in a bubble of likeminded culturally similar people. I don't see a problem with this behavior, it just looks like basic human nature to me. But I think some people are offended that they might not be as "enlightned" as they fancy themselves to be.
Given that many of his public posts are devoted to ranting against conformity of thought, it's amusing that pg designed a forum that rewards exactly that behavior.
I don't think I agree at all.
Some of my favorite comments I've made here are the ones that get downvoted. They point me to places where one of several interesting scenarios has occurred, such as, but not limited to:
1) I'm right, other people have not yet realized it and the way I'm expressing it doesn't make it clear that there's a good argument there. This is a fantastic opportunity.
2) I'm wrong about something, and haven't yet realized how. This is extremely valuable information because my own cognitive biases mean that it's difficult for me to discover through introspection.
3) lots of other possibilities too!
When I stumble upon making a comment that gets unexpected downvotes, I have come across some of the most valuable information HN can give me.
If I make a comment that I know will get lots of downvotes, I'm just wasting everybody's time. If I share something interesting that I think will get lots of upvotes, I may give some good information to others, but otherwise I'm mostly validating myself, which isn't a great use of my time.
But most of the time I'm not commenting with any thoughts to votes, it's just about discussion. The votes just serves as a standin for body language that we'd get if we were talking face to face.
Some of my favorite comments I've made here are the ones that get downvoted. They point me to places where one of several interesting scenarios has occurred, such as, but not limited to:
1) I'm right, other people have not yet realized it and the way I'm expressing it doesn't make it clear that there's a good argument there. This is a fantastic opportunity.
2) I'm wrong about something, and haven't yet realized how. This is extremely valuable information because my own cognitive biases mean that it's difficult for me to discover through introspection.
3) lots of other possibilities too!
When I stumble upon making a comment that gets unexpected downvotes, I have come across some of the most valuable information HN can give me.
If I make a comment that I know will get lots of downvotes, I'm just wasting everybody's time. If I share something interesting that I think will get lots of upvotes, I may give some good information to others, but otherwise I'm mostly validating myself, which isn't a great use of my time.
But most of the time I'm not commenting with any thoughts to votes, it's just about discussion. The votes just serves as a standin for body language that we'd get if we were talking face to face.
I don't think downvotes are the problem.
I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms. The people who would normally upvote your honest good faith against the grain take are no longer on the platform, because the reigning ideology pushed them out. That doesn't mean you are necessarily ideologically aligned with these people, reality is much more nuanced then black and white.
I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms. The people who would normally upvote your honest good faith against the grain take are no longer on the platform, because the reigning ideology pushed them out. That doesn't mean you are necessarily ideologically aligned with these people, reality is much more nuanced then black and white.
> I don't think downvotes are the problem.
> I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms
Echo-chamberization is a result of downvoting. When comments close to the borders of Overton window are downvotes, Overtone windows narrows over time.
Echo-chamberization is a result of downvoting. When comments close to the borders of Overton window are downvotes, Overtone windows narrows over time.
As an academic experiment, one could post a message here on HN and on Usenet to see how the interaction plays out on each platform. On Usenet, people can not vote or moderate your message. Messages are only removed from Usenet relays if they violate law for the most part. Anyone can reply if interested in doing so, with any text or content. Has anyone done this experiment recently?
On Usenet, you can moderate your own incoming messages. Assuming you have a suitable newsreader (I know of none that are not suitable for use with killfiles).
Opt-In self moderation is great. You can even do that here on HN with add-ons like uBlock.
From My Filters
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22781635
From My Filters
ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)
ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr
ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr+tr
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22781635
Filters would be fantastic. I would love very much to be able to filter out specific words and phrases from my HN view.
A simpler add-on for words and phrases is FoxReplace. [1]
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/
@crazy_horse, what do you have in mind when you say "we can do much better than downvotes"?
In my opinion, stackoverflow-style downvotes are a good solution. Downvotes cost reputation points to cast, and can only be cast once you are at a certain trust level. SO has other issues, but I think they got downvoting right.
In my opinion, stackoverflow-style downvotes are a good solution. Downvotes cost reputation points to cast, and can only be cast once you are at a certain trust level. SO has other issues, but I think they got downvoting right.
I use a throwaway account and a really simple tamper monkey script that hides my current feedback score, this allows me to interact on this website without getting neurotically obsessed with how other people think of me.
It allows me to push back on polarizing posts without having to get too psychologically involved.
It allows me to push back on polarizing posts without having to get too psychologically involved.
I partly disagree with your comment (HN isn't an academy) but you make a good point that 4 downvotes are enough to effectively make a comment disappear. That can be abused to easily wreck good comments, adn genuinely shitty comments don't get enough negative feedback.
When you add in flagging and other factors, the 'mysterious black box + benevolent moderator' approach satisfies nobody and is easily gamed by bad actors. It's just an attempt at community security through obscurity, and like all STO approaches it doesn't work. There's also evidence to suggest that flamewars do a better job of eliminating toxicity over the long term than the approach outlined above.
When you add in flagging and other factors, the 'mysterious black box + benevolent moderator' approach satisfies nobody and is easily gamed by bad actors. It's just an attempt at community security through obscurity, and like all STO approaches it doesn't work. There's also evidence to suggest that flamewars do a better job of eliminating toxicity over the long term than the approach outlined above.
Votes determine visibility. A post doesn't matter if it's not visible.
A bad vote is more harmful than a bad comment. Bad comments get sorted. A bad vote makes the front page worse.
Making votes visible makes the bad actors visible. Though I think other feedback mechanisms are better.
A bad vote is more harmful than a bad comment. Bad comments get sorted. A bad vote makes the front page worse.
Making votes visible makes the bad actors visible. Though I think other feedback mechanisms are better.
I can see this.
One half-cocked idea I can think of is downvotes require a comment explaining why. Conversationally, "I agree" or "that's correct" requires no follow on conversation. However, "I disagree" or "that's wrong" requires some sort of counter-argument or reason why you disagree. IMO, it does some good in making people explain their position, at least copy/paste another position, or shitpost and then they can deal with their own downvotes.
One half-cocked idea I can think of is downvotes require a comment explaining why. Conversationally, "I agree" or "that's correct" requires no follow on conversation. However, "I disagree" or "that's wrong" requires some sort of counter-argument or reason why you disagree. IMO, it does some good in making people explain their position, at least copy/paste another position, or shitpost and then they can deal with their own downvotes.
HN has a bit of the opposite policy, but it would be interesting to only allow downvotes if you have responded to the comment.
You would need a separate mechanism for flagging though to filter low effort contributions and it is questionable if that wouldn't just replace downvotes with flagging. Alternatively maybe only have that rule for comments above a certain length, although that isn't a good metric either.
You would need a separate mechanism for flagging though to filter low effort contributions and it is questionable if that wouldn't just replace downvotes with flagging. Alternatively maybe only have that rule for comments above a certain length, although that isn't a good metric either.
> someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got
I think the Reddit server software actually detects that kind of thing now and will make those votes not count.
Likewise I think they’ve also made it so that a single comment alone that downvotes get piled onto will not hurt the account of the person that wrote it that much any longer.
I think the Reddit server software actually detects that kind of thing now and will make those votes not count.
Likewise I think they’ve also made it so that a single comment alone that downvotes get piled onto will not hurt the account of the person that wrote it that much any longer.
For stories? Yes. For comments? They don't seem to care. Also the reddit bot mob is a very real thing and there's folks who enjoy evading those sorts of attempts at control. It becomes a game unto itself.
> I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them
I agree with everything you wrote except for the part about actually not participating - try as I might (and knowing better), I just can't keep myself away. I've taken long hiatuses, but I'm always inexorably drawn back anyway.
I agree with everything you wrote except for the part about actually not participating - try as I might (and knowing better), I just can't keep myself away. I've taken long hiatuses, but I'm always inexorably drawn back anyway.
Exactly. The article reads like expressing displeasure is hampered. But if negative comments have increased, then that is a good thing, because at least the commenters have had to come out of the woodwork to express themselves.
And then we can talk, if they actually have a point. Or we can upvote your point.
Downvotes are anonymous slaps on the wrist with no recourse. They're insulting, offensive, and then further used for censorship (especially here). People who don't know what they're talking about, can't articulate themselves, or are just taking sides all get to punish what they don't like without being caught. They get to be taken seriously. By robots.
The author of the article is a prolific writer. If anyone knows the importance of writing, even long-form writing, it would be him, and it's exactly what he used to make his point about downvotes. He could not have done it with a downvote, or even a tweet.
Nuance is invaluable and context is king. Language gives us all of it. Twitter makes us stupid. Votes make us children.
When expression is limited, the dumber - and more violent - we become.
And then we can talk, if they actually have a point. Or we can upvote your point.
Downvotes are anonymous slaps on the wrist with no recourse. They're insulting, offensive, and then further used for censorship (especially here). People who don't know what they're talking about, can't articulate themselves, or are just taking sides all get to punish what they don't like without being caught. They get to be taken seriously. By robots.
The author of the article is a prolific writer. If anyone knows the importance of writing, even long-form writing, it would be him, and it's exactly what he used to make his point about downvotes. He could not have done it with a downvote, or even a tweet.
Nuance is invaluable and context is king. Language gives us all of it. Twitter makes us stupid. Votes make us children.
When expression is limited, the dumber - and more violent - we become.
I wonder how much downvotes are to blame for the incredible political bias over on Reddit (just check out /r/politics). Or whether it would naturally occur without the downvotes anyway. I suspect downvotes exacerbate the problem but probably aren't the only cause.
r/politics is a huge echo chamber. Occasionally you will see posts with thoughtful disagreement, but usually it’s extremely one sided with the top 100 comments all confirming each other.
The problem with "democratic" downvotes is that the vote of an expert is equal with the vote of an ignorant who votes while browsing the internets in the evening while drunk.
Actually, that's kind of the problem with democracy in general.
Actually, that's kind of the problem with democracy in general.
> I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.
That's a fine opinion to have, but why are you then in academia?
That's a fine opinion to have, but why are you then in academia?
There's definitely a downvote squad. I've noticed my comments tend to do much better their first few hours and downvotes tend to come later after the submission has fallen off the front page.
A while back I posted that according to my local state utility, installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price of installed nat-gas per year, both for the newest installations. And from that I concluded nuclear power was the only viable alternative to CO2 producing energy.
Now this is the highest heresy in our new world religion, yet I only lost a single vote. Granted I didn't get any useful feedback on why I was wrong, likely because that would have involved 2 minutes of googling and some basic math, and it's just easier to believe what you want and click downvote. But Hacker News is still way better than anyplace else for serious discussions.
Now this is the highest heresy in our new world religion, yet I only lost a single vote. Granted I didn't get any useful feedback on why I was wrong, likely because that would have involved 2 minutes of googling and some basic math, and it's just easier to believe what you want and click downvote. But Hacker News is still way better than anyplace else for serious discussions.
> installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price of installed nat-gas per year
I don't know which state you are in, but for the US as a whole "recent [2018] wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-no...
I don't know which state you are in, but for the US as a whole "recent [2018] wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-no...
But that's my point, none of these studies ever cite a utility's actual costs. When I got curious and looked at what the actual cost to the utility (not counting any federal rebates) just their actual outlays, versus how much power was generated over the year, it was ridiculous.
And the easy way to know this is true is that utilities are still building nat-gas plants. It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits. If wind was actually cheaper than fuel, they'd just be over building wind farms so that no new nat-gas plants were needed.
And the easy way to know this is true is that utilities are still building nat-gas plants. It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits. If wind was actually cheaper than fuel, they'd just be over building wind farms so that no new nat-gas plants were needed.
> just their actual outlays
My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel, or maybe the two types of plants have different financing models that are hard to compare directly, but I wouldn't be qualified to check your results even if you presented all the data.
> It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits.
Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.
My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel, or maybe the two types of plants have different financing models that are hard to compare directly, but I wouldn't be qualified to check your results even if you presented all the data.
> It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits.
Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.
> My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel
The docs seemed pretty clear that they were the operating costs of the installation. I had to find the install cost and the operating costs separately.
> Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.
That's a good point, but there is also an enormous amount of pressure to go carbon free and these power companies answer to several regulatory bodies all with enormous power of their operations. It's not unreasonable to believe there are requirements to move to wind for continued licensing.
The docs seemed pretty clear that they were the operating costs of the installation. I had to find the install cost and the operating costs separately.
> Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.
That's a good point, but there is also an enormous amount of pressure to go carbon free and these power companies answer to several regulatory bodies all with enormous power of their operations. It's not unreasonable to believe there are requirements to move to wind for continued licensing.
Downvoting here on HN does seem pretty arbitrary.
(Either that, or I just don't post quality comments/posts :D)
I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I don't know how successful they are.
I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might have some viability.
As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.
I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I don't know how successful they are.
I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might have some viability.
As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.
Would it be better if you get down voted to hell and also get swamped with throwaway comments like "that's stupid"
I think throwaway accounts should be banned, or at the very least, there should be a waiting period before you can comment. If you participate with thoughtful comments, you’ll reach 500 within a month. What bothers me is people creating these accounts on a whim just a throw out some garbage, or maybe a valid opinion, and then disappear in the night. If you had to wait a week to post it might lead to massive duplicate account creation, but I think it’s worth considering.
> or at the very least, there should be a waiting period before you can comment.
That wouldn't work that well for sites like this one where reading doesn't require an account. The moment one wants to create an account will most probably be the moment one wants to reply to a post or comment with a salient point; making it impossible to reply unless the account was created with forethought would just lead to the account never being created in the first place ("I would create an account to reply to this, but even if I create an account I cannot reply, so why bother?").
That wouldn't work that well for sites like this one where reading doesn't require an account. The moment one wants to create an account will most probably be the moment one wants to reply to a post or comment with a salient point; making it impossible to reply unless the account was created with forethought would just lead to the account never being created in the first place ("I would create an account to reply to this, but even if I create an account I cannot reply, so why bother?").
I believe Hell has nine levels; HN downvoteland has only 4.
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I upvoted you for this.
Shh!
You realise downvotes are a big deal for managing information on certain sites that we frequent...
You realise downvotes are a big deal for managing information on certain sites that we frequent...
> If downvotes don't matter…
They clearly do, to you. I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego, but if I were to downvote this it would be because you don't have a persuasive argument for why an upvotes-only feedback system (which can also be easily gamed) is any better than one which supports both.
They clearly do, to you. I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego, but if I were to downvote this it would be because you don't have a persuasive argument for why an upvotes-only feedback system (which can also be easily gamed) is any better than one which supports both.
> I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego,
This is criticism, IMO it's stupid criticism that should deserve a downvote, but you still wasted time to write it and it's ok, according to OP view of things, you responded to his words with some ad hominem attack, it's pointless and dumb in my opinion, but you put in the effort to respond and presented your arguments.
Compare it to the blind downvoting, you get downvoted, with no reasoning, not knowing who did it and if you get 4 of them your comment gets hidden.
Just 4.
I much prefer your ad hominems to hypotetical perfectly valid downvotes.
At least now people can form an opinion on what you wrote.
With downvotes people just assume that the comment was worthless or worse.
What if you had to reply to the comment before being able to downvote it?
It would at least be a bit less anonymous.
This is criticism, IMO it's stupid criticism that should deserve a downvote, but you still wasted time to write it and it's ok, according to OP view of things, you responded to his words with some ad hominem attack, it's pointless and dumb in my opinion, but you put in the effort to respond and presented your arguments.
Compare it to the blind downvoting, you get downvoted, with no reasoning, not knowing who did it and if you get 4 of them your comment gets hidden.
Just 4.
I much prefer your ad hominems to hypotetical perfectly valid downvotes.
At least now people can form an opinion on what you wrote.
With downvotes people just assume that the comment was worthless or worse.
What if you had to reply to the comment before being able to downvote it?
It would at least be a bit less anonymous.
