Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#161

Post by BoxOfRain » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:06 AM UTC

swarnie_ wrote: post #110

IanCal wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

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

I'm really sad about what happened to /r/ukpolitics. Back when it had 20-30k subscribers it was genuinely full of political anoraks and I'd often feel I'd learned something because you had the full spectrum represented there. They'd argue but people tended to know their shit a lot more, and obviously rubbish arguments were much less common. It's far more successful on paper now, but it's also enormously less interesting for me.

Maybe I'm just not the intended audience any more, I'm the sort of person who'd rather see an anarchist and a Thatcherite get into a verbal knife fight than the beige, very mainstream discussions that go on there now.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#162

Post by lifthrasiir » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:07 AM UTC

ipsi wrote: post #159

lifthrasiir wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually have even stronger opinion: moderation also doesn't work, but it seems pretty much the only way to slow decay. For example niche forums fare better in particular because moderation is easier with smaller forums and they generally decay anyway as the forum itself grows. And I don't think the moderation skill is learnable either; I (painfully) learned that the founder is rarely a good moderator.

The one counter-example I can think of for that is https://forums.rpg.net - it's quite a large community, and has been around for something like 20 years. The moderators are very active in the forums themselves, and they've learned from their experiences over time. It's not perfect, but as the community is still large and thriving, even in the Reddit/Facebook/Twitter era, I'd say they're doing a good job.

I mean, there are of course good moderators (I've surely seen some), but unless they already happen to exist in the community it is extremely hard to put good moderators to the existing community. It is even harder to discover good moderators anyway.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#163

Post by machinehermiter » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:07 AM UTC

InTheArena wrote: post #41

great. now we can further extend the ideological bubbles, with the brigade wars and political virtue-signaling mono-culture of reddit.

Exactly. This is a terrible idea. This is exactly the opposite of what we need as a society.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#164

Post by opinion-is-bad » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #143

azangru wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views. Different subreddits will have different majorities with different views, no? > toxicity ... toxic towars other people What does this mean? For example, if you are sitting inside your bubble and laughing at the outsiders, who don't even come to your bubble, is there any toxicity going on?

[flagged]

Is there some evidence to support this being a purely right-wing phenomena?

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#165

Post by jonny383 » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:10 AM UTC

So, will Twitter ban single-sided up or down voting in accordance with their agenda, similar to how they have start preventing users from even "liking" a tweet?

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#166

Post by oldsecondhand » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:10 AM UTC

Sergiu37 wrote: post #137

whalabi wrote: post #116

I've wondered why Twitter seems far more toxic than Reddit (certain now-banned subreddits excluded) and I believe the downvote is a powerful tool used to achieve this, along with Reddit's community-style moderation, even though that can border on toxic itself at times. I wrote about it here a little while back https://unlikekinds.com/article/trolls-and-consequences-what...

Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views. If not it is probably the most toxic social media. So other views people leave and so reddit remains a bubble of like minded people that don't see their toxicity. You can just look at some popular subreddits like iata i am the asshole or idiotsincar or murdered by words, justiceserved to name a few and many other where people just laugh and are being toxic tow…

"am I the asshole" and idiotsincars are pretty normal places where people can politely disagree; MurderedByWords and Politics are political echochambers and that territory brings a bit of toxicity like black-and-white thinking, but I would only call "justiceserved" particularly toxic.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#167

Post by tgv » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:11 AM UTC

nicky0 wrote: post #157

The best thing Twitter could do is announce that it was all a big mistake and the are shutting down the company and deleting all tweets and accounts.

One can dream.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#168

Post by madeofpalk » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:14 AM UTC

geraltofrivia wrote: post #152

jokoon wrote: post #61

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.

It might happen that folks downvote things even if they like it, just because its the only interaction possible. From what little I understand of content reception, the drive to interact triumphs the drive to curate/(give your opinion for the collective good, for the lack of a better word). In a few weeks the website would then introduce a ‘controversial’ or ‘worst’ sorting and ironic downvoting would become mainstre…

Someone once told me

    an intense sense of wanting to be involved
    and a staggering lack of something to add

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#169

Post by yreg » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:16 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #120

IanCal wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm seconding your suggestion. I also think it's mostly moderation. 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…

Heavy moderation (/r/askhistorians) and niche (this forum?) for sure help, but they are not the solution for the most "public" and mainstream places like comments under posts on BBC's Facebook page.

And the toxic polarising discussion in those mainstream places is the one that threatens all of our societies the most. Disciplining a RuneScape phpBB board is trivial in comparison.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#170

Post by _nalply » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 11:16 AM UTC

TheFreim wrote: post #145

azangru wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit is not toxic if you agree with the majority views. Different subreddits will have different majorities with different views, no? > toxicity ... toxic towars other people What does this mean? For example, if you are sitting inside your bubble and laughing at the outsiders, who don't even come to your bubble, is there any toxicity going on?

> Different subreddits will have different majorities with different views, no? Different subreddits do have different majority views, yes, but the largest subreddits all pretty much have the same ones.

Probably of the general majority.

This is an almost natural consequence. The largest sub-groups start out with having most of the same people of the whole society. Then the minorities get turned off and leave to smaller sub-groups where they feel more welcome.