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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

#101

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #80
cblconfederate wrote: post #72

I use the love button for bookmarking (one click less) . My timeline is in chronological mode. I dont see the point of the Algorithm, what is it for? The few times it switched back by itself, it was terrible Anyway, the downvoters will have an easy way to defuse their anger, and twitter hopes that it will lead to less cringe replies. Alas

The "love" button originally used to be a "bookmark" button, and the icon was a star. When they switched it to "like", bookmarks were automatically converted into likes, which seemed misleading to me.

If it's a bookmark button, why make this public? I'm glad Firefox does not share my bookmarks with the world, for one.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#102

Post by Y_Y »

nosianu wrote: post #70
alpaca128 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On HN the moderation is better and the community smaller (and I guess also united by at least one common interest). Another important difference I see is that the score of comments is hidden, at least to some degree. Seeing how "the community" has already judged a post is greatly influential to future votes. It also creates a bias on the way the comment is interpreted by the reader. I don't know what would be the ide…

There also is this problem I had (have?) on HN: I no longer dare try to go against downvotes and upvote downvoted comments that I think are perfectly fine. I did that quite a bit - and my voting rights where removed. When I asked by email my voting behavior was cited as trying to be controversial by upvoting already downvoted comments (I don't remember the exact words any more, it was well over a year ago or even muc…

View much were you doing it? I have showdead on, and often I'll upvote and vouch comments I think were unfairly dismissed. Maybe it's an illusion, but I feel the vote counts are often small enough that it does make a difference (as opposed to sites like reddit where I don't bother).

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#103

Post by pjc50 »

Kiro wrote: post #52
chimpansteve wrote: post #19

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.

Is this not a problem on HN? I think it is but if it's not, what makes it work here?

While HN tried and abandoned the "no politics" rule, it does have a soft "no partisan flamewars" rule and a vague "stay on topic" rule. It bans violators pretty effectively - if you're just starting trouble you won't last long.

Also, on HN, you can't reply to people, only to a comment. And it doesn't end up in any inbox. This makes it a lot harder to maintain a longstanding "beef"; we have to do that manually.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#106

Post by bufferoverflow »

littlestymaar wrote: post #99
wanderingmind wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

One of the points of going to Mars is to save our species. One large enough asteroid can wipe us out, along with all high-level life, animals, insects.

Being multiplanetary is very important.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#107

Post by Y_Y »

rolleiflex wrote: post #48
endisneigh wrote: post #11

I think up and down voting are great, however what is dumb is that neither has a cost. If you think of karma as an economy, taking an action should have a cost. Of course this leads to the question: if voting has a cost, then how do people accumulate irrespective of themselves receiving a vote? You could give everyone say, a fixed number of karma to begin with that could then be allocated. You can then give people mo…

> For example, if the #1 person believes something is being said that is really damaging in some way, they could put at stake the entirety of their karma and downvote it, which would pretty much obliterate the comment. We are building a P2P network with subjective moderation [0], so while we don’t know what works yet (we’re experimenting) I can at least tell you why we’ve found this is suboptimal. The issue is that t…

You've probably thought of this, but if you can associate votes to identities then a classic way to mitigate this behaviour is quadratic weighting, where e.g. your nth vote costs n^2, so a censor or propagandist needs to pay 1e4 counteract the single votes of 100 casual observers.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#108

Post by _pmf_ »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #104

I've been saying twitter needs a downvote button for years. Only having like or retweet means there is only positive signal, so messages can only be amplified. Downvotes allow a signal to be de-amplified. Bravo.

It just makes it more important to keep you bubble clean from dissenters, thus furthering the divide. Of course, this is probably the point.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#109

Post by woko »

endisneigh wrote: post #16
randomdata wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think up and down voting are great It is great as a poor man's analytics system, providing knowledge that at least someone read your comment, allowing you to evaluate if it is worth posting more or if your efforts are disappearing into the void. However, having both up and down seems redundant. The both provide the exact same information. > however what is dumb is that neither has a cost. If there is a cost then…

> It is great as a poor man's analytics system, providing knowledge that at least someone read your comment, allowing you to evaluate if it is worth posting more or if your efforts are disappearing into the void. However, having both up and down seems redundant. The both provide the exact same information. I disagree. If a comment has 100 likes and 100 dislikes that clearly is different than a comment that has 200 li…

Note sure what you mean by "a new metric".

Sorting by "controversy" has been an option on Reddit for a long time. Most people won't use this option, but it exists.

The formula is here: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/753b17407e9a9d...

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#110

Post by swarnie_ »

IanCal wrote: post #90
yreg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the flaws you point out, but I still find reddit discussions to be of much higher value than Facebook discussions. I atribute it to the voting system. The Facebook discussions (e.g. under posts by serious media in my country) are overrun by antivaxers, xenophobes and the like. It makes it seem like they hold the opinion of almost everyone. I believe that's not the case, but most non-extremists are tired…

I'd say that it's perhaps more tied to moderation. Reddit communities vary dramatically in quality of discussion and one thing that seems to separate the highest quality from the lowest is heavy moderation. AskHistorians for example is extremely strict and has very high quality answers. Another example that's strict in a different way is CasualUK, where even vague references to politics or politicians is an immediate…

I think Reddit might be fundamentally flawed because of its voting system and its need for high moderation to make it workable. Mods influence so much power over what people are and aren't allowed to talk about. You use the example of CasualUK which is indeed a very good if slightly "police state" sub but it only exists because the other UK subs became unviable.

The old defence has always been "if you don't like it go away and make your own sub", unfortunately with so many obvious subs being squatted its difficult to get exposure to newer communities.

From memory we have:

/r/unitedkingdom - Mostly teenage lefties, often resembles a 6th form common room, mostly dislike the UK.

/r/ukpolitics - Similar to above, slightly quicker on the banhammer.

/r/england - cybersquatted and shutdown for years by a power mod, just opened back up but the power mod won't give top rank over to active mods.

/r/scotland - A borderline anti-English hate sub, harsh group think in most threads.

/r/baduk - The less said the better.

I don't know what the solution is because as i said, reddit is flawed at a base level. The only positive change i can think of is to cap active participants in a sub to a specific small number.

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