The world is binary, there are just a lot more binary decisions than we often tote around. It’s a great model for academic and scientific work but not for society.
Thank the powers that be who push statistical analysis as being the “one path” to truth.
The mathematicians who first defined our statistical tools warned about using them to run society, as they are all designed with a certain amount of loss of precision.
When it comes to running a society, applying statistical models to people means rounding people off to make a choice work. Human biology works on adapting agency to the most common inputs; currently we are fine with man made behavior of treating each other like rounding errors.
This meme we can just statistically carve up wealth held by a minority is a huge joke of a cultural effort; as you can see here you are berating the efforts of one of the minority we protect as being pathological.
For starters, what real obligation is there scientifically to believe that Zuckerberg is that wealthy?
Oh that’s right; their experts who built their systems that train our biology to stay addicted to them, using scientific theory of biology to manufacture consent.
Thank the powers that be who push statistical analysis as being the “one path” to truth.
The mathematicians who first defined our statistical tools warned about using them to run society, as they are all designed with a certain amount of loss of precision.
When it comes to running a society, applying statistical models to people means rounding people off to make a choice work. Human biology works on adapting agency to the most common inputs; currently we are fine with man made behavior of treating each other like rounding errors.
This meme we can just statistically carve up wealth held by a minority is a huge joke of a cultural effort; as you can see here you are berating the efforts of one of the minority we protect as being pathological.
For starters, what real obligation is there scientifically to believe that Zuckerberg is that wealthy?
Oh that’s right; their experts who built their systems that train our biology to stay addicted to them, using scientific theory of biology to manufacture consent.
ohreallynow(1)
downvotes matter a lot and you should not ignore them. they are trying to tell you something. you dont have to agree with that message, as I frequently post things on HN that get downvoted, usually not that surprisingly, and I continue to simply disagree with the majority HN community on certain topics. downvotes are usually accompanied by a few real responses that will add context to why these downvotes might be coming in.
If we're going to have "upvotes" that can amplify things to a ridiculous degree, like all the vaccine mis-information on facebook that's being spread by something like eight individuals to hundreds of millions of people, then we need downvotes too. it's of course bad for facebook's business model.
If we're going to have "upvotes" that can amplify things to a ridiculous degree, like all the vaccine mis-information on facebook that's being spread by something like eight individuals to hundreds of millions of people, then we need downvotes too. it's of course bad for facebook's business model.
If you want to tell me something you need to spell it out, not leave me guessing and wondering whether I have said something untrue or that you merely dislike it.
This pretty much sums up my sentiment as well. I think people should comment their disagreement instead of downvote. Others can then upvote the response, but at least dialogue can remain open.
I've actually considered using a screenname like commentdontdownvote lol.
I've actually considered using a screenname like commentdontdownvote lol.
I don't mind downvotes on my comments, I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind of reason for it. Even a short comment "I don't like this" would be telling because it would indicate they don't have a reason other than emotion. Often I initially get a bunch of downvotes and then later enough upvotes to even it out.
I downvote stuff because it's either low-effort or inflammatory. I don't know if it would be valuable to tell the commenter this, because they're unlikely to agree.
(I know that this isn't what everyone does, just wanted to offer a data point.)
(I know that this isn't what everyone does, just wanted to offer a data point.)
>I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind of reason for it.
Could be interesting if it were applied selectively. If a user had a higher number of downvotes to upvotes over a sustained period of time for instance.
Could be interesting if it were applied selectively. If a user had a higher number of downvotes to upvotes over a sustained period of time for instance.
Someone with honest contrarian views would not be hurt by this because they leave usually comments with reasons. I appreciate them as much as the up voters.
Agree completely.
While in theory I completely agree downvotes should be around, in practice I have seen they are an ideological voting machine used to suppress opinions.
It is kind of unusual how fast the downvotes appear, as if there are downvote bots running on the HN & Reddit. I've posted a comment and had what appeared to be 3 downvotes within a minute.
Of course, I am an evidence driven technologist that is not very partisan so that could explain some of it.
While in theory I completely agree downvotes should be around, in practice I have seen they are an ideological voting machine used to suppress opinions.
It is kind of unusual how fast the downvotes appear, as if there are downvote bots running on the HN & Reddit. I've posted a comment and had what appeared to be 3 downvotes within a minute.
Of course, I am an evidence driven technologist that is not very partisan so that could explain some of it.
I always find the assumption that quick reactions are "bots" a bit weird. If I click on an active discussion, some comments will be "0 minutes" old (like yours right now, although it won't be when I submit this comment, because typing takes time - but downvoting doesn't). If I click on "comments" tab on HN, all comments there are new. So it's not particularly surprising that many people see your comment very shortly after it is posted on an active site like HN and react to it immediately.
They're not bots. Bots act on logic, however simple it is. These are mostly people who disengaged their brain.
If a comment that requires at least some thinking does not have a simple TLDR, preferably as the first line, you're going to get downvotes on Reddit and Imgur.
People just aren't there to think and they have this "weapon" that they can use to shoo away anything they don't immediately understand.
It's even more ridiculous that simple one sentence or better yet, one meme comments get drives of upvotes.
You can easily automate that. Just copy and paste comments in the same thread, mix with some meme comments, and you're halfway to an account with high karma.
Begs the question, why bother participating in this bottom of the barrel mindwankery? Nothing but an addiction these days.
I say Reddit, but that platform is really a lot of smaller forums with useful information, even if you have to wade through some shit.
Imgur on the other hand, I finally couldn't stand the sheer idiocy and quit. It's amazing, and I wish I could quit this site and Reddit, too.
People just aren't there to think and they have this "weapon" that they can use to shoo away anything they don't immediately understand.
It's even more ridiculous that simple one sentence or better yet, one meme comments get drives of upvotes.
You can easily automate that. Just copy and paste comments in the same thread, mix with some meme comments, and you're halfway to an account with high karma.
Begs the question, why bother participating in this bottom of the barrel mindwankery? Nothing but an addiction these days.
I say Reddit, but that platform is really a lot of smaller forums with useful information, even if you have to wade through some shit.
Imgur on the other hand, I finally couldn't stand the sheer idiocy and quit. It's amazing, and I wish I could quit this site and Reddit, too.
Down votes create cultural echo chambers and social cooling.
What down votes should be for is rudeness or site violations...but they're effectively used to blackball people with counter opinions.
There's a social cooling that goes along with anyone who has a counter opinion to the tribes narrative but doesn't want to be digitally outcast.
And eventually those with differing opinions who do speak up accumulate enough down votes and are outcast.
And over time the echo chamber continues to grow....
Edit: god bless HN echo chamber and the down votes.
What down votes should be for is rudeness or site violations...but they're effectively used to blackball people with counter opinions.
There's a social cooling that goes along with anyone who has a counter opinion to the tribes narrative but doesn't want to be digitally outcast.
And eventually those with differing opinions who do speak up accumulate enough down votes and are outcast.
And over time the echo chamber continues to grow....
Edit: god bless HN echo chamber and the down votes.
I suspect the original author would agree with your assessment on effects, but doesn't see either cultural echo chambers or social cooling as de-facto negatives. Lacking a downvote signal (i.e. a "most people who saw this disagreed" signal), a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers of equal apparent strength or value, increasingly divided by who upvotes what with no downvote counter-signal to breed some kind of consensus.
I don't think it's assumable that either the inability to converge in a shared space or the alternative to social cooling (shout louder to be bigger, because there's no way to signal the other ideas should be smaller) are a net positive for the global online community (the latter, of course, does drive those engagement numbers up though...).
I don't think it's assumable that either the inability to converge in a shared space or the alternative to social cooling (shout louder to be bigger, because there's no way to signal the other ideas should be smaller) are a net positive for the global online community (the latter, of course, does drive those engagement numbers up though...).
> a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers
So you mean a variety of opinions?
So you mean a variety of opinions?
A variety of strongly-held opinions that are not proved against each other and don't intersect to build a coherent narrative.
I would much rather have a variety of perspectives than a coherent narrative.
You learn more that way.
You learn more that way.
My observations don't suggest that principle holds true for the general poplulation. I fear too many people lack either sufficient knowledge or sufficient critical thinking to independently determine whether strongly-made claims successfully fact-check.
Lacking that ability, consensus of the commons is more likely to be correct than fringe opinion and can back-stop that missing ability.
Much of the Internet-connected world is currently running a fascinating experiment on itself regarding whether a public exposed to a fire-hose of unmodulated opinion can grow in aggregate wisdom or will be dissolved by gibbering foolishness. The results of this experiment are not yet determined.
Lacking that ability, consensus of the commons is more likely to be correct than fringe opinion and can back-stop that missing ability.
Much of the Internet-connected world is currently running a fascinating experiment on itself regarding whether a public exposed to a fire-hose of unmodulated opinion can grow in aggregate wisdom or will be dissolved by gibbering foolishness. The results of this experiment are not yet determined.
You make interesting points.
My observations suggest that human beings above 18 are adults and can think for themselves.
"Benevolent" attempts at manipulating the crowds by people who think they are wiser or more knowledgeable...leads to more harm than good.
My observations suggest that human beings above 18 are adults and can think for themselves.
"Benevolent" attempts at manipulating the crowds by people who think they are wiser or more knowledgeable...leads to more harm than good.
If by manipulation you mean discourse, then there's a whole history of more knowledgeable people sharing their knowledge to manipulate crowds to great benefit. Thomas Payne. Thomas Jefferson. Martin Luther King Jr.
If you instead mean regulation of what information enters a consensus... That's basically every history book. Every encyclopedia. The curated speaker list at a convention. The moderated comment stream on Hacker News.
And yes, such regulation can be used for ill also. The fascists in World War II used direct control of broadcast media to shape the thinking of the population. Of course, so did Roosevelt with his fireside chats.
I don't know what the future of information exchange in social media looks like. But I'm getting a strong sense that it doesn't look like Facebook and Twitter. I don't think those systems provide the right tools to build consensus.. instead, they seem to build cacophony. They reward enragement (because it drives engagement) and make it difficult for people unfamiliar with the topic to distinguish mainstream opinion from fringe.
If you instead mean regulation of what information enters a consensus... That's basically every history book. Every encyclopedia. The curated speaker list at a convention. The moderated comment stream on Hacker News.
And yes, such regulation can be used for ill also. The fascists in World War II used direct control of broadcast media to shape the thinking of the population. Of course, so did Roosevelt with his fireside chats.
I don't know what the future of information exchange in social media looks like. But I'm getting a strong sense that it doesn't look like Facebook and Twitter. I don't think those systems provide the right tools to build consensus.. instead, they seem to build cacophony. They reward enragement (because it drives engagement) and make it difficult for people unfamiliar with the topic to distinguish mainstream opinion from fringe.
Every forum, every social media site, every community participation vehicle rewards one thing above all: time.
Do I have time to make 4 or 5 burner accounts to enforce my votes? No. I have things to do.
Do I have time to post ad nauseum about any given topic to make my point? No. I have things to do.
And I'm sure you have things to do as well, so do a lot of people. But those that don't, have the thing we lack: time. And there's often reasons they have all that time. Often good reasons. And it's not because they're pleasant people.
Do I have time to make 4 or 5 burner accounts to enforce my votes? No. I have things to do.
Do I have time to post ad nauseum about any given topic to make my point? No. I have things to do.
And I'm sure you have things to do as well, so do a lot of people. But those that don't, have the thing we lack: time. And there's often reasons they have all that time. Often good reasons. And it's not because they're pleasant people.
I've been thinking how to counter this effect. How to give power to the silent majority.
I've been slowly writing a version of Reddit with an added level of moderation via direct democracy but made efficient by using proxy votes and statistical sampling. People with time and interest provide most is the content but moderation incentivizes behavior beneficial to the majority.
It's a fools errand as it's a double-sided market but I feel the need.
I've been slowly writing a version of Reddit with an added level of moderation via direct democracy but made efficient by using proxy votes and statistical sampling. People with time and interest provide most is the content but moderation incentivizes behavior beneficial to the majority.
It's a fools errand as it's a double-sided market but I feel the need.
It probably is.
Moderation itself is an attempt at a solution. And it is a solution on a small enough scale. But when you're literally dealing with moderating the entire world 24/7, there just aren't the resources to deal with that.
You're attempting to automate that or kick that can back to the users. But just like here, just like reddit, just like StackOverflow, just like every single site that relies on community moderation that gets big, time beats all.
It'll be fine for a while and you'll think you've solved the issue, but then you'll tip and become larger than you can socially manage. And those with the most time will skew your samples and votes.
Moderation itself is an attempt at a solution. And it is a solution on a small enough scale. But when you're literally dealing with moderating the entire world 24/7, there just aren't the resources to deal with that.
You're attempting to automate that or kick that can back to the users. But just like here, just like reddit, just like StackOverflow, just like every single site that relies on community moderation that gets big, time beats all.
It'll be fine for a while and you'll think you've solved the issue, but then you'll tip and become larger than you can socially manage. And those with the most time will skew your samples and votes.
I've always had this idea that reputation systems and enforced, systematic gatekeeping might be a way to build stronger communities.
The fundamental issue of any fully open community is scale. From what I've seen, no online community really resists the swarm that comes when it goes viral. Whatever community that was there before, for all it's values and culture, gets replaced by the masses by sheer virtue of numbers.
The fundamental issue of any fully open community is scale. From what I've seen, no online community really resists the swarm that comes when it goes viral. Whatever community that was there before, for all it's values and culture, gets replaced by the masses by sheer virtue of numbers.
Reputation systems can be gamed. On massive sites, they reward those with the most time.
Gatekeeping (or moderation) works, but like we've both already said, it only works for smaller scales.
Gatekeeping (or moderation) works, but like we've both already said, it only works for smaller scales.
Has weighting members by arrival order been tried? For example, the 100th member has 10x the voting power as the 1000th and so on.
A comment disputing the post with its own upvotes seems a better representation.
So original post states x (it can gather up votes that mean relevance). Then responses are posted, positive, negative, adding nuance - doesnt matter.. then those responses get up votes.
Seems to me that everything can be done with positive re-inforcement.
I would like to be able to filter out out votes though, maybe within a scope. So if you post x, someone disputes it with a comment that i disagree with that gets lots of upvotes.. i would like to be able to flag all those users as incompetent within that domain (this would just be my opinion and no one else would see it) then i can have two upvote scores: the masses, and the "competent in my eyes" masses.
I know this isnt a full solution.. just putting ideas out there
So original post states x (it can gather up votes that mean relevance). Then responses are posted, positive, negative, adding nuance - doesnt matter.. then those responses get up votes.
Seems to me that everything can be done with positive re-inforcement.
I would like to be able to filter out out votes though, maybe within a scope. So if you post x, someone disputes it with a comment that i disagree with that gets lots of upvotes.. i would like to be able to flag all those users as incompetent within that domain (this would just be my opinion and no one else would see it) then i can have two upvote scores: the masses, and the "competent in my eyes" masses.
I know this isnt a full solution.. just putting ideas out there
It sounds like this is more about your ego. Not to be glib, but if you have written out a thoughtful statement, who cares if it gets downvoted? You can’t control how other people are going to react, and getting upset that you lack that control, takes away from your arguments and makes it about you.
How do you respond when colleagues or students disagree? Perhaps working in academia so long has given you a false sense of superiority.
How do you respond when colleagues or students disagree? Perhaps working in academia so long has given you a false sense of superiority.
A downvote is not "disagreeing". It doesn't require the downvoter to be able to justify their action, they can just do it, and it is closer to violence than to communication.
Come and see the violence inherent to the system!
I think Americans don't give enough attention to the bi-party system as an important cause for the current political divide, and increasingly, civil divide.
My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling. I've never seen such disdain or hatred towards people on the other side of the political spectrum as in the US. I'm from continental Europe and that divide there is much less present. And I think it's because we have so many different parties, that the "us vs them" feeling isn't so powerful.
