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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

#231

Post by bopbeepboop »

pjc50 wrote: post #103
Kiro wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can be on topic and only making calm, cited comments, but get shadowbanned for having sufficiently controversial views.

HN is like any other forum which censors certain views for being controversial.

Like stating that BLM is a Marxist organization — with a citation to their founders describing it as such.

HN relies on your belief that they only ban people “starting trouble” to remove certain topics from conversation, like how Marxist activists are using historic wrongs as a way to undermine society and for their own selfish enrichment.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#232

Post by matheusmoreira »

bagacrap wrote: post #220
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…

"I disagree" and "detracts from the conversation" have a lot of overlap. A (subjectively) very wrong take on a subject distracts from where you think the conversation should be heading. On Reddit I see many comments, convincingly written, that are (imo) flatly wrong. These comments are potentially very harmful because they're persuading others of a falsehood. Am I supposed to upvote or downvote? (what I actually tend…

How do you know you aren't the one who's wrong?

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#233

Post by sumtechguy »

baq wrote: post #147

slashdot had this covered years ago. literally decades. 1. upvotes limited to +5. 2. votes categorized: funny, informative, insightful, etc. 3. number of votes limited per time frame and user karma. 4. meta-moderation: your votes (up/down both) were subject to voting (correct/incorrect). good score == more upvotes to spend. and yet, simple trumps good. i was very happy to see parts of this implemented in steam review…

This style of moderation works to a point. But for larger conversations it falls apart. Unless you camp for new stories to show up, your posts will typically not be seen. They will get drowned out by the early voted on posts. Voting early and seeing things early is in many ways the way that particular voting system works.

Also for 'older' conversations you will tend to see a lot of +5's and a lot of -1s. But rarely anything in-between. That means it is harder to tell what rank a comment has in relation to another. So if you miss a story popping up and have a good point your 0/1 default moderation will have a tough time even being seen by some. I have seen the same topic take on radically different styles just depending on who posts early. Many topics can have this quality but it seems to happen to me more often with systems that have voting to me.

In practice most of these systems are agree/disagree systems. Trying to use that as some sort of barometer/filter of what the conversation is tough. It seems like it should work but in the end it is just 'internet points'.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#234

Post by throwaway0a5e »

simion314 wrote: post #230
7ewis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on Reddit for over 10 years now and have to agree. Generally all the larger subreddits are fairly left. There have been some hard right subs, but most of the larger ones are banned now. I find a lot of the mods of large subs are quite power hungry too, for example r/soccer. If someone breaks some news, linking good sources, correct post format etc. mods will regularly take the post down and repost it themse…

Avoid the large ones, I am not even referring at politics, any big movie,book,game subbreddit will be filled with garbage , better to find or create a subreddit with strict rules. For politics, I have no advice , probably try real life

That still doesn't help. Unless you 100% tow the party line in whatever sub you're on you will get inundated with hate.

Try telling any car sub that Toyotas can break or that Germany's automotive regulations are even slightly over-bearing and see where that gets you. No matter how narrowly you scope your dissent from the local norms the platform rewards everyone dog-piling onto the dissenter. There is simply no room for conversation on that platform and that drives out anyone who doesn't extremely align with whatever the local opinion on a given sub is so eventually all subs become filter bubbles almost completely dominated by one set of views and you basically can't have any meaningful exchange unless it's ten levels of comments deep where the masses won't see it and crap on it.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#235

Post by codesections »

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…

> The problem is, is supposedly, upvote = adds to the conversation, downvote = detracts from conversation.

>

> In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree.

Maybe Twitter should go all the way back to the Slashdot model, and let people vote up and down on "insightful", "funny", "normal", "offtopic", "redundant", "interesting", or "troll", etc.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#236

Post by wccrawford »

gruez wrote: post #227
baq wrote: post #147

slashdot had this covered years ago. literally decades. 1. upvotes limited to +5. 2. votes categorized: funny, informative, insightful, etc. 3. number of votes limited per time frame and user karma. 4. meta-moderation: your votes (up/down both) were subject to voting (correct/incorrect). good score == more upvotes to spend. and yet, simple trumps good. i was very happy to see parts of this implemented in steam review…

>4. meta-moderation: your votes (up/down both) were subject to voting (correct/incorrect). good score == more upvotes to spend. Doesn't this lead to a keynesian beauty contest situation where people are incentized to vote what they think other people would vote, rather than by their own honest assessment?

It's also another kind of echo chamber, where the majority can penalize you for going against the group-think both by downvoting your posts and by providing you with fewer votes.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#237

Post by Tainnor »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #198
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…

>”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…

I'm not super active on reddit, but I do frequent (mostly as a lurker) some subreddits from time to time, such as r/math, r/learnjapanese, r/history etc. I don't remember running into any sort of heated political argument in any of these subreddits. Of course, for other subreddits it might be different, but this is my experience.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#238

Post by krapp »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #63
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #3

I personally don't like this. Hackernews and slashdot do good jobs of moderation by making you have to be a participant that's contributed with well thought out comments. Reddit fails because the "upvotes/downvote machine" is just an opinion meter. Also the gaming of it is not good either so it's a matter of time before Twitter publicly displays your stats as you tweet. It's another slippery slope for them to show ig…

“well thought out comments” in this case means “well thought if your comment is aligned with the herd's opinion”.

More often than not the spicy contrarian hot takes of those who don't "follow the herd" are just the bleats of sheep following another herd.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#239

Post by tester34 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #190
tester34 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What would the better version be? in my opinion? Forums with mature community and competent moderators. Forums have way better model for discussions - better than fb, reddit, hn, twitter. Discussions on forums can last weeks / months, meanwhile on reddit/hn when thread drops from front page and then 20 hours pass, then comment section under thread is dead. But it doesn't scale

I've spent a lot of time on old-style (phpBB, SFML) forums of all sorts, and I feel that Reddit and HN are an improvement on them - but there are two factors to disentangle here: discussion shape, and discussion cadence. In terms of shape, I very strongly believe that tree model - like on Reddit and HN - is superior to the linear model. Every discussion naturally keeps trying to sprout new branches. People go off tan…

Some forums add some kind of non-linearity by adding comments to posts

this way you have linear main topic and offtopic "sub topics" in comment chains under posts.

But I think that tree has some cons, namely - it creates/allows to have many sub discussions in one thread, meanwhile forum's linear model force everybody to follow the same discussion instead of groups.

It depenends when one model is better than the other - in thread called "Linux vs Windows" tree is better, because there's going to be a lot of sub discussions, but in technical thread I'd rather have linearity.

>Forums ain't it - of the ones I've been on, all considered replying to a week-old conversation as "necroposting"[4].

It's up to the community.

I've seen it done healthly e.g decade old posts are in fact "necroposting", but one year old not.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#240

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #190
tester34 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What would the better version be? in my opinion? Forums with mature community and competent moderators. Forums have way better model for discussions - better than fb, reddit, hn, twitter. Discussions on forums can last weeks / months, meanwