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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

#201

Post by TeMPOraL »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #162
ipsi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For good moderation, the moderators have to care about their work. This is a hard problem in life in general - people tend to care on things that affect them directly, or as a part of their value system. In small groups it's easy to find organic caring.

We've scaled up civilization by replacing the need for organic care with money. The need for money provides the "affects them directly" part[0], and job requirements provide the "value system" part. Unfortunately, having people do the work for money, instead of for the output of their work, introduces all kinds of well-known problems that plague us.

All this means that, to provide good moderation for a community, you have to either:

- Find moderators within the community, who already care about its health, or

- find people within the community who care about it and have money, to draft moderation standards, hire paid moderators to enforce those standards, and then police the moderators so that they're actually doing their jobs properly.

I think very large communities can work only if they're applying either method #2, or become subdivided into small enough sub-communities that method #1 can be applied.

(There's also a third method: start a religion. It's the other tried and true method of maintaining a system of values in a society. But it's tricky to pull off, and stops working when the group grows too large.)

--

[0] - Which is why some people are worried that basic income could collapse civilization. As it is, most value in society is provided by jobs into which people are coerced by their precarious economic situation.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#202

Post by danso »

swalsh wrote: post #153
thinkingemote wrote: post #75

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…

Our feeds are already heavily curated. I recently subscribed to the WSJ, and got paper delivery of the weekend editionfor free. At first, I clicked the option because I use a charcoal grill and I'm paperless to the point I struggled to find material to start it with. But it seemed like a waste to not read it. Once I started though, I quickly started to really enjoy the experience of reading a paper news paper. Aside…

> Life is duller when its completely curated.

A newspaper is the very definition of “completely curated”. There are entire, multiple positions devoted to the physical prioritization, and design and layout of content, including the precise wording of headlines that fit the space and gel with the surrounding context.

It’s why imho a newspaper is very much worth reading, because its production is so much less cost efficient than any website or social media

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#203

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #199
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>”if you just want to talk about knitting, you can avoid the people talking about politics.” I don’t find this to be the case at all. The amount of politics tolerated in each subreddit is almost entirely dependent on the personalities of the mods who run it. And for whatever reason, most Reddit mods tend to be activist friendly or at least look the other way when it comes to obvious soapbox accounts breaking the rule…

To be fair to the Reddit moderation staff, they’re also paid $0.00, so being strict about keeping the sub on-topic may not be high up on their list of daily priorities.

Understandable, but I also suspect most of the moderators are at least somewhat sympathetic to the soapboxer’s political agendas.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#204

Post by darkerside »

dijit wrote: post #182
stared wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is diverse. I hear a lot of “Reddit is toxic”. Or that “Reddit is the best place”. Both are correct. It is not only about the majority view. It is mainly about which subreddits you pick. I am not a massive Redditor. Yet, for some time, I opened r/MachineLearning daily. Some subreddits are/were highly toxic (e.g. the infamous r/incels). Some other are full of vulnerable life stories you won’t find anywhere else…

I disagree with your overall point that reddit is diverse (and it is beyond the scope of this comment to mention why) but I'd like to chime in with my love of ChangeMyView. I just love the idea that you can have a judgement free place to discuss things openly and get reasoned replies without being piled on. Sometimes we hold views which are controversial, and it's great that we can had a non-adversarial discussion ab…

Your comment would have been much better without the first statement. Why include it if you don't want to explain or talk about it? Seems flamebait-y.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#205

Post by tomrod »

allsystemsgo wrote: post #178
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 absolutely toxic.

Parts of it are, but those tend to get banned.

I'd argue reddit is more of an amplified hive mind of the communities that use the internet, of which some become toxic due to ineffective moderation policies or squelching of dissent.

