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Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

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Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#91

upvote/downvote system is flawed allows to manipulate, promotes groupthink and kind of harassing people it maybe worked over decade ago or so, but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. edit. or maybe it just doesn't work for e.g news/discussions (especially about politics and other "hot" topics) meanwhile for meme sites it should be fine

> but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. What would the better version be? I can only think of chronological order (the most active/noisy wins) or any kind of engagement metric like number of retweets/hearts/followers, that it's basically a worse version of arrows since it only measures engagement without caring if it's positive or negative.

If you make an optimization system, you can optimize for things besides just raw up/downvotes. E.g. up- or downvotes from a broad selection of people (as deduced from the social graph) could count as more than up- or downvotes from a smaller group piling on the post.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#92

upvote/downvote system is flawed allows to manipulate, promotes groupthink and kind of harassing people it maybe worked over decade ago or so, but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. edit. or maybe it just doesn't work for e.g news/discussions (especially about politics and other "hot" topics) meanwhile for meme sites it should be fine

I prefer upvotes/downvotes to likes, but there's an issue with "I downvote because I disagree" instead of "I downvote because the content is of poor quality".

I also 100% agree that groupthink can be an issue, it's almost like the highlighted notes on kindle--I feel like once they reach a critical mass, people start highlighting the same text without really thinking about it.

So, the ideal, for me is to allow for up/downvotes but not display them on the screen (like in certain Mastodon setups).

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#93

upvote/downvote system is flawed allows to manipulate, promotes groupthink and kind of harassing people it maybe worked over decade ago or so, but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. edit. or maybe it just doesn't work for e.g news/discussions (especially about politics and other "hot" topics) meanwhile for meme sites it should be fine

Twitter has a new target of the two minutes of hate every day. I doubt this will add anything but white noise to an already terminally cancerous platform.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#94
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter is already very groupthink Just like all social platforms including this one. Here on HN if you have a controversial opinion the site literally fades your comment away until it disappears.

HN has a downvote system as well. What you describe happens when a comment gets downvoted enough times, which makes it another good example of downvotes amplifying groupthink.

I kinda like that I only have upvote button currently here since I haven't hit the karma threshold. I do feel like the HN crowed doesn't downvote comments unless its spam or way out of the current topic. It happens but not like reddit where it acts like a disagree button.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#95

The way users might benefit is if Twitter learns what users like and dislike and curate a feed based on these preferences. At the very least one could expect them to use it for the list of who to follow. One similar strategy would be how Reddit introduced a subreddit filter feature (which was previously only available in a 3rd party extension) to get metrics on which popular but disliked subreddit to quarantine. Thes…

The chronological feed is a must-have for me, but here's a wild idea: having Home (personalised), New (chronological), Hot and a big Random thread button would be neat.

Twitter's current "chronological" feed is only chronological in that the posts that appear in it are ordered by creation date, but it doesn't include all posts from the people you follow.

This was one of the reasons why I finally stopped using Twitter.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#96

upvote/downvote system is flawed allows to manipulate, promotes groupthink and kind of harassing people it maybe worked over decade ago or so, but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. edit. or maybe it just doesn't work for e.g news/discussions (especially about politics and other "hot" topics) meanwhile for meme sites it should be fine

Works great at Hacker news. I rarely come across anti-scientific, illogical nonsense.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#97

upvote/downvote system is flawed allows to manipulate, promotes groupthink and kind of harassing people it maybe worked over decade ago or so, but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. edit. or maybe it just doesn't work for e.g news/discussions (especially about politics and other "hot" topics) meanwhile for meme sites it should be fine

Works great at Hacker news. I rarely come across anti-scientific, illogical nonsense.

HN has moderators. Twitter doesn't, other than their own malgorithm.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#98
post #54

This seems prone to trouble to me. Twitter is already very groupthink heavy, and I can only see this amplifying that problem. You see it in Reddit all the time - people don't actually read the comments, just upvote the upvoted ones and vice versa. I worry this will just make an already very narrow set of acceptable opinions even narrower.

I think up and down voting could actually help the discourse on twitter if it's implemented correctly. Currently every way to interact with a tweet drives its engagement score: likes, retweets and replies all result in more visibility for a tweet. So if you think a tweet is unproductive or wrong, you can express that in a reply, but even that is resulting in more visibility for the original tweet. This incentivizes b…

This is far from guaranteed: "The company also said it’s not currently using this vote information to rank the replies at this time"

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#99

upvote/downvote system is flawed allows to manipulate, promotes groupthink and kind of harassing people it maybe worked over decade ago or so, but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. edit. or maybe it just doesn't work for e.g news/discussions (especially about politics and other "hot" topics) meanwhile for meme sites it should be fine

Works great at Hacker news. I rarely come across anti-scientific, illogical nonsense.

You must have missed the comments about how colonization of Mars is going to save our specie …

(for instance, the first comment of this post which reached the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600)

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#100

upvote/downvote system is flawed allows to manipulate, promotes groupthink and kind of harassing people it maybe worked over decade ago or so, but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. edit. or maybe it just doesn't work for e.g news/discussions (especially about politics and other "hot" topics) meanwhile for meme sites it should be fine

> but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. What would the better version be? I can only think of chronological order (the most active/noisy wins) or any kind of engagement metric like number of retweets/hearts/followers, that it's basically a worse version of arrows since it only measures engagement without caring if it's positive or negative.

Honestly I found the Slashdot system to be pretty good, but it doesn't seem like any big site is doing anything similar nowadays, in terms of identifying different kinds of comments you'd like to upvote (Insightful, Funny, Troll etc.).
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