Sure, social media and the completely politicized media landscape exacerbate the issue. But I think the root cause is the two-party political system.
My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling. I've never seen such disdain or hatred towards people on the other side of the political spectrum as in the US. I'm from continental Europe and that divide there is much less present. And I think it's because we have so many different parties, that the "us vs them" feeling isn't so powerful.
Sure, social media and the completely politicized media landscape exacerbate the issue. But I think the root cause is the two-party political system.
> a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling
I agree, but that's just the punch-and-judy show. The real disaffection stems from seeing how the incentives of politicians are reliably not aligned with their nominal constituents.
We have legal precedent establishing money as speech, and a steep hill to climb for any third party to win the prerogatives which the two major US parties enjoy, like automatically getting your candidate on the ballot in all 50 states in federal elections.
I decided some time ago to never cast a vote for either of these two parties again. Even speaking with people who decry the bankrupt nature of these parties, they still view casting a vote for a third party as throwing their vote away.
I agree, but that's just the punch-and-judy show. The real disaffection stems from seeing how the incentives of politicians are reliably not aligned with their nominal constituents.
We have legal precedent establishing money as speech, and a steep hill to climb for any third party to win the prerogatives which the two major US parties enjoy, like automatically getting your candidate on the ballot in all 50 states in federal elections.
I decided some time ago to never cast a vote for either of these two parties again. Even speaking with people who decry the bankrupt nature of these parties, they still view casting a vote for a third party as throwing their vote away.
Personally, I agree both parties are severely problematic, don't feel they're equally problematic.
I vote for third party candidates with policy I actually agree with when it isn't going to negatively affect me or others when they inevitably lose.
The sad reality is that FPTP makes strategic voting necessary if you want to have any kind of power. In addition to the issues you mentioned we need score or ranked choice voting so we can begin a transition towards actual accountibility, and hopefully eventually a more diverse set of parties.
Voting for a third party candidate is effectively throwing your vote away in a protest no one will ever hear in a FPTP system.
I vote for third party candidates with policy I actually agree with when it isn't going to negatively affect me or others when they inevitably lose.
The sad reality is that FPTP makes strategic voting necessary if you want to have any kind of power. In addition to the issues you mentioned we need score or ranked choice voting so we can begin a transition towards actual accountibility, and hopefully eventually a more diverse set of parties.
Voting for a third party candidate is effectively throwing your vote away in a protest no one will ever hear in a FPTP system.
> Voting for a third party candidate is effectively throwing your vote away in a protest no one will ever hear in a FPTP system.
Voting for a 3rd party is not a de facto protest vote, nor is it throwing it away in any case. What power do you get for voting for a party not aligned with your interests? If a third party should achieve a 5% vote, they are eligible for federal funds and would have a big impact on ballot access nationally.
That may not be very persuasive to you (based on conversations I've had with others who felt similarly), but I no longer need regret voting strategically (which actually feels like throwing my vote away).
Voting for a 3rd party is not a de facto protest vote, nor is it throwing it away in any case. What power do you get for voting for a party not aligned with your interests? If a third party should achieve a 5% vote, they are eligible for federal funds and would have a big impact on ballot access nationally.
That may not be very persuasive to you (based on conversations I've had with others who felt similarly), but I no longer need regret voting strategically (which actually feels like throwing my vote away).
I actually voted for a third party candidate in 2020 because I knew I could do it without supporting Trump and didn't feel either candidate represented my views.
I was only able to do that because I knew my vote wouldn't ultimately matter in my state's contest though.
In score or ranked choice voting I could both articulate my actual preference in a way that was publicly visible and still make the strategic vote(s) I needed to get the least bad of likely options.
FPTP is one of the least expressive voting systems you could have, and it is objectively terrible for third parties. This isn't a controversial opinion, it's what that vast majority of political scientists agree with.
Third parties are irrelevant in American politics and will continue to be unless we change our voting system (and campaign finance).
I was only able to do that because I knew my vote wouldn't ultimately matter in my state's contest though.
In score or ranked choice voting I could both articulate my actual preference in a way that was publicly visible and still make the strategic vote(s) I needed to get the least bad of likely options.
FPTP is one of the least expressive voting systems you could have, and it is objectively terrible for third parties. This isn't a controversial opinion, it's what that vast majority of political scientists agree with.
Third parties are irrelevant in American politics and will continue to be unless we change our voting system (and campaign finance).
Unless you are in a jurisdiction which offers ranked choice voting, then this is equivalent to throwing your vote away and then being surprised when nobody wants it. Also, and orthogonally, eliding the distinctions between the two main parties over a systemic issue that arises out of the constitutional structure means that a party can be incentivized to discourage you from voting by pandering to your dissatisfaction using sockpuppets.
But I think the root cause is the two-party political system.
I get what you're saying, but I don't completely agree. Firstly because, to the extent that we can say we have a "two party system" that itself is an effect with a deeper cause. And if you buy the theory behind Duverger's Law[1], the fundamental cause is the mechanism we use for elections, with "first past the post" voting in single-member districts.
My second quibble concerns more of the definition of "two party system". Clearly we do not have a "two party system" in the most literal sense, as there are plenty of other political parties in the US, and several of them routinely have candidates elected to office (the Libertarian and Green parties come to mind) albeit mostly at lower levels.
So yes, we have a system where two parties are dominant, but they are not exclusive and I think that difference matters. Why? Because I believe talking about us having a "two party system" creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop further enforcing the Duverger's Law effect and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
I get what you're saying, but I don't completely agree. Firstly because, to the extent that we can say we have a "two party system" that itself is an effect with a deeper cause. And if you buy the theory behind Duverger's Law[1], the fundamental cause is the mechanism we use for elections, with "first past the post" voting in single-member districts.
My second quibble concerns more of the definition of "two party system". Clearly we do not have a "two party system" in the most literal sense, as there are plenty of other political parties in the US, and several of them routinely have candidates elected to office (the Libertarian and Green parties come to mind) albeit mostly at lower levels.
So yes, we have a system where two parties are dominant, but they are not exclusive and I think that difference matters. Why? Because I believe talking about us having a "two party system" creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop further enforcing the Duverger's Law effect and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
OK, the US doesn't strictly have a two-party system. But in practice it is, at least at the federal level (which dominates the political discussions). Sure, in theory a Libertarian or Green candidate could become president in 2024. But that will never happen, because the media landscape is strongly colored by either the Democrat or Republican party . So they have no incentive to let anyone but from their own party come to power.
I get your point that denoting it a "two-party system" only makes it worse. But I don't know how to bring it up without mentioning it :-)
I get your point that denoting it a "two-party system" only makes it worse. But I don't know how to bring it up without mentioning it :-)
> The expression to feed into an anonymous algorithm that we don’t just not like something — that we actually dislike it.
The author seems to assume that this sort of interaction would lead to these algorithms recommending similar content less, but these algorithms tend to prioritize engagement, not enjoyment. Downvotes are a form of engagement, so don't be surprised if these algorithms use your downvote patterns to learn what to show you to make you angry, upset, and engaged.
The author seems to assume that this sort of interaction would lead to these algorithms recommending similar content less, but these algorithms tend to prioritize engagement, not enjoyment. Downvotes are a form of engagement, so don't be surprised if these algorithms use your downvote patterns to learn what to show you to make you angry, upset, and engaged.
Reddit had downvotes which means every thread is full of people agreeing with eachother. Creates an echo chamber. People don't want to get downvoted so they eventually stop posting.
It's great for creating perception bubbles. Everyone agrees!
It's great for creating perception bubbles. Everyone agrees!
Yeah, my experience has been that any downvote system will turn an audience that's divided 51-49 to one that's partitioned 51-0 in very short order. If anything, I've come to the conclusion that downvoting should be completely removed from most online platforms.
Not so.
Reddit's system works that if a post get 1000 upvotes and 500 downvotes (66% liked), it will be scored worse than a post than gets 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
Basically what it does is penalize controversy, which is the perfect decision for a website that is about mining the most humorous and widely-liked response.
Anything that is 51% liked and 49% disliked (e.g. political individuals mentioned in a non-political thread) gets bombed to the bottom almost immediately, which is exactly what most redditors want.
The other brilliant thing it does it let the user adjust this prioritization if they so desire.
Reddit's system works that if a post get 1000 upvotes and 500 downvotes (66% liked), it will be scored worse than a post than gets 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
Basically what it does is penalize controversy, which is the perfect decision for a website that is about mining the most humorous and widely-liked response.
Anything that is 51% liked and 49% disliked (e.g. political individuals mentioned in a non-political thread) gets bombed to the bottom almost immediately, which is exactly what most redditors want.
The other brilliant thing it does it let the user adjust this prioritization if they so desire.
The point is that the 49% eventually leave when their every contribution get bombed to the bottom immediately. Then the 49% of the remaining 51% get bullied out.
Reddit's system encourages purity spirals, especially when the main topic of discussion is how terrible everyone else is.
Reddit's system encourages purity spirals, especially when the main topic of discussion is how terrible everyone else is.
While downvotes can drive people out of communities, I have to contrast what happens in no-downvote communities, where often the top commentary is, to be blunt, far worse because corrections can only exist in the form of responses (and so more engagement).
Downvote-based systems are better at having the consensus viewpoint and quality content bubble to the top, at the expense of pummelling some of the dissenting views.
Upvote-only systems seem to have worse stuff bubble to the top.
Downvote-based systems are better at having the consensus viewpoint and quality content bubble to the top, at the expense of pummelling some of the dissenting views.
Upvote-only systems seem to have worse stuff bubble to the top.
What's happening in Hnews then? Is it bad?
It's not as bad on HN in my opinion, for a few reasons:
1. Comments cannot fall below -4 points
2. Downvoted comments only get greyed out, not hidden entirely
3. Most topics on HN are not political (though there are certainly exceptions)
4. The community here is (usually) a bit more mature than on other sites like Reddit
1. Comments cannot fall below -4 points
2. Downvoted comments only get greyed out, not hidden entirely
3. Most topics on HN are not political (though there are certainly exceptions)
4. The community here is (usually) a bit more mature than on other sites like Reddit
There's an inherent account age requirement on HN though, tied to the number of upvotes an account has
Surprisingly many topics are political [1], and an answer the very right-wing libertarian consensus here disagrees with will absolutely be voted all the way down.
[1] Often, the assertion "this topic is not or should not be political" is political. Because politics is how we organize society on a large scale and saying things should be exempt from that, guess what, is a political opinion.
[1] Often, the assertion "this topic is not or should not be political" is political. Because politics is how we organize society on a large scale and saying things should be exempt from that, guess what, is a political opinion.
Dunno, I'm pretty sure I've seen calls to break up or even nationalize Google and similar sentiments at the top quite a lot. That doesn't strike me as particularly right-wing?
The groupthink here isn't straight party-line, but it does have a lean.
That's moving the goalposts quite a bit from "...absolutely be voted all the way down."
Not really. It just means the topics people are touchy about don't follow the party line. They're still touchy and political about them.
I actually agree, I just think libertarian right wing is a mischaracterization, and I think it matters because the stereotype of the tech nerd is the atlas shrugged-toting libertarian, but HN doesn't really match that stereotype most of the time, I think.
I'm sure it happens here, too. I know that if I start getting voted into oblivion, I walk away for a while. Clearly the community disagreed with my thoughts and it's not worth it to continue to engage.
Ironically, it doesn't affect me at all on Reddit. I have such low expectations for the platform that I don't even notice my own karma score nor do I bother to look at posts of mine to see how they're being received. HN makes your score much more prominent so it's easy to see it moving and you know immediately whether you've said something controversial somewhere.
Ironically, it doesn't affect me at all on Reddit. I have such low expectations for the platform that I don't even notice my own karma score nor do I bother to look at posts of mine to see how they're being received. HN makes your score much more prominent so it's easy to see it moving and you know immediately whether you've said something controversial somewhere.
HN is a rare exception to this effect due to its more focused niche (though the bubble effect is definitely there to some degree). I'm more referencing larger platforms, particularly reddit.
A subreddit tends to be more focused than HN. I'd chalk it up to user maturity, not that HN is without great fault on this either.
Not all users can downvote,only few can.
Yes it's bad. Only boring agreeable normies get the up vote's necessary to get downvote privs, then they do their school marm routine, exercising their petty tyranny.
This is why I stopped posting on reddit and why I still feel somewhat comfortable posting on HN. It's been years since reddit crossed the line and just became a left-wing echo chamber like twitter (or any other mainstream media, really). I'm neither liberal nor conservative, but I can't stand participating in a community where you're expected to play along with the mob or else be vilified.
> Reddit moderators who run subreddits are given the choice to allow the function. When it’s enabled, it’s used as a filter to sort out divisive posts from the rest but also leads to problems like abuse based on opinions and introducing a feeling of negativity into the communities.
Just want to clarify this: reddit inc. doesn't really offer communities a way to "disable" downvoting. The subreddits referenced at the link in this article are using the custom CSS to hide the downvote button. Notably this does not impact users who are browsing 1) via the mobile app, a substantial to majority percentage of traffic based on the community in question 2) with custom CSS disabled [which can be done via a global reddit setting or via popular extensions like RES 3) via the reddit desktop redesign ['r3']. In the desktop redesign, some communities try to continue hiding downvotes by using the customization tools to set the button to a transparent png - but this is blatantly ineffective - the downvote hitbox remains accessible and feedback is offered to the user on a successful click when they see the score change.
I have some experience with this, having helped researcher Nate Matias test the impact of downvote behavior in a community I'm involved with. You can see the summary of the resulting paper Do Downvote Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior? here https://citizensandtech.org/2018/01/do-downvote-buttons-caus...
Just want to clarify this: reddit inc. doesn't really offer communities a way to "disable" downvoting. The subreddits referenced at the link in this article are using the custom CSS to hide the downvote button. Notably this does not impact users who are browsing 1) via the mobile app, a substantial to majority percentage of traffic based on the community in question 2) with custom CSS disabled [which can be done via a global reddit setting or via popular extensions like RES 3) via the reddit desktop redesign ['r3']. In the desktop redesign, some communities try to continue hiding downvotes by using the customization tools to set the button to a transparent png - but this is blatantly ineffective - the downvote hitbox remains accessible and feedback is offered to the user on a successful click when they see the score change.
I have some experience with this, having helped researcher Nate Matias test the impact of downvote behavior in a community I'm involved with. You can see the summary of the resulting paper Do Downvote Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior? here https://citizensandtech.org/2018/01/do-downvote-buttons-caus...
In my experience of HN and StackOverflow, at first, I did not like people downvoting my naive or thoughtless comments. Throughout the years, my reputation on StackOverflow grew and a little bit on HN since the bar is so much higher seems... but in any case, this has been a learning journey in being a more thoughtful and respectful contributor and without those downvotes, I wouldn't have had the self reflection to be better, as trivial as that may sound.
This is my experience as well! I usually reflect on my unpopular comments and realize I could have been more considerate or worded things less rashly... Or my viewpoint is just unpopular.
I find it genuinely difficult to relate to the other comments on here equating downvotes to oppression or even violence.
If anything, my hope would be that Hacker News becomes MORE strictly moderated via downvotes, and maybe even starts banning some non-tech oriented politics. Now shower me with downvotes, 500+ karma daddies, to show the little ones it is okay.
I find it genuinely difficult to relate to the other comments on here equating downvotes to oppression or even violence.
If anything, my hope would be that Hacker News becomes MORE strictly moderated via downvotes, and maybe even starts banning some non-tech oriented politics. Now shower me with downvotes, 500+ karma daddies, to show the little ones it is okay.
thoughtful and respectful :)
The trouble with up and down buttons, or like and dislike is that they often are only used by the lovers or haters - the 10-20% of people at the opposite ends of the 'likeability spectrum'.