The elephant in the room is that large subreddits tend to avoid deep analysis if it disagrees with the hive mind, and cross-brigading from smaller subreddits happens all the time. Add influence peddling by sovereign states to that.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#206

Post by darkerside »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #192
oldsecondhand wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

>am I the asshole" and idiotsincars are pretty normal places where people can politely disagree These places are echo chambners too you just don't realize it because you agree with the echo. Go on I am the asshole and give even the slightest hint of approval for a parent that's parenting in a traditional manner (e.g. approving of a "my house my rules" attitude toward an older teenager) and you'll get all sorts of hat…

These examples seem overblown, and likely a false equivalence

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#207

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

tayo42 wrote: post #26
ausbah wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do think innovative in social media spaces in lacking, probably because the established players have no real reason to change things up aside from stealing newcomers's ideas but it would to cool to see if any research could be done on stuff like seeing how different features (or lack of) lead to different communities and cultures on a site

How do you define success for these experiments? Social media already is optimizing for engagement, probably the average hn commenter doesn't like those results though.

Agreed. Wondering why social media companies aren’t trying to make the platforms less engaging is like wondering why drug dealers aren’t making a less addictive opiate.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#208

Post by dkarl »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #150
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...

Personally, I think it's just because of subreddits: - Well-moderated subreddits are bubbles of locally higher quality - Discussions on one subreddit stay contained within it - each subreddit is also a social bubble On Twitter, there's no quality standards moderation, and Tweets spread along the social graph, not within bounded communities. You may be discussing a niche topic with a group of like-minded friends, but…

This is exactly it. You can find subreddits that match your interests and your desired level of civility. Somebody else can find theirs, and you can live in separate spheres.

People also heavily use alts on Reddit, which I think makes them less self-conscious about conforming to standards of behavior, because if they are feeling a bit pissed off and aggro about something they can switch to a different alt and a different subreddit where they can vent and it's acceptable behavior. It's much more like the real world where different physical spaces allow outlets for different kinds of behavior, where you can be polite and deferential at work and then go home to your living room and tell your brother in law that your boss is a rat bastard and cheerfully cuss up a storm watching sports together.

Twitter seems to have a totalizing effect on people's personalities, I think because people realize there's only one context, and therefore only room for one version of themselves. They talk one way all the time. If someone I follow for software news and insight posts a beef Wellington recipe or talks about the whiskey they got for their birthday, they sound exactly like they do when they're talking about software. Real people don't act that way! You know if you only work with somebody then you only know a fraction of who they are, and you crave a glimpse behind the curtain. I think online communities where identities are intended to correspond to real people and there is no compartmentalization of space will always suffer from this totalizing effect, where a percentage of people, small but enough to poison things, choose the worst part of themselves to stand in for the rest of them.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#209

Post by kortex »

geraltofrivia wrote: post #155
ookdatnog wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvote/downvote have a design flaw. They are intended to be asymmetrical (one for "I like this or agree with this or find it interesting", the other is _intended_ for "irrelevant, doesn't contribute" and not "don't like this/disagree"), but their design is symmetrical. They are equally prominent in the UI, they have mirrored names, etc. So no wonder people use downvotes as the mirror concept of upvotes.

I always think that these interactions should be modeled as: upvotes as ‘I want others to read this’, and downvote as ‘I don’t want others to read this’. I believe your intended behaviours (I like this or agree with this or find it interesting/irrelevant, doesn't contribute" and not "don't like this/disagree) also fit the aforementioned model.

That gives me the interesting idea of a twitter UX where the buttons are volume-greater and volume-less (just like sound control). With or without limits.

It's pretty much what people are trying to accomplish already; this just makes it explicit.

Would be neat to see how people react to hitting "max volume". You could model it in all sorts of ways. Do you silently accumulate, or do you keep hysteresis, such that you need a constant stream of positive engagement to keep it up?

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#210

Post by numpad0 »

heurisko wrote: post #191

The problem is, is supposedly, upvote = adds to the conversation, downvote = detracts from conversation. In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree. However I don't think anything can save twitter from being a toxic platform. What makes it especially toxic, I think, is its lack of separation of communities. Reddit is toxic sometimes, but at least there is some separation: if you just want to talk about knitt…

Reddit style up/downvote system is a great “homogenizer” of opinions. Applied correctly, it only leaves the most desirable opinions to survive. It also allows discussions to be steered without commenting.

Together it allows majority vote to simply take control of a comment page, and first rule of online voting is it’s always manipulated.

You know where that goes. You will end up with a self driving system that represents the richest guy there, with little control input necessary, into the walls.

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