111–120 of 400 posts
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.
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.
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.
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 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…
It highly depends on the sub-reddits. Go to highly frequented and news-oriented subs like /r/worldnews or /r/soccer and you'll see the group-think comments upvoted the most. I agree though, on more specialised and less trafficked subs the comments with the highest number of points tend to have the most value, too.
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.
I wrote about it here a little while back https://unlikekinds.com/article/trolls-and-consequences-what...
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/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 That's disappointing. I do the same actually. Not to cause controversy but, well, because sometimes I agree and try to vote honestly. Maybe there are malicious attempts that look the same from the server's perspective, but it's still wei…
* Upvoting comments because you think they are good comments, regardless of whether they are downvoted or not * Voting more for things that are downvoted than things that aren't, because you think the downvoting is unfair
The former is just adding your vote to the pool, blindly. The latter is deliberately trying to undo other votes, distorting the system.
There's a difficulty here if you tend to align naturally with things that tend to get downvoted though.
I'm interested/curious to see how a system where you can only downvote would behave. I think users would be much more interested to only downvote, if they could. The front page would only show items that were not downvoted. Of course if would also be possible to see which posts were the most downvoted.
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…
Through close to two decades of watching and participating in discussions on Reddit, HN, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, YouTube comments, some phpBB boards, website comment systems, as well as a bunch of local discussion boards in the age before social media, I've observed that:
- Niche forums fare better than general ones
- Voting systems don't matter at all, including pseudo-voting like "likes" and "shares" counters
- Real name policy doesn't matter
- Heavy active moderation - i.e. with moderators being part of the community - seems to be the deciding factor
- Passive moderation, like e.g. "report" buttons on Facebook/YouTube, does not work
It is my current belief that the only way to maintain quality discussion in a community is to:
1. Define a quality standard, e.g. through a set of guidelines, and
2. Have moderation that continuously and timely enforces everyone's adherence to the standard.
Nothing else matters.
People don't have one fixed mode of communication - they can't be divided into groups like "idiots", "assholes" and "quality contributors". Individuals may habitually prefer some styles, but they also naturally mimic other people, and ultimately always adapt to boundaries of what's allowed. Culture then grows around those boundaries, further influencing people through mimicry.
A person that's a total asshole on YouTube can also be very professional at work, and polite to their friends. A person that's communicating constructively on HN may do the opposite on Twitter. In all these cases, the enforced standards differ.
Guidelines aren't standards if they aren't actually enforced, and moderation doesn't bring quality if it's not moderating for it.