I've never figured out if up/down votes mean the content is good or that people agree with it? (the old issue of people liking death announcements/obituaries) On HN I tend not to downvote unless the person is writing like they're on Reddit, or in an offensive/confrontational manner.
I've never figured out if up/down votes mean the content is good or that people agree with it? (the old issue of people liking death announcements/obituaries) On HN I tend not to downvote unless the person is writing like they're on Reddit, or in an offensive/confrontational manner.
> I've never figured out if up/down votes mean the content is good or that people agree with it?
Most social sites have guidelines that downvotes are only supposed to be used for comments that break their guidelines. On HN and Reddit it seems many people ignore this and readily downvote opinions they disagree with or comments they simply don’t want to hear.
This is most obvious on posts about contentious topics (politics, police, social media, drugs) where well-written posts quickly accumulate downvotes if they don’t agree with the popular sentiment on on HN.
It only takes a few instances of seeing your well-written, polite comments with citations being downvoted immediately to -3 to know that unpopular opinions aren’t welcome. That’s how the echo chamber is propagated.
Most social sites have guidelines that downvotes are only supposed to be used for comments that break their guidelines. On HN and Reddit it seems many people ignore this and readily downvote opinions they disagree with or comments they simply don’t want to hear.
This is most obvious on posts about contentious topics (politics, police, social media, drugs) where well-written posts quickly accumulate downvotes if they don’t agree with the popular sentiment on on HN.
It only takes a few instances of seeing your well-written, polite comments with citations being downvoted immediately to -3 to know that unpopular opinions aren’t welcome. That’s how the echo chamber is propagated.
> It only takes a few instances of seeing your well-written, polite comments with citations being downvoted immediately to -3 to know that unpopular opinions aren’t welcome. That’s how the echo chamber is propagated.
While that might happen every once in a while, it is important to remember that politely worded comments with citations can (and often are) still rude, wrong, misguided, and/or spin. Unfair downvotes to death have even happened to me once or twice, but I don’t think HN is going to hell in a handbasket yet. I think I’ve seen a lot more people jumping to conclusions about why downvotes are cast than I have of actually positive and helpful comments being unfairly downvoted purely for harmless but unpopular opinions. Unless the downvoter explains their reasons, we don’t know why the downvotes were cast, so it’s not safe to assume it’s for popularity reasons just because it appears polite. HN threads are sometimes interesting because they can attract experts in the domain of the posted article, and it’s common for people who are curious but relatively ignorant to argue with people who really know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it’s not easy to tell who’s who.
Either way, if you see comments that don’t deserve to be gray, upvote them!
While that might happen every once in a while, it is important to remember that politely worded comments with citations can (and often are) still rude, wrong, misguided, and/or spin. Unfair downvotes to death have even happened to me once or twice, but I don’t think HN is going to hell in a handbasket yet. I think I’ve seen a lot more people jumping to conclusions about why downvotes are cast than I have of actually positive and helpful comments being unfairly downvoted purely for harmless but unpopular opinions. Unless the downvoter explains their reasons, we don’t know why the downvotes were cast, so it’s not safe to assume it’s for popularity reasons just because it appears polite. HN threads are sometimes interesting because they can attract experts in the domain of the posted article, and it’s common for people who are curious but relatively ignorant to argue with people who really know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it’s not easy to tell who’s who.
Either way, if you see comments that don’t deserve to be gray, upvote them!
> Most social sites have guidelines that downvotes are only supposed to be used for comments that break their guidelines. On HN and Reddit it seems many people ignore this and readily downvote opinions they disagree with or comments they simply don’t want to hear.
On HN they aren’t ignoring anything; the original HN guideline, set by pg himself, is that downvoting for disagreement is okay here. (I don’t necessarily agree with that guideline, but I didn’t start this site.)
On HN they aren’t ignoring anything; the original HN guideline, set by pg himself, is that downvoting for disagreement is okay here. (I don’t necessarily agree with that guideline, but I didn’t start this site.)
To add to your point (kind of) the dislikes are often caused by brigading and a bunch of people just get onto the site to vote down something in a community they don’t care about, ruining it for normal users to even see.
Facebook has an option to “See fewer posts like this”. Select the three dots icon on the upper right corner of a post (mobile app) to see it. It doesn’t notify the person that you’ve chosen to not see their posts, so there’s no social risk in clicking it.
I use it liberally and it works. I check Facebook maybe a couple times a month and almost never see anything I don’t want to see any more.
I use it liberally and it works. I check Facebook maybe a couple times a month and almost never see anything I don’t want to see any more.
It doesn't work at all. Once I accidentally liked some movie thing and then it wouldn't stop shoeing me movie quoted. If U'd dislike one and block ine account then it'd show me another. I had to block a hundred, literally, until it startef showing less of them. It still showd ine ocassionally.
How does Facebook's engine score similarity between posts, exactly?
Obviously we don’t see the inner workings of algorithms, from Facebook’s feed to HN’s upvote/downvote/flag/decay system.
However, my sense is that by clicking the button I see fewer posts from the person who posted it, which is often quite effective at shaping my feed the way I want it anyway. Facebook does also seem to do some basic classification of hot topics (politics in particular) such that hiding a few politics posts results in fewer politics posts even from other people, too.
Likes are upvotes, so it’s also important to hit the like button on content you want to see more of, and to not hit the like button on content you don’t want to see. I know it sounds obvious, but I know people who refuse to press Like buttons because they object to the concept of Likes.
Using likes and the “hide post” features to curate a feed doesn’t take much more effort than upvotes and downvotes and it’s very effective at shaping my feed, in my experience. I think too many tech people simply ignore those features and can’t understand why their feed is only showing them content that other people are engaging with (often arguments).
However, my sense is that by clicking the button I see fewer posts from the person who posted it, which is often quite effective at shaping my feed the way I want it anyway. Facebook does also seem to do some basic classification of hot topics (politics in particular) such that hiding a few politics posts results in fewer politics posts even from other people, too.
Likes are upvotes, so it’s also important to hit the like button on content you want to see more of, and to not hit the like button on content you don’t want to see. I know it sounds obvious, but I know people who refuse to press Like buttons because they object to the concept of Likes.
Using likes and the “hide post” features to curate a feed doesn’t take much more effort than upvotes and downvotes and it’s very effective at shaping my feed, in my experience. I think too many tech people simply ignore those features and can’t understand why their feed is only showing them content that other people are engaging with (often arguments).
Part of this is their capability of processing image posts and giving it a text description. For example Facebook will look at a jpeg of an old man with some text on it and use image recognition to actually determine a description of "photo of old man saying 'top text bottom text'". I've seen these descriptions appear in the page and they're pretty impressive accuracy-wise. Beyond that, comparing posts for similarity is likely mundane stuff like who wrote it, associated words, the type of people that engage, and how.
FYI, you can see these descriptions by inspecting the alt text for an image posted to FB. It's there for accessibility, I assume.
Down-votes are, plain and simple, mob rule.
There's ample historical evidence that the fact that many people believe in something absolutely does not make it correct. I'd even venture to go to the other extreme: if many people believe something to be correct there's IMO 50% chance of it being severely and hilariously wrong.
Watch a few National Geographic documentaries on monkeys and how their tribes are constantly at war with each other. It's eye-opening. They fling poop at whomever they don't like, not only in the other tribe, but inside their own as well.
Like @crazy_horse said, I have zero problems being wrong or engaging in a discussion from which I might emerge with my mind changed.
But I don't like turning myself into target practice for poop flinging masters.
There's ample historical evidence that the fact that many people believe in something absolutely does not make it correct. I'd even venture to go to the other extreme: if many people believe something to be correct there's IMO 50% chance of it being severely and hilariously wrong.
Watch a few National Geographic documentaries on monkeys and how their tribes are constantly at war with each other. It's eye-opening. They fling poop at whomever they don't like, not only in the other tribe, but inside their own as well.
Like @crazy_horse said, I have zero problems being wrong or engaging in a discussion from which I might emerge with my mind changed.
But I don't like turning myself into target practice for poop flinging masters.
Has this person even used Reddit? Or StackOverflow? Or even GitHub? I’ve used social platforms with downvote buttons; saying that they make you feel bad and should be removed is like saying that cigarettes should be removed because they smell bad.
But to be specific, instead of just using metaphors:
* A downvote carries less information than an upvote does. If a feature request gets a lot of upvotes, the voters are saying you should ship it. If it gets a lot of downvotes, does it mean that the voters don’t think it solves a real problem (so you should just drop it)? Or does it mean that they think the solution is bad (so it should be tweaked)?
A post usually justifies itself, so the meaning of upvotes is obvious, while it rarely has one, single, obvious counter argument, so a downvote could mean any number of things.
* Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really think strengthening the filter bubble would help?
* Downvotes get used for bullying. Their application for this is obvious, relatively low-effort, and if it influences a sorting algo, can have long-lasting effects on someone’s social reach. There are definitely groups with vote bots on Reddit and HN.
* On platforms with anonymous voting, it creates paranoia. You have people telling you your content is bad, but you don’t know who and you don’t know why. People say that they only downvote content that doesn’t add anything to the discussion at all, but what you see seems different, where informative but unorthodox comments get downvoted seemingly because the voters disagree. Who’s doing that? Reddit won’t tell you, so you’re forced to guess, and that’s really damaging to a community, because people get accused of abusing the downvote button with no way of ever proving it right or wrong.
* On platforms with public voting, someone can lash out at you for downvoting them. It’s very easy to take it personally (see point 1 on how downvoting is low-information).
But to be specific, instead of just using metaphors:
* A downvote carries less information than an upvote does. If a feature request gets a lot of upvotes, the voters are saying you should ship it. If it gets a lot of downvotes, does it mean that the voters don’t think it solves a real problem (so you should just drop it)? Or does it mean that they think the solution is bad (so it should be tweaked)?
A post usually justifies itself, so the meaning of upvotes is obvious, while it rarely has one, single, obvious counter argument, so a downvote could mean any number of things.
* Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really think strengthening the filter bubble would help?
* Downvotes get used for bullying. Their application for this is obvious, relatively low-effort, and if it influences a sorting algo, can have long-lasting effects on someone’s social reach. There are definitely groups with vote bots on Reddit and HN.
* On platforms with anonymous voting, it creates paranoia. You have people telling you your content is bad, but you don’t know who and you don’t know why. People say that they only downvote content that doesn’t add anything to the discussion at all, but what you see seems different, where informative but unorthodox comments get downvoted seemingly because the voters disagree. Who’s doing that? Reddit won’t tell you, so you’re forced to guess, and that’s really damaging to a community, because people get accused of abusing the downvote button with no way of ever proving it right or wrong.
* On platforms with public voting, someone can lash out at you for downvoting them. It’s very easy to take it personally (see point 1 on how downvoting is low-information).
> * Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really think strengthening the filter bubble would help?
Discerning between truth and misinformation is also a "filter bubble". Any community-driven system that discerns between "this is what we like" and "this is what we hate" is also being used to discern between "this is what is true" and "this is what is false".
Online communities with healthy cultures and downvotes quickly destroy misinformation. In those circumstances, the filter bubble is a good thing. People pushing misinformation should be pushed either to stop posting misinfo or leave.
The challenge is that the people who are doing the most work on this subject - like Facebook and Twitter - have chosen to make it invisible. We don't know how Twitter and Facebook rank their posts and replies. But they obviously have invisible powers as leadership to identify which voices on their systems are "good" and which aren't, and give those "good" voices outsized power in communication.
But to me it seems obvious that something that takes Reddit's simple up/down interface but combines it with the kind of credibility ranking that Twitter does (where people who've been established as harmful don't actually have as much visibility or influence in the system) would be ideal.
Give the leadership tools to establish a preference for fact, and you also give them tools to establish a preference for their particular worldview. You can't separate those.
If you want a discussion system that supports fact over misinfo, you need to have a discussion system that enforces a community bias and creates a filter bubble, and then give the leadership the tools to control that filter bubble and bias, in the hopes that the leadership prefers truth over misinfo. Otherwise the community will organically create its own filter bubble on whatever biases it develops.
And if you have no filtering at all, you get 4chan, where abuse and misinformation run rampant.
Discerning between truth and misinformation is also a "filter bubble". Any community-driven system that discerns between "this is what we like" and "this is what we hate" is also being used to discern between "this is what is true" and "this is what is false".
Online communities with healthy cultures and downvotes quickly destroy misinformation. In those circumstances, the filter bubble is a good thing. People pushing misinformation should be pushed either to stop posting misinfo or leave.
The challenge is that the people who are doing the most work on this subject - like Facebook and Twitter - have chosen to make it invisible. We don't know how Twitter and Facebook rank their posts and replies. But they obviously have invisible powers as leadership to identify which voices on their systems are "good" and which aren't, and give those "good" voices outsized power in communication.
But to me it seems obvious that something that takes Reddit's simple up/down interface but combines it with the kind of credibility ranking that Twitter does (where people who've been established as harmful don't actually have as much visibility or influence in the system) would be ideal.
Give the leadership tools to establish a preference for fact, and you also give them tools to establish a preference for their particular worldview. You can't separate those.
If you want a discussion system that supports fact over misinfo, you need to have a discussion system that enforces a community bias and creates a filter bubble, and then give the leadership the tools to control that filter bubble and bias, in the hopes that the leadership prefers truth over misinfo. Otherwise the community will organically create its own filter bubble on whatever biases it develops.
And if you have no filtering at all, you get 4chan, where abuse and misinformation run rampant.
That’s not wrong, but you want actual proof if you’re going to block something because it’s false. That looks more like mod mail than like downvoting.
Then you've got moderators drowning in the bullshit asymmetry principle.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a...
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a...
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
>"Downvotes get used for bullying."
Absolutely. This is especially noticeable on the state/city/town subreddits where political partisans consistently dogpile on posts that go against their message.
Absolutely. This is especially noticeable on the state/city/town subreddits where political partisans consistently dogpile on posts that go against their message.
[deleted]
Downvotes on something like reddit are very different from downvotes on something like Facebook. Imagine being a teenager and getting downvoted by your own friends. These are complicated tradeoffs of course, but that's an important part of the story.
Negative feedback from your peer group is normal, and provides conformity pressures, which is important when forming and maintaining a community bound together by a common culture.
In my opinion, that mechanism didn't survive the transition to online. Or rather, it survived all too well; it grew fangs and learned how to breathe fire.
In an in-person peer group, there are a lot more subtle gradations in disapproval. "Dude, that's not cool!" is very different from looking at someone askance. Overt signals require everyone else present to take a position on something. Subtle ones don't.
Being downvoted on a Facebook peer group of teens is an overt signal. Everyone is going to take sides. It's not that it doesn't happen in person, it's just that online it makes everything into a Big Deal. That produces bland communities with fear-based conformity.
To do better, you'd need something that can support richer communication, allowing for more nuance. One possibility that comes to mind is emojis -- a group can (and does) form its own vocabulary based on emoji-only responses that may only have meaning within a group. But they can serve the purpose. If I were a teen, or more active in social forums, I might know if that's already happening.
In an in-person peer group, there are a lot more subtle gradations in disapproval. "Dude, that's not cool!" is very different from looking at someone askance. Overt signals require everyone else present to take a position on something. Subtle ones don't.
Being downvoted on a Facebook peer group of teens is an overt signal. Everyone is going to take sides. It's not that it doesn't happen in person, it's just that online it makes everything into a Big Deal. That produces bland communities with fear-based conformity.
To do better, you'd need something that can support richer communication, allowing for more nuance. One possibility that comes to mind is emojis -- a group can (and does) form its own vocabulary based on emoji-only responses that may only have meaning within a group. But they can serve the purpose. If I were a teen, or more active in social forums, I might know if that's already happening.
It's also a way to apply peer pressure.
Yes. Peer pressure is a natural part of tribal or communal affiliation. A culture is a set of norms, customs, and beliefs common to a group. Maintenance and propagation of that culture requires a complex combination of positive and negative social feedback in order to keep those beliefs persisting, part of which is peer pressure.
Extreme peer pressure can be bad, just as any social extreme is bad. But it isn't universally bad if used sparingly and for a reason.
Extreme peer pressure can be bad, just as any social extreme is bad. But it isn't universally bad if used sparingly and for a reason.
One problem with downvotes, at least the way they are implemented in reddit and HN, is that they cancel out upvotes. You are not able to see how many upvotes a post got, only how many upvotes minus downvotes.
This always bothered me in some subconscious part of my brain, thanks for putting it into words. Reddit even lets you sort by controversial posts, so they clearly store both upvotes and downvotes, why do they have to display them as one number?
very much this. i would really like to see the actual number of up and downvotes on a post.
The Facebook thing shows the absurdity of trying to tie people's hands - in practice the "haha" reaction has become the downvote, only now it's spiteful mockery. Gee, that was an improvement.
There are interventions you can make on the interface to improve civility of discourse, but they're more complicated than just trying to crudely stifle anger.
There are interventions you can make on the interface to improve civility of discourse, but they're more complicated than just trying to crudely stifle anger.
My mental model of downvote systems is that systems without them allow more diverse thoughts.
Imagine a topic where everyone feels compelled to vote, skewed about 51% to 49%. Without downvotes, your top comments are going to be a mix of both sides. Opinions are about 50-50 and comments will look like that. It will feel frustrating, like in the article, because you see about half of these posts from those evil Others, and have no way to disagree aside from commenting.
With downvotes, the 51% side’s score becomes 51-49=+2, and the 49% side’s score becomes 49-51=-2; below a never-read comment at zero! All the top comments are from the (slim) majority, making it feel like a strong consensus, when it isn’t. It will feel better to that 51%. Who knows what the 49% will do. Leave?
Of course it’s never exactly as straightforward as that, but that’s the tendency. I like systems without downvotes because what you’re likely to see more proportionally reflects the diversity of opinions of the others on the site.
Imagine a topic where everyone feels compelled to vote, skewed about 51% to 49%. Without downvotes, your top comments are going to be a mix of both sides. Opinions are about 50-50 and comments will look like that. It will feel frustrating, like in the article, because you see about half of these posts from those evil Others, and have no way to disagree aside from commenting.
With downvotes, the 51% side’s score becomes 51-49=+2, and the 49% side’s score becomes 49-51=-2; below a never-read comment at zero! All the top comments are from the (slim) majority, making it feel like a strong consensus, when it isn’t. It will feel better to that 51%. Who knows what the 49% will do. Leave?
Of course it’s never exactly as straightforward as that, but that’s the tendency. I like systems without downvotes because what you’re likely to see more proportionally reflects the diversity of opinions of the others on the site.
A bit more information for your mental model:
Afaik, reddit has a pretty stable upvote vs downvote ratio, like 7:1. (Sorry, no source, but I remember the reddit founder saying it in an interview).
And in your calculations you assumed that every post receives the same number of votes. Also that is not true, because of ranking. Higher ranking posts get more views, more votes, more views and so on. In this case the upvote-downvote difference is different for two posts with different popularity, but same upvote:downvote ratio.
Afaik, reddit has a pretty stable upvote vs downvote ratio, like 7:1. (Sorry, no source, but I remember the reddit founder saying it in an interview).
And in your calculations you assumed that every post receives the same number of votes. Also that is not true, because of ranking. Higher ranking posts get more views, more votes, more views and so on. In this case the upvote-downvote difference is different for two posts with different popularity, but same upvote:downvote ratio.
Society needs downvotes with context. Show me downvotes by left leaning and right leaning users. Left and right downvoting each other is noise. Show me when an echo chamber disagrees with itself.
Yes. Downvotes are vectors and amendable to cluster analysis. I've been proposing this on HN for a long long time but the answer has always been 'data explosion, arc is meant to be small and fast and this will break it.'
I'm researching different voting algorithms for HN. If you're interested, please contact me (email in profile).
I don't find that voting systems are a positive evolution, generally. It's a non-committal way to interface for people that don't contribute any tangible content to a discussion. I remember when Facepunch Studios integrated it, which was simulating SA. It was years ago and I was a youth, but I remember, in myself at least, attempting to cater to voters. I don't suspect I fall far from the average interaction in that capacity. And I think that breeds disingenuous user interaction. And FP was a bog-standard BBS forum, the only thing that decided the content stream was moderation and new posts/threads; using votes to promote or demote content streams - targeting, [at least] has been pretty widely discussed as a hazard and that's all I see it as. So between those two features, targeting and disingenuous posting (itself a form of targeting), I think that voting systems at large are a real detractor in general conversation. And if we consider malefactors and echo formation... I just don't see a whole lot in the way of good other than streamlining and automating moderation, which is appropriate in some circumstances, in general conversation I think it just compromises the whole thing.
Of course, it's all dependent on the design of the website. If you're there simply to generate reams of data for marketing teams to sop up, that's something you can do with this sort of system. But if you're designing for legitimate vulnerability and honest to god expression 4chan is probably the best model in a sort of ironic twist. It's user-streamlined, no account, setup or email, the page is barebones, you don't need to post anything whatever and there's no history to haunt you. And maybe you could argue you can't trust anything on 4chan, but you could argue the same anywhere, and in fact I'd assume that the quantity of Facebook and Reddit are far more rife with artifice than 4chan. But FB and R aren't actually designed for absolute expression, they're designed to generate marketing feedback.
Of course, it's all dependent on the design of the website. If you're there simply to generate reams of data for marketing teams to sop up, that's something you can do with this sort of system. But if you're designing for legitimate vulnerability and honest to god expression 4chan is probably the best model in a sort of ironic twist. It's user-streamlined, no account, setup or email, the page is barebones, you don't need to post anything whatever and there's no history to haunt you. And maybe you could argue you can't trust anything on 4chan, but you could argue the same anywhere, and in fact I'd assume that the quantity of Facebook and Reddit are far more rife with artifice than 4chan. But FB and R aren't actually designed for absolute expression, they're designed to generate marketing feedback.
I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to expose their own opinion and risk their own downvotes.
I have no problems with people disagreeing with me and it can be enlightening if I learn something from the exchange. With a naked downvote I learn nothing.
I have no problems with people disagreeing with me and it can be enlightening if I learn something from the exchange. With a naked downvote I learn nothing.
Although I agree that downvoting alone is not very constructive, if the comment is obviously spam/troll or especially when someone else already pointed out what is wrong with it, I don't see a problem.
Isn't that what flagging is for?
It can be useful to have a range of signals. Flagging is a rather hard-line "this is not appropriate" mark that many are unwilling to make on borderline things, e.g. when only somewhat misleading or partially incorrect.
Plus it requires clicking into the individual message, so you are required to see the contents twice, and can't do it quickly. That friction alone slows down using it on any softer or higher volume cases.
Plus it requires clicking into the individual message, so you are required to see the contents twice, and can't do it quickly. That friction alone slows down using it on any softer or higher volume cases.
downvoting to disagree is totally acceptable on HN
I complained once and dang corrected me.
I complained once and dang corrected me.
It's how I use it in reverse. I see my number tank and know people on HN don't agree.
What I would like is the ability to hide my score. If I notice the drop I may check a comment to see what the disagreement was, but I stopped after several times of seeing nothing just the downvotes.
Anyway, I don't need my number on every page I visit on HN, and would prefer the ability to hide it.
I'd also love the ability to mute users. Some people post on here way too often for my tastes and always with the same rhetoric. I'm sure others feel the same.
But, it is what it is. Nothing will ever be perfect, and the forced civility reminds me to be more civil IRL and I appreciate that. And it's probably good to see things I don't agree with, echo chambers are bad.
What I would like is the ability to hide my score. If I notice the drop I may check a comment to see what the disagreement was, but I stopped after several times of seeing nothing just the downvotes.
Anyway, I don't need my number on every page I visit on HN, and would prefer the ability to hide it.
I'd also love the ability to mute users. Some people post on here way too often for my tastes and always with the same rhetoric. I'm sure others feel the same.
But, it is what it is. Nothing will ever be perfect, and the forced civility reminds me to be more civil IRL and I appreciate that. And it's probably good to see things I don't agree with, echo chambers are bad.
It can be somewhat arbitrary.
I remember posting a link to a BBC article which got downvoted and eventually flagged. Two weeks later I posted a link to the original research the article referred to and that time it was heavily upvoted.
I think unless your posts are getting repeatedly downvoted its not worth worrying about.
I remember posting a link to a BBC article which got downvoted and eventually flagged. Two weeks later I posted a link to the original research the article referred to and that time it was heavily upvoted.
I think unless your posts are getting repeatedly downvoted its not worth worrying about.
Downvoting to disagree is effectively a heckler's veto to make minority positions literally disappear. It rewards organized brigading from motivated parties you don't want to see particular criticisms be surfaced.
I don't understand why that type of discourse should be encouraged.
I don't understand why that type of discourse should be encouraged.
Sometimes people can dislike something but they are unable to articulate the reason. Yet the reason may be valid.
So I would say: permit downvoting, but as well as removing one point from the downvoted, let it cost the downvoter one point also.
This reflects real life where it's possible for me to lose my temper in a conversation but it always inflicts a psychological cost on me for doing so. I don't get to express displeasure for free. Which helps keep the discourse civil.
So I would say: permit downvoting, but as well as removing one point from the downvoted, let it cost the downvoter one point also.
This reflects real life where it's possible for me to lose my temper in a conversation but it always inflicts a psychological cost on me for doing so. I don't get to express displeasure for free. Which helps keep the discourse civil.
Wow, I love both of these comments. I've been on the receiving end of downvotes after making helpful comments reflecting strongly-held opinions, that are the result of years of battle-testing them, and even building free software to put them into practice. Silent downvotes are maddening, and I often edit my comments to invite people to just disagree and give me their strongest arguments as to why they think my comment is bad / shouldn't have been posted / etc. I prefer they focus on substance, and I would welcome great counterpoints that I haven't thought of.
But it's worse than that. Every time I link to the actual solution that I spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars building, rather than just talk about it, I get silent downvotes. Watch, I will do it here:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
But it's worse than that. Every time I link to the actual solution that I spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars building, rather than just talk about it, I get silent downvotes. Watch, I will do it here:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It's pretty easy to farm karma here. Would double-edged downvotes incentivize more submission karma farming in order to spend it in downvotes?
Maybe building up and selling high carma accounts with lots of downvote ammo?
I've always thought an evolution on the threaded messageboard system where
1) Votes are tied to comments inherently
2) People can argue with those comments
3) Eventually, when a consensus may be reached in the follow up comments (by having most objections to an argument downvoted to oblivion I guess)
4) If so, the thread is replaced with a stub that summarizes it (maybe participants can vote on the person who they'd like to summarize the thread)
5) People can go on to argue with that stub
Might be neat. The intent would be to create a system that is more directly acrimonious, with the hope that we could eventually actually snip off tangents and create a high-quality argument on a topic as a community. I don't know if it actually is possible to do enough cat-herding, such that an actual high quality argument is produced, but it would be an interesting experiment.
There are lots of details that would have to be sorted out, for example it would probably be necessary to group posts as "jointly in support of argument(X).point(Y)" in a way that makes it possible to respond to them jointly with a single counterargument, while still keeping the system from devolving into two sides with horns intractably locked.
1) Votes are tied to comments inherently
2) People can argue with those comments
3) Eventually, when a consensus may be reached in the follow up comments (by having most objections to an argument downvoted to oblivion I guess)
4) If so, the thread is replaced with a stub that summarizes it (maybe participants can vote on the person who they'd like to summarize the thread)
5) People can go on to argue with that stub
Might be neat. The intent would be to create a system that is more directly acrimonious, with the hope that we could eventually actually snip off tangents and create a high-quality argument on a topic as a community. I don't know if it actually is possible to do enough cat-herding, such that an actual high quality argument is produced, but it would be an interesting experiment.
There are lots of details that would have to be sorted out, for example it would probably be necessary to group posts as "jointly in support of argument(X).point(Y)" in a way that makes it possible to respond to them jointly with a single counterargument, while still keeping the system from devolving into two sides with horns intractably locked.
Have you ever thought about becoming a Wikipedia contributor?
Wikipedia is cool (so is stack overflow). However I prefer to engage in arguments that do actually terminate at some point.
Actually, though I think there's something to be gained by reading something that is explicitly phrased as a back and forth argument, rather than an explanation. Arguments between informed people usually bring up objections that I wouldn't have thought of, or that somebody writing an encyclopedia entry wouldn't want to deal with.
Actually, though I think there's something to be gained by reading something that is explicitly phrased as a back and forth argument, rather than an explanation. Arguments between informed people usually bring up objections that I wouldn't have thought of, or that somebody writing an encyclopedia entry wouldn't want to deal with.
Something that I've learned: nobody owes you an explanation for why they disagree with you, nor are they bound to care whether you learn something.
Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.
Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.
>Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.
It's easier to practice empathy when you're not blindly guessing at what bothered the downvoter.
It's easier to practice empathy when you're not blindly guessing at what bothered the downvoter.
Except, not? Empathy as a practice is the process of thinking about and correctly guessing the feelings or thoughts of another. If you are given the 'answer' then it does not require any further though. It is trying to cross that gap, 'why did no one like what I said', that I think you find empathy in.
I'm almost just on HN so I can't talk about other places. But the few times I get downvotes I would like to know why somebody voted me down.
[deleted]
It's not owed to you, but it is still best practice to do so.
In many communities (HN, Reddit, etc.) downvotes are ostensibly not to be used for disagreement. Forcing users to supply a reason could introduce enough friction to encourage more thoughtful usage of the downvote.
HN is not such a forum, downvotes to disagree are perfectly fine here.
Please kindly enter a constructive reason for your downvote:
"ur dumb and wrong .stay mad!"
"ur dumb and wrong .stay mad!"
"ostensibly" is an important qualifier.
What makes you think no one owes you an explanation? If they're downvoting you and influencing how visible your comment(s) are I'd argue they do need to explain.
Likewise you seem to need to take your own advice to brainstorm to understand why it is likely to add value to someone else leaving a comment and not simply requiring you to brainstorm and make guesses, e.g. bias and blind spots a person may have; what other possibilities are there?
Edit to add: 2 upvotes then down to -1; it's hilarious how bad and poorly used downvotes are.
Likewise you seem to need to take your own advice to brainstorm to understand why it is likely to add value to someone else leaving a comment and not simply requiring you to brainstorm and make guesses, e.g. bias and blind spots a person may have; what other possibilities are there?
Edit to add: 2 upvotes then down to -1; it's hilarious how bad and poorly used downvotes are.
> What makes you think no one owes you an explanation?
What makes you think they do? You think you could use something, that doesn't mean a stranger owes it to you.
If you change seats to get away from someone on a bus, do you tell them why? If not, how would you feel if they followed you and said you embarassed them and you owe them an explanation?
What makes you think they do? You think you could use something, that doesn't mean a stranger owes it to you.
If you change seats to get away from someone on a bus, do you tell them why? If not, how would you feel if they followed you and said you embarassed them and you owe them an explanation?
This is a perfect example of the point. I hold your view too, but your comment is being downvoted and I have no idea what the counterarguments are. It would be enlightening to know.
This doesn't really work because every bad comment would have to generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations of its badness. It's also worth thinking about why this logic is so readily applied to downvotes but not upvotes. Presumably you learn nothing from a plain upvote so upvotes should come with a note as well, right?
> generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations
I just recently heard about a system where upvotes/downvotes themselves could be upvoted/downvoted. I could see a system like that to avoid the duplication, and if every original vote came with explanation, it would be nearly indistinguishable from regular conversation.
Plus, something getting downvoted would presumably get less traction over time since it’d get pushed down.
I just recently heard about a system where upvotes/downvotes themselves could be upvoted/downvoted. I could see a system like that to avoid the duplication, and if every original vote came with explanation, it would be nearly indistinguishable from regular conversation.
Plus, something getting downvoted would presumably get less traction over time since it’d get pushed down.
Such a system would mostly add ceremony, complexity and meta without obvious benefit to conversation interestingness. I think the other thing is a more fruitful line of inquiry - how come nobody wants notes on upvotes? The answer, I think, is getting downvoted feels bad and people naturally want more friction, 'accountability', etc when something makes them feel bad. However natural, though, this isn't a great way to design forum systems - it's more elabourate rationalization than design. The question of whether a particular forum's negative feedback system is too punishing, imbalanced, makes users feel too bad too easily or too soon is a perfectly sensible one and worth exploring, of course.
Reminds me of "was this review helpful" feature at many websites that sell things that can get reviewed. But "was this up/downvote helpful" instead? (I like the idea)
I totally agree. Twitter's ratio is probably the best upvote/downvote system. At best it results in providing context for the disagreement. At worst, if the person is a complete idiot then a constant stream of people dunking on them is more entertaining than a downvote.
The reality of this of course would be a bunch of meta comments "." or "dumbass" or just general low-effort insults
> I have no problems with people disagreeing with me
Anonymous downvotes exist in the first place because this isn't a common character trait. If everyone was like that then we'd all be giving each other feedback
> I have no problems with people disagreeing with me
Anonymous downvotes exist in the first place because this isn't a common character trait. If everyone was like that then we'd all be giving each other feedback
That's kind of how Slashdot used to work: you couldn't just up/down vote, you had to pick a reason why, from a list. "Insightful", "Funny", "Informative", etc. for upvotes, "Incorrect", "Trolling", "Off topic", etc. for downvotes. Of course, Slashdot also had meta moderation, where you could occasionally be given the job of up/downvoting other peoples' votes, which in turn influenced how often they would be allowed to vote in the future.
I think it was the best system. Importantly - not having the power to moderate all the time. You were given a certain amount of moderation points at random times so you felt like you had to use them wisely. This prevents a site from being consumed by the same active up/down voters which creates an echo chamber.
And yes, moderating the moderators was a decent idea too.
I'd also support a system of moderation where you don't get to necessarily moderate whichever comments you want but rather are given moderation points and maybe a few comments within a topic are sent your way and it's you moderate those. This would prevent users from deliberately seeking out other users or topics to +/-.
And yes, moderating the moderators was a decent idea too.
I'd also support a system of moderation where you don't get to necessarily moderate whichever comments you want but rather are given moderation points and maybe a few comments within a topic are sent your way and it's you moderate those. This would prevent users from deliberately seeking out other users or topics to +/-.
The top 10% of active users were actually prevented from getting moderation points at all, which helped prevent those users dominating the site. If you browsed /. a couple of times a week and read a few articles each time you'd likely get mod points each week, whereas I never once got them in a decade of reading the site because I was on there all the time.
That would be cool. In order for a downvote to be cast you have to reply
Shouldn't they do the same if they agree with you? What if they are wrong, or agreeing with you for purely strategic reasons rather than because they sincerely thing you're right? Any argument about downvoting is equally applicable in the opposite direction.
Conversely, it's highly inefficient for people to take time to write out their reasons if someone else has already done so and they are merely echoing that. Trolls exploit this because many of them derive amusement from stealing others' time and attention by deliberately posting drivel and then demanding it be taken seriously or that people educate the troll out their misconceptions (a wholly insincere request).
Nobody owes you agreement, and sometimes you will be rejected for unfair reasons. That's life. Expecting to only get positive reinforcement or always be fully supplied with context will only lead to disappointment.
Conversely, it's highly inefficient for people to take time to write out their reasons if someone else has already done so and they are merely echoing that. Trolls exploit this because many of them derive amusement from stealing others' time and attention by deliberately posting drivel and then demanding it be taken seriously or that people educate the troll out their misconceptions (a wholly insincere request).
Nobody owes you agreement, and sometimes you will be rejected for unfair reasons. That's life. Expecting to only get positive reinforcement or always be fully supplied with context will only lead to disappointment.
The last paragraph really nails it. Especially in these online spaces, how you say something and tailor your voice to specific communities sometimes matters more than your content. No amount of downvoter commentary is going to capture that.
It seems like a lot of opposition to downvotes comes from people who take them personally. The internet is fickle and often dumb, don’t let fake points push your emotional state around. This is coming from someone who likes to share unpopular positions and, as a result, spends a lot of time thinking about fake points.
It seems like a lot of opposition to downvotes comes from people who take them personally. The internet is fickle and often dumb, don’t let fake points push your emotional state around. This is coming from someone who likes to share unpopular positions and, as a result, spends a lot of time thinking about fake points.
Well thanks. I too get upset sometimes when a comment I thought was good gets downvoted and I don't know why. Sometimes it's wrong and I only realize that later. Sometimes it's because I'm an asshole. Sometimes it's because other people are assholes. That accounts for (I guess) >90% of comments,a dn keeping an open mind on these possibilities means that I don't get downvoted too often, and that when it does happen I can keep the reasons in perspective and minimize disappointment and hurt feelings.
Arguing with people posting in bad faith or complete ignorance is a waste of my time.
You can come with a mountain of evidence and/or a well written edited thought out post and they'll just ignore it, post elsewhere with the same argument, or complain about inconsequential things. In my younger days I used to waste time arguing with racists, Nazis, etc but the argument comes from bad faith and they've already made their mind up. I just down vote or report them and move on.
They are specifically egregious but similar people are not owed my time and if it's an actual good faith argument they'll eventually learn to word their statements better.
You can come with a mountain of evidence and/or a well written edited thought out post and they'll just ignore it, post elsewhere with the same argument, or complain about inconsequential things. In my younger days I used to waste time arguing with racists, Nazis, etc but the argument comes from bad faith and they've already made their mind up. I just down vote or report them and move on.
They are specifically egregious but similar people are not owed my time and if it's an actual good faith argument they'll eventually learn to word their statements better.
I would much rather see tags than an upvote/downvote.
Some people downvote all jokes, others downvote opinions they disagree with, others downvote misinformation. It's a very ambiguous signal with little value.
Slashdot had it right very early on with the various tags (insightful, funny, interesting) but also gets it wrong by allowing only a very small percentage of the user-base apply those tags. Tags like misinformation, and agree/disagree would allow more nuanced and better filtering options.
Some people downvote all jokes, others downvote opinions they disagree with, others downvote misinformation. It's a very ambiguous signal with little value.
Slashdot had it right very early on with the various tags (insightful, funny, interesting) but also gets it wrong by allowing only a very small percentage of the user-base apply those tags. Tags like misinformation, and agree/disagree would allow more nuanced and better filtering options.
I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is. I vote very rarely here, and when I do, it's almost exclusively as a vague nod of acknowledgement to someone who responded to me but to whom I have nothing else to say. It's weird to me when I get a large burst of 100+ positive votes on a comment. I think in general voting is pretty good as implemented on HN, but I would insist that voting rights be taken away for any thread you're participating in. Reddit seems worse at this. It feels strongly like if you're in a 1:1 debate with someone they will downvote each response you make and that feels... stupid.
Generally I think votes work reasonably well as a credibility system. Not the mean or total votes, because they're skewed by a small number of hugely upvoted content, but the median as inferred from a quick one page view of their posts. Honestly having a little tracker that shows the running median net vote count of a users last 25 posts would be a nice forcing mechanism I think to not be a little shit.
I don't mind saying controversial things and getting downvoted. Sometimes, particularly on reddit, you might just need to accept that you're dealing with a particularly moronic group of individuals (for me, especially, on gaming subreddits). I would assume 99% of people have a running median of 1-5 at any given point. But you do encounter people who are constantly hitting their head against -5's. That is useful information. These people are either pretty consistently trolls, weirdly mono-topic obsessed ranters, or, and I'll happily tank downvotes here, aggressively conservative posters grumbling about how their first principals rights justify acting in a selfish manner to the detriment of others or how free markets solve everything and definitely don't have massive negative externalities for everything.
People decry "Echo chamber!" but in reality most people consistently grinding their face along the bottom of negative downvotes don't actually have anything valuable to add to most conversations, and are just angry people. There is an enormous spectrum of opinions welcome on this site.
Generally I think votes work reasonably well as a credibility system. Not the mean or total votes, because they're skewed by a small number of hugely upvoted content, but the median as inferred from a quick one page view of their posts. Honestly having a little tracker that shows the running median net vote count of a users last 25 posts would be a nice forcing mechanism I think to not be a little shit.
I don't mind saying controversial things and getting downvoted. Sometimes, particularly on reddit, you might just need to accept that you're dealing with a particularly moronic group of individuals (for me, especially, on gaming subreddits). I would assume 99% of people have a running median of 1-5 at any given point. But you do encounter people who are constantly hitting their head against -5's. That is useful information. These people are either pretty consistently trolls, weirdly mono-topic obsessed ranters, or, and I'll happily tank downvotes here, aggressively conservative posters grumbling about how their first principals rights justify acting in a selfish manner to the detriment of others or how free markets solve everything and definitely don't have massive negative externalities for everything.
People decry "Echo chamber!" but in reality most people consistently grinding their face along the bottom of negative downvotes don't actually have anything valuable to add to most conversations, and are just angry people. There is an enormous spectrum of opinions welcome on this site.
> I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is.
Voting is power and people love one thing more than power, and that’s greater power. Imagine if there were no up or down votes, and how people might respond to having no ability to silently express their opinions.
Voting is power and people love one thing more than power, and that’s greater power. Imagine if there were no up or down votes, and how people might respond to having no ability to silently express their opinions.
Then threads just fill up with people going 'agree, yup, right on.' Upvotes are like applause. Are concert audiences trying to put performers in their place by clapping, or just expressing their enthusiasm?
> Imagine if there were no up or down votes, and how people might respond to having no ability to silently express their opinions.
This is silly. None of the internet forums I grew up with had these.
This is silly. None of the internet forums I grew up with had these.
Downvotes seem to work fine in small niche communities without much politics and whose focus is truth-seeking about their topic. But not so much in larger politically charged communities.
In the former, the community members tend to use downvotes as they should, to hide spam and trash comments, while remaining open to new or unpopular ideas that are well-reasoned and presented.
But in the latter, downvotes are too often abused to suppress ideas the majority disagree with, even if well-reasoned or presented. In that context, I find a better combination is having a "flag" button instead of downvote. Flag makes it clearer that the purpose is to flag spam, misinformation, or troll speech, rather than merely things you disagree with.
In the former, the community members tend to use downvotes as they should, to hide spam and trash comments, while remaining open to new or unpopular ideas that are well-reasoned and presented.
But in the latter, downvotes are too often abused to suppress ideas the majority disagree with, even if well-reasoned or presented. In that context, I find a better combination is having a "flag" button instead of downvote. Flag makes it clearer that the purpose is to flag spam, misinformation, or troll speech, rather than merely things you disagree with.
Downvote is unwelcoming for newcomer, create possibility for toxic environment, and useless
See downvotes in stackoverflow and reddit. Why not flag instead? I’ve seen many people being afraid to get downvoted that they finally back off from posting question
See downvotes in stackoverflow and reddit. Why not flag instead? I’ve seen many people being afraid to get downvoted that they finally back off from posting question
Downvoting is like saying people disliked what you posted. Flagging is like saying you shouldn't even have posted it (because it's spam or severely violates the guidelines). There's even less transparency around flagging and vouching and it's just as easily abused.
On my social site we have over 160 different reactions, it's a constantly evolving thing reflecting current trends and memes etc (we also had them long before FB).
But the one thing that's really interesting is out of all the 'negative' reactions the 'dislike' was ALWAYS taken personally, people used to qualify it with a comment 'disliking the post, not you' etc. And if they didn't the OP would take it personally.
But when we renamed it from 'dislike' to 'disagree' that problem just evaporated. Human nature is just weird.
But the one thing that's really interesting is out of all the 'negative' reactions the 'dislike' was ALWAYS taken personally, people used to qualify it with a comment 'disliking the post, not you' etc. And if they didn't the OP would take it personally.
But when we renamed it from 'dislike' to 'disagree' that problem just evaporated. Human nature is just weird.
Dislike is more emotionally loaded. It's also ambiguous - do you dislike the comment, or do you dislike the commenter? You can't "disagree the commenter"
What if the "New post" form required users to choose between "Like/Dislike" or "Other people need to see this/Other people don't need to see this" for their posts' rating? That way it separates the content's "likeability" from people's desire to spread it. I'm thinking of things like Tiananmen Square protest aftermath photos: people don't want to "like" it, but I'm sure they'd agree that people need to see them.
I feel like “other people should not see this” is already the function of a downvote. Problem is, it is used for two different kinds of content; spam/trolling and “things I have a negative ideological reaction to”. And no person wants to admit it’s the second one when they are downvoting.
I'd like to propose an "informative" button and a "political" button so that I could ask to see things that are useful & intelligent but have nothing to do with politics.
I don’t think that the right and the left agree on what’s informative and what’s political.
Reminds me of steam reviews
I don't have a solution but my thinking at the moment is either (a) get rid of the downvote or (b) keep it to rank order of comments but don't show it to users including the commentor. That also means not showing it in aggregate.
I wrote an extension to hide points for myself
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-points-exorcism...
I wrote an extension to hide points for myself
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-points-exorcism...
I'm curious why downvoting feels painful or frustrating. Perhaps I'm majorly naive. When I post a comment in HN, I sometimes feel a twinge of nervousness, since I'm not attempting any level of anonymity and I'm aware that some people have strong opinions, sometimes become personal, and cancel culture is a thing, but at the end of the day, if I'm downvoted, it's only a comment on the internet, not something about which I feel personally judged. People are entitled to their opinions, I'm not attached to them agreeing.
Sometimes, after I write something, I think, 'I could have phrased that more effectively' and sometimes I even change my mind based on someone else's more informed points. This is why I engage in discussion, not to be right, but to explore things I'm interested in and to learn.
I appreciate downvoting in an environment like HN, where usually it seems to be wielded in service of better conversation, but I also have seen it used to push down voices that might be simply passionate. There is a certain hegemony that may be enforced by downvotes. ("Why is THIS on HN?" is a clue). Still, there's an amazing level of thoughtful moderation, and I prefer to notice the culture from a slightly sociological perspective rather than thinking it needs to change by fiat, and make my small contributions from a slightly different perspective.
I don't comment on things that feel emotional to me, and sometimes things make me frustrated. I think downvoting is actually a good tool- however, I hope someone will educate me here.
Sometimes, after I write something, I think, 'I could have phrased that more effectively' and sometimes I even change my mind based on someone else's more informed points. This is why I engage in discussion, not to be right, but to explore things I'm interested in and to learn.
I appreciate downvoting in an environment like HN, where usually it seems to be wielded in service of better conversation, but I also have seen it used to push down voices that might be simply passionate. There is a certain hegemony that may be enforced by downvotes. ("Why is THIS on HN?" is a clue). Still, there's an amazing level of thoughtful moderation, and I prefer to notice the culture from a slightly sociological perspective rather than thinking it needs to change by fiat, and make my small contributions from a slightly different perspective.
I don't comment on things that feel emotional to me, and sometimes things make me frustrated. I think downvoting is actually a good tool- however, I hope someone will educate me here.
Note: I love that this comment was downvoted - very meta - but I would have appreciated hearing more about the thinking behind it :)
"Society" needs neither downvoting nor upvoting; it's a false dichotomy. What we need is to eliminate social media entirely. People need to get out in the real world and talk to others; that way, each person has to expend real energy to state their opinions one way or the other.
It's easy to hate someone remotely over the internet and even easier to click a vote button, no matter what way the thumb is pointing. What's much harder is participating in physical society.
It's easy to hate someone remotely over the internet and even easier to click a vote button, no matter what way the thumb is pointing. What's much harder is participating in physical society.
While I don't think they are useful, I have come to relish downvotes because if I have provoked a snide response at least it is sincere, where a downvote means I have threatened the integrity of a narrative - and that's when you know it's quality writing.
Downvotes are a substitute for discourse. If want something better, post it. It's like someone wanted to design a product for a braying, superstitious mob and created an electronic thumbs down button. I'm all for giving voice to the voiceless, but downvotes aren't speech or a voice, they are a manipulation tool that encourage and reward the absolute worst quality of thought and reasoning.
On HN they are somewhat and relatively judicious by convention, but it is not an exaggeration to say there is a cadre of even educated people who believe their intellectual role is not to establish truth or find consensus, but to direct "narrative," which means specifically to lie and decieve for power. Downvotes are not discourse, they are the exclusive tool of this so-called narrative control. I tolerate downvotes because they draw engagement, even if it is of an inferior kind, and ideally they will be converted from boos to discourse, perhaps even a snide remark.
Downvotes are a substitute for discourse. If want something better, post it. It's like someone wanted to design a product for a braying, superstitious mob and created an electronic thumbs down button. I'm all for giving voice to the voiceless, but downvotes aren't speech or a voice, they are a manipulation tool that encourage and reward the absolute worst quality of thought and reasoning.
On HN they are somewhat and relatively judicious by convention, but it is not an exaggeration to say there is a cadre of even educated people who believe their intellectual role is not to establish truth or find consensus, but to direct "narrative," which means specifically to lie and decieve for power. Downvotes are not discourse, they are the exclusive tool of this so-called narrative control. I tolerate downvotes because they draw engagement, even if it is of an inferior kind, and ideally they will be converted from boos to discourse, perhaps even a snide remark.
a downvote means I have threatened the integrity of a narrative - and that's when you know it's quality writing.
Neither your premise nor your conclusion are valid. A downvote could simply mean you stated a counterfactual or alleged a fallacy. Nor can any automatic inference of quality be drawn. By your logic, someone who just posts the equivalent of fart noises and is habitually downvoted for doing so is a genius.
Frankly, your comment's harping on shaping narrative seems like a case of projection.
Neither your premise nor your conclusion are valid. A downvote could simply mean you stated a counterfactual or alleged a fallacy. Nor can any automatic inference of quality be drawn. By your logic, someone who just posts the equivalent of fart noises and is habitually downvoted for doing so is a genius.
Frankly, your comment's harping on shaping narrative seems like a case of projection.
But a downvote wouldn't correct that, whereas a comment improves the discouse because it captures the best they can do.
What's left in relief is something closer to truth.
What's left in relief is something closer to truth.
(I don't actually think you're dumb, or that your comment is dumb. I wrote the sibling comment to this one to point out that it's just as easy to degrade discussion with bad comments as with downvotes. I'm sure you can think of many more offensive/asinine comments that you've seen on over the years.)
A downvote says 'I dislike this, and I don't think it's worthy of any more time.' Yes, it's tough on the writer of the comment in that they have to infer the reason something was unpopular, and that inference might not be correct. But that's how it is in the real world. Look at it from the point of view of a busker trying out songs on the sidewalk. Some people stop and listen, some give money, some just express dislike without articulating why, a few are actively hostile.
There's a widespread assumption on HN that any discourse is an improvement on no discourse. It isn't. If I harbor a toxic dislike for you, I can erect a giant billboard saying 'motohagiography is a bad person', and abuse preconceptions about discourse to turn people against you. There are also any number of semantic tactics for doing the same sort of thing, and some people actively weaponize such tactics.
A downvote says 'I dislike this, and I don't think it's worthy of any more time.' Yes, it's tough on the writer of the comment in that they have to infer the reason something was unpopular, and that inference might not be correct. But that's how it is in the real world. Look at it from the point of view of a busker trying out songs on the sidewalk. Some people stop and listen, some give money, some just express dislike without articulating why, a few are actively hostile.
There's a widespread assumption on HN that any discourse is an improvement on no discourse. It isn't. If I harbor a toxic dislike for you, I can erect a giant billboard saying 'motohagiography is a bad person', and abuse preconceptions about discourse to turn people against you. There are also any number of semantic tactics for doing the same sort of thing, and some people actively weaponize such tactics.
Worth engaging on that point, as I think the crux of the disagreement is about boundaries on rhetoric, and whether downvotes are an appropriate enforcement mechanism for a kind of rhetorical social contract. (pls correct if doesn't capture intent)
A billboard (or search results) with false accusations are a good example, as it exploits others' limited ability to reason about them, sort of like propaganda. It's why there are laws about libel, "fighting words," incitement, false advertising, harassment, perjury, and I'm sure others that fall outside free speech guarantees. They aren't great, or even very good, but they are examples of existing legal boundaries on rhetoric, so the "all/any discourse" already has some limits. Then we've got logical fallacies, and civility etc, so these are checks and balances in a dynamic and narrows the scope away from extreme examples.
Regarding "any discourse" being necessarily better than none, I'd very reluctlantly accept that position, but I would certainly say "most, and almost all discourse" is better than none. All and here? No. Most and here (public)? I'd still err on the side of liberality, even though I'd agree there exist a bunch of common systematic tactics designed to destroy discussions, but public discourse has evolved to handle an increasing number of those tacitcs by recognizing them as trolling.
My position is that discourse is hard, it takes practice, and when it's done well, it is a very refined human art that is an honest signal of thoughtful work. Even the "Dumb." comment in the example, if it were comedically timed or in context it might be brilliant, and is way better than a downvote. When discourse is crappy, it also signals the quality of the thought that goes into it, and I think that's a feature. Nobody is born a great thinker, and the only way we get better and create value we can share with others is by testing our ideas, with opposition. I'm saying downvotes subvert and even pervert that by rewarding spoilers.
That said, I'm oddly in favour of flagging as a tool for things completely out of contextual bounds because that's a request for refereeing, but absolutely against flagging on a global scale.
Regarding the busker, I'm saying that if to get a busking permit in a square you had to have a little box people could hit as they walked by that tallied peoples hostility toward you, is just as absurd on the internet as it sounds in real life.
Pleasure to engage! :)
A billboard (or search results) with false accusations are a good example, as it exploits others' limited ability to reason about them, sort of like propaganda. It's why there are laws about libel, "fighting words," incitement, false advertising, harassment, perjury, and I'm sure others that fall outside free speech guarantees. They aren't great, or even very good, but they are examples of existing legal boundaries on rhetoric, so the "all/any discourse" already has some limits. Then we've got logical fallacies, and civility etc, so these are checks and balances in a dynamic and narrows the scope away from extreme examples.
Regarding "any discourse" being necessarily better than none, I'd very reluctlantly accept that position, but I would certainly say "most, and almost all discourse" is better than none. All and here? No. Most and here (public)? I'd still err on the side of liberality, even though I'd agree there exist a bunch of common systematic tactics designed to destroy discussions, but public discourse has evolved to handle an increasing number of those tacitcs by recognizing them as trolling.
My position is that discourse is hard, it takes practice, and when it's done well, it is a very refined human art that is an honest signal of thoughtful work. Even the "Dumb." comment in the example, if it were comedically timed or in context it might be brilliant, and is way better than a downvote. When discourse is crappy, it also signals the quality of the thought that goes into it, and I think that's a feature. Nobody is born a great thinker, and the only way we get better and create value we can share with others is by testing our ideas, with opposition. I'm saying downvotes subvert and even pervert that by rewarding spoilers.
That said, I'm oddly in favour of flagging as a tool for things completely out of contextual bounds because that's a request for refereeing, but absolutely against flagging on a global scale.
Regarding the busker, I'm saying that if to get a busking permit in a square you had to have a little box people could hit as they walked by that tallied peoples hostility toward you, is just as absurd on the internet as it sounds in real life.
Pleasure to engage! :)
Dumb
A person with extremely mainstream views suggests that the mainstream should be able to bury opinions that do not align with theirs. Oh my, how surprising.
I would like to see justified downvoting implemented instead. For example users should be able to counter-argument (as in a different reply mode) a post/comment, in that case If the counter-argument gets more upvotes than the parent post/comment then the parent comment should start greying out like it does here. Of course this doesn't even try to fix sybil attacks but I still would prefer it.
There ought to be better ways, if any is needed at all. Downvoting should never be free and unlimited (having requirements is fine, but only involves a bit more time and effort to the would-be disturbance), most of the time it turns into bashing opposition of the consensus, which is turns out to be wrong too often to permit it. Self-reinforcing mere beliefs without evidence or proofs doesn't make it any more valid, but hinders discussion completely. Not too long ago there was some drama about a fork and some harrasment allegations, and see how it turned out (still zero evidence about anything at all), yet anyone doubting was downvoted away. Also, I'd argue the ability to give "thumbs down" itself already is a child-cuddling system. I don't understand the need of such things at times, chronological sorting of parent replies may not be the most time-efficient for readers, but it's the most natural.
Can we bring back the time when there was no social media instead? I feel like that's what society desperately needs.
I have a better idea, why not just un-invent violence and scarcity? Then social media will be wonderful because bad things will no longer exist in the world.
Social media is not the cause of toxicity. It's a mirror for it, albeit a collection of various distorted mirrors that many people aggressively manipulate.
People were shitty to each other on usenet and bulletin boards, people were shitty to each other via broadcast media, people were shitty to each other via newspapers, and people have been shitty to each other in person.
People have tribal tendencies and some tribes are more aggressive than others. Sometimes you have to choose between different tribal affiliations because conflict is happening whether or not you want it to. We are living in one such period and the internet (like many previous iterations of communication technology) is having an accelerative effect.
Social media is not the cause of toxicity. It's a mirror for it, albeit a collection of various distorted mirrors that many people aggressively manipulate.
People were shitty to each other on usenet and bulletin boards, people were shitty to each other via broadcast media, people were shitty to each other via newspapers, and people have been shitty to each other in person.
People have tribal tendencies and some tribes are more aggressive than others. Sometimes you have to choose between different tribal affiliations because conflict is happening whether or not you want it to. We are living in one such period and the internet (like many previous iterations of communication technology) is having an accelerative effect.
I greatly dislike downvoting. Fundamentally, in my opinion, it's an act of censorship. Especially on sites that ultimately hide that information after a certain threshold, as HN does. It's no different in my mind than turning your nose up at someone or trying to talk over someone in a real-life conversation (assuming those still happen). I would much rather upvote the good comments, so that they rise to the top. I probably spend half my upvotes on this forum and others to undo what I consider to be unfair downvotes. If there is a comment I don't like and it bothers me, then it's better for me to reply to it rather than just signal my disapproval at it.
The only time I would downvote personally is for something like spam, and I rarely even do that.
I just think it's better all around to be positive instead of negative.
The only time I would downvote personally is for something like spam, and I rarely even do that.
I just think it's better all around to be positive instead of negative.
Facebook is worth $1 trillion. Twitter also very successful. I think they know what they are doing and do not need the advice of some random writer. Down-votes suck. They feel much worse on an absolute basis than the pleasure of up-votes. I am all in favor of removing them from all sites.
Facebook has been rather open about moderation struggles, and they shifted their strategy as recently as two weeks ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57836319 . It's hard to see that as "they know what they're doing".
You have to be careful of assuming successful companies are making the right choice in individual decisions. Success has a way of hiding failure. People tend to overlook all of Facebook's failed products and features, because their overall income is so large, but bad decisions must have happened.
You have to be careful of assuming successful companies are making the right choice in individual decisions. Success has a way of hiding failure. People tend to overlook all of Facebook's failed products and features, because their overall income is so large, but bad decisions must have happened.
> I think they know what they are doing and do not need the advice of some random writer.
If you ignore the article's hypothesis that "things are getting worse" and that social media is contributing to it, then... yeah, companies making money from social media are doing just fine. Is society doing fine? Does it matter?
If you ignore the article's hypothesis that "things are getting worse" and that social media is contributing to it, then... yeah, companies making money from social media are doing just fine. Is society doing fine? Does it matter?
Society != profit. What benefits such trillion dollar companies isn’t aligned with what benefits society. Society doesn’t benefit from promotion of fake news, or other spreading of misinformation just to keep the people a minute longer on their platform to shove ads in their face.
Tiktok has skip which is an algorithmic downvote without being a social one.
I think opining on the internet should be rethought. I think that instead of the relatively opaque up/down, it should be a 2D grid of agree/disagree and good/bad argument. Allowing you to still commend users that you disagree with by noting they make solid logical arguments.
Just look at the patterns of voting by user. If we interact regularly but only pay attention to the content of each others' comments, and sometimes agree and sometimes disagree, then there will be little correlation between our accounts. But if I have a personal dislike o you and make a thing out of downvoting every comment of yours that I see, that will become obvious very quickly.
I think it's worth distinguishing between "I disagree with this comment" and "This comment is not well written: it is superficial, makes extraordinary claims without backup, or is illogical." My one problem with downvotes is it's hard to know which is meant.
I don't like upvotes but I strongly dislike downvotes. Having karma is even worse because it forces people into creating throwaways or accepting the anonymous wrath of the hive mind.
Who up or downvoted you, and why, you will never know. What I find most suspicious is that moderation often travels in packs. Most interesting. As if people have multiple accounts. Crazy, I know
Just take a look at Slashdot. It's been the same 100 guys simultaneously writing and moderating using multiple accounts for literally decades. It's almost dead now for some reason. Maybe people with good karma should start at 5 while the dirty 0 peasants have their posting privileged revoked. That'll fix everything.
Silencing everyone we disagree with is the answer!
Who up or downvoted you, and why, you will never know. What I find most suspicious is that moderation often travels in packs. Most interesting. As if people have multiple accounts. Crazy, I know
Just take a look at Slashdot. It's been the same 100 guys simultaneously writing and moderating using multiple accounts for literally decades. It's almost dead now for some reason. Maybe people with good karma should start at 5 while the dirty 0 peasants have their posting privileged revoked. That'll fix everything.
Silencing everyone we disagree with is the answer!
I don't want to downvote articles or posts, I want to downvote people. Especially across multiple platforms. If I downvote a person's blog post, I want their Reddit comments to be less prioritized. I want them to show up less in my Google results. I want that to flow over into the results of people who have upvoted me, creating a web of influence over good vs bad content. I know, tons of pitfalls and shortcomings to an approach like this, but please try to think of an improvement to it rather than shooting it down immediately :)
Of course, 100% accountability rapidly becomes a Black Mirror episode, but I think right now we're at the opposite end of the accountability spectrum.
Of course, 100% accountability rapidly becomes a Black Mirror episode, but I think right now we're at the opposite end of the accountability spectrum.
Downvotes aren't going to fix anything until algorithms stop segregating us into individual groups of uniform opinion. How can you downvote what you never even see in the first place?
This is a silly article. Add downvotes, don't add them -- it doesn't address the polarization issue he identifies.
Many things can be and used to be individual choices and not societal issues open to debate (and mutual hatred). If you refuse to accept that, then everyone who doesn't make your choices becomes your enemy.
I'm not lamenting the bygone days, since they sucked in numerous ways. But they did contains a kernel of truth, in that shrinking the size of public discourse is the only way to keep it civil.
Many things can be and used to be individual choices and not societal issues open to debate (and mutual hatred). If you refuse to accept that, then everyone who doesn't make your choices becomes your enemy.
I'm not lamenting the bygone days, since they sucked in numerous ways. But they did contains a kernel of truth, in that shrinking the size of public discourse is the only way to keep it civil.
Perhaps there should be two different things to vote on: One for "agree/disagree with points made" and one for "constructive contribution to the discussion".
I am all for downvotes, but just like here you shouldn't be able to downvote anyone who comments your comment. This will just lead people to instantly downvote anyone who doesn't 100% agree with them.
Secondly all downvotes should be acompanied by a reason for the vote and those should be publicly visible both on the comment/topic and generally in the profile of the user. This way it would be apparent if someone is just downvoting based on ideology and should be ignored.
Secondly all downvotes should be acompanied by a reason for the vote and those should be publicly visible both on the comment/topic and generally in the profile of the user. This way it would be apparent if someone is just downvoting based on ideology and should be ignored.
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I agree that we need negative feedback in our voting systems. But it doesn't have to be downvotes. You can use the number of views as a negative force. I created some simulations and plots: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring
I would be fine with downvoting on stuff like news, interest groups, etc. I absolutely don't want to see it on personal feeds though. I don't need that drama in my social media feed, but if you could downvote the trolls and spammers on facebook (so the posts would be hidden if negative, or filterable), that would be awesome.
Why did this article feel the need to put the political divide chart up there? You can clearly see the divide started long before the internet was a factor. The political divide has been caused by first past the post voting (which causes the 2 party system) and gerrymandering (which drastically exacerbates political radicalism).
What's the context of this "bring back". I only engage in public discussions on Reddit and HN and both have downvotes. And I'm not going to read the article just to try to figure out what platform he's referring to. Is there a platform that had downvotes and then subsequently the feature was removed?
> “If we just gave people a very simple, frictionless way to say, ‘I disagree with this,’ you would probably reduce a massive amount of the sort of negative swaller that exists inside of social media.” — Ashton Kutcher
Is "swaller" a word? I've never heard it and don't see it in my dictionary.
Is "swaller" a word? I've never heard it and don't see it in my dictionary.
Sure being on the wrong end of a downvoting is not pleasant - particularly when it's unexpected or undeserved. But it's not "sticks and stones", and without it, how can anyone tell if they're wasting their time preaching to the choir?
It's my theory that we need voting systems that go in more than one dimension. Correctness, Humor, Politeness and other dimensions are somewhat orthogonal to each other, and trying to cram all of that into up/down just doesn't work.
I quite like how the Daily Mail does separate upvote and downvote counts.
I've been arguing that websites should only allow users to downvote.
I wonder if only allowing downvotes would lead to the same result as only allowing upvotes.
With a different ranking formula it's actually quite promising. I created a simple simulation and some plots: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring
I don't understand this simulation, did you have real users who could only downvote?
No real users. It's a simplified simulation of a frontpage and how random users interact with it. Have a look at the code: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring/blob/master/scor...
I started to write another simulation with the goal to be more realistic, i.e. backed by real statistics from HN, like "how many votes arrive on each rank of the frontpage", or "what is the distribution of submission arrival".
I started to write another simulation with the goal to be more realistic, i.e. backed by real statistics from HN, like "how many votes arrive on each rank of the frontpage", or "what is the distribution of submission arrival".
101% disagree. In my opinion, social media and comment sections are already a fire-hose of negativity without consequences. We don't need to enable passive-aggressive hate any further.
Killfiles too. If someone says something really bad you just put him there and he disappears from the site for you regardless of what he says or what threads he'll trigger next.
Downvotes tend to get taken away when things the bigcos want you to see and like -- like trailers for shitty movies with major Hollywood backing -- get ratio'd all to hell.
I have never, not once been able to downvote on HN and zi couldn't care less. If something is egregious there's always the flagging option.
I don't see how anyone needs downvotes
I don't see how anyone needs downvotes
Just a thought experiment, what if we can vote against one political candidate. Does this bring better or worse democracy?
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Even better: rate each candidate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment
You have candidates A, and B and a fringes candidate Ca, Da, and Eb. The "a" and "b" are broadly supportive of A and B, but their own party (think green tends to align with liberal and church goers tend to align with conservative).
Now, a supporter of the A party ideals is faced with "minus vote" B or Eb. And likewise, a supporter of the B party ideals is faced with "minus vote A, Ca, or Da".
And so, instead of getting a relatively moderate A or B, you're much more likely to get an extremist in one of the minor parties.
Consider the "I'm not 100% in favor of B, but I really don't want Ca, or Da to get elected - how do I vote?"
You get into the comparison of voting systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
... and a minus vote system would likely fail a number of the tests. To that end, it would likely result in a worse democracy.
For https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... - consider would the Peace and Freedom party or American Independent Party have won? Are either of their views more representative of California than those of the Democratic Party?
No... I don't think that such a voting system would work.
Now, a supporter of the A party ideals is faced with "minus vote" B or Eb. And likewise, a supporter of the B party ideals is faced with "minus vote A, Ca, or Da".
And so, instead of getting a relatively moderate A or B, you're much more likely to get an extremist in one of the minor parties.
Consider the "I'm not 100% in favor of B, but I really don't want Ca, or Da to get elected - how do I vote?"
You get into the comparison of voting systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
... and a minus vote system would likely fail a number of the tests. To that end, it would likely result in a worse democracy.
For https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... - consider would the Peace and Freedom party or American Independent Party have won? Are either of their views more representative of California than those of the Democratic Party?
No... I don't think that such a voting system would work.
It is amazing how much we have accelerated the shift towards a society where no one‘s feelings is allowed to be hurt.
Downvotes are irrelevant, society needs to get off FB (today it marked a post of mine containing only a link to the CDC's website with no further text or emoticons as "misinformation") and possibly off all pure textual discussion media, since they mostly encourage spontaneous, irresponsible reactions instead of discourse. Even Tiktok's video responses are better than FB and Twitter...
What's really missing is a "meh" button, meaning "this was a waste of time".
I'd have clicked it.
I'd have clicked it.
Society doesn't need a downvote or an upvote. I'd be happier with the removal of both buttons.
First reply!
How are you gonna deal with the spam that we know to appear and clutter up time-ordered systems? What's to stop me (or m tribal group) wrecking a good discussion by flooding it with 50 nonsense posts to take over the front page?
Votes are absolutely imperfect and are not working as hoped. But they gained currency because sometimes any ranking system is better than none at all.
How are you gonna deal with the spam that we know to appear and clutter up time-ordered systems? What's to stop me (or m tribal group) wrecking a good discussion by flooding it with 50 nonsense posts to take over the front page?
Votes are absolutely imperfect and are not working as hoped. But they gained currency because sometimes any ranking system is better than none at all.
It's ironic that we can't downvote this article on Hacker News. Only upvote it.
Upvotes and downvotes are both old tech.
"Applause" reactions/flags seem promising.
"Applause" reactions/flags seem promising.
'yay' vs 'boo' is just a different label for the same thing, no?
Nah. A flag is more than a "boo," much in the same way laws are (hopefully/sometimes) different from mob justice. It says: this is bad for x reason.
And a single yay is very little investment of time, but applause can be made to take time. If someone wants to spend a 20s clicking "yay," that says quite a bit more. If combined with "reactions" you get a bit more nuance.
And a single yay is very little investment of time, but applause can be made to take time. If someone wants to spend a 20s clicking "yay," that says quite a bit more. If combined with "reactions" you get a bit more nuance.
I fully agree with the statement, although the solution may be difficult. In general, there has to be a way to give negative feedback. Without any correction feedback loop at all, the worst of the worst is thriving.
Negative feedback is not just for consensus, also as a quality filter. I'll start with the example of Medium, the blogging platform.
The idea of this platform is to encourage long form high quality writing. But that's not what's happening. Every topic is hijacked by people gaming the system, producing endless streams of lazy articles that lack any original thought, any sources, nuance, any quality.
There's no way at all to give negative feedback other than blocking each individual author or writing a critical comment. Both don't solve the problem. I consider it an existential problem for the platform as only crap comes to the surface. Why would I possibly pay for this garbage? There has to be a way to clean the garbage.
So here, the idea of negative feedback is to serve as a quality filter.
On Twitter, it's a different use case. It's to reduce harm. Twitter is an outrage platform. Saying dumb, extreme, unhinged things will maximize engagement. The goal of negative feedback here would not be to censor anything, instead to tell the algorithm to dampen the "spread" factor. Show the post with lots of negative feedback less prominently in timelines, which will reduce the amount of retweets, new followers, etc. Somebody consistently extreme should not be rewarded for it.
Arguably, on Twitter it's going to be difficult. The way things work currently is their business model. Further, there's the mob mentality likely to abuse any such mechanism.
I'll end with an example where negative feedback is implemented extremely well. It's the dutch site tweakers.net. They have a pretty sophisticated comment system.
You vote on individual comments roughly like this:
-1: troll, offensive 0: off-topic, irrelevant +1: on-topic (this is the default level) +2: informative (enriches the topic) +3: excellent (well researched essential addition)
So you give a quality vote, not an opinion/agreement vote. Some people still opinion vote, say a comment like this:
"Microsoft sucks"
And then give it a +3, instead of the -1 or 0 it should get. Do this a few times and they take away your voting rights entirely. You get one chance to get it back by begging, and if you promise to better your ways. Screw it up again and it's gone forever.
A fairly involved system, which will obviously not work everywhere, but it's really good.
Negative feedback is not just for consensus, also as a quality filter. I'll start with the example of Medium, the blogging platform.
The idea of this platform is to encourage long form high quality writing. But that's not what's happening. Every topic is hijacked by people gaming the system, producing endless streams of lazy articles that lack any original thought, any sources, nuance, any quality.
There's no way at all to give negative feedback other than blocking each individual author or writing a critical comment. Both don't solve the problem. I consider it an existential problem for the platform as only crap comes to the surface. Why would I possibly pay for this garbage? There has to be a way to clean the garbage.
So here, the idea of negative feedback is to serve as a quality filter.
On Twitter, it's a different use case. It's to reduce harm. Twitter is an outrage platform. Saying dumb, extreme, unhinged things will maximize engagement. The goal of negative feedback here would not be to censor anything, instead to tell the algorithm to dampen the "spread" factor. Show the post with lots of negative feedback less prominently in timelines, which will reduce the amount of retweets, new followers, etc. Somebody consistently extreme should not be rewarded for it.
Arguably, on Twitter it's going to be difficult. The way things work currently is their business model. Further, there's the mob mentality likely to abuse any such mechanism.
I'll end with an example where negative feedback is implemented extremely well. It's the dutch site tweakers.net. They have a pretty sophisticated comment system.
You vote on individual comments roughly like this:
-1: troll, offensive 0: off-topic, irrelevant +1: on-topic (this is the default level) +2: informative (enriches the topic) +3: excellent (well researched essential addition)
So you give a quality vote, not an opinion/agreement vote. Some people still opinion vote, say a comment like this:
"Microsoft sucks"
And then give it a +3, instead of the -1 or 0 it should get. Do this a few times and they take away your voting rights entirely. You get one chance to get it back by begging, and if you promise to better your ways. Screw it up again and it's gone forever.
A fairly involved system, which will obviously not work everywhere, but it's really good.
we need to free associate and disassociate from groups.
we focus so much on the former and pay not attention to the latter. we delude ourselves into believinf we can all get along.....we can but away from each other....
we focus so much on the former and pay not attention to the latter. we delude ourselves into believinf we can all get along.....we can but away from each other....
An opposing opinion:
https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-...
The TL;DR:
"Any voting system where most posts mostly receive upvotes, but also allows downvotes, has a huge problem:
No matter how you do the math, downvotes count more than upvotes do."
https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-...
The TL;DR:
"Any voting system where most posts mostly receive upvotes, but also allows downvotes, has a huge problem:
No matter how you do the math, downvotes count more than upvotes do."
I feel like the solution is to allow downvotes, but not to allow the total score to go below 1.
side note /s: Spotify would know me a whole lot better too & we can deemphasize glorified "we know you best models"
Get rid of paywalls and we’ll talk.
I think you should only have a set amount of upvotes and downvotes per day. Or have a mod point structure similar to Slashdot. That way it prevents commenting to just get karma, and it allows for people to properly respond in a way that they'd like to without having fear of a downvote brigade. The people who can moderate then at that point will mod appropriately if it is even worthwhile of attention. So, is a troll even worth your time to give mod points over? Or someone who just isn't thinking right but can have a legitimate discussion?
That way it deters someone from just being really scummy and downvoting all your posts, thus bringing your karma down even though what they were mad at had nothing to do with those other posts. Also, voting for karma to be locked after x amount of days/months.
That way it deters someone from just being really scummy and downvoting all your posts, thus bringing your karma down even though what they were mad at had nothing to do with those other posts. Also, voting for karma to be locked after x amount of days/months.
Ohhhh, gods it's another rebranded Medium page. Couldn't read it, paywalled. Flagged.
Vis-à-vis HN and the discussion of down-voting here specifically:
There are definitely times when the down-voting is pathetically petty and inane. One of the most glaring examples I've noticed is this: any time somebody makes a post asking for book recommendations in any form (eg, "What's a book that influenced you?" or "What books do you recommend for $REASON?", or however they choose to phrase it), no matter what the rest of the content of your response is, IF you include anything by Ayn Rand you will get down-voted.
That's it... just mentioning an Ayn Rand book like The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged will provoke some people to downvote you. You could scarcely get more petty and ridiculous if you tried.
It's not like I'm even talking about overtly political threads, or a comment that specifically endorses Rand or her philosophy / ideology / etc. That I could (almost) understand the occasional downvote at least, just because her stuff is moderately controversial in some circles.
But to think that merely having the audacity to include a certain author's books on a list is reason to downvote a comment? And it wouldn't matter if it were Rand or anybody, the fundamental point is the same. It's one thing to dislike an author, but "C'mon, man..." as they say.
There are definitely times when the down-voting is pathetically petty and inane. One of the most glaring examples I've noticed is this: any time somebody makes a post asking for book recommendations in any form (eg, "What's a book that influenced you?" or "What books do you recommend for $REASON?", or however they choose to phrase it), no matter what the rest of the content of your response is, IF you include anything by Ayn Rand you will get down-voted.
That's it... just mentioning an Ayn Rand book like The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged will provoke some people to downvote you. You could scarcely get more petty and ridiculous if you tried.
It's not like I'm even talking about overtly political threads, or a comment that specifically endorses Rand or her philosophy / ideology / etc. That I could (almost) understand the occasional downvote at least, just because her stuff is moderately controversial in some circles.
But to think that merely having the audacity to include a certain author's books on a list is reason to downvote a comment? And it wouldn't matter if it were Rand or anybody, the fundamental point is the same. It's one thing to dislike an author, but "C'mon, man..." as they say.
> IF you include anything by Ayn Rand you will get down-voted. [...] I could (almost) understand the occasional downvote at least, just because her stuff is moderately controversial in some circles.
To explain why your post was (as you so correctly predicted) downvoted: Her stuff isn't "moderately controversial in some circles"; it is utter bullshit through and through, and a surefire indicator that the proponent is either stupid, misled, motivated by hateful politics, or two or more thereof. Any downvotes are utterly well-deserved and a valuable life lesson that should be taken to heart.
To explain why your post was (as you so correctly predicted) downvoted: Her stuff isn't "moderately controversial in some circles"; it is utter bullshit through and through, and a surefire indicator that the proponent is either stupid, misled, motivated by hateful politics, or two or more thereof. Any downvotes are utterly well-deserved and a valuable life lesson that should be taken to heart.
In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion. Note that this isn't "the truth" or "the consensus of the community" but of the people engaged on the subject. For example, if you see an otherwise-liberal community discussing gun-rights, the gun owners within that community will flood in and are highly motivated on the subject, and so the consensus will reflect their interest in the subject.
But either way, consensus.
Without the downvotes, the top post is often misinformation or just trash. Because a small, motivated group pushes it up, and the rest of the participants can only argue against it but not drive it back down... this creates the "engagement-based content" that aggregators crave.
The problem, of course, is that bots and sockpuppets are treated the same as established community members and can skew the "consensus". Realistically, the leadership of an online community needs to be able to identify who are credible voices on a subject and give them the power to steer the conversation. Yes, it's not egalitarian, but these systems never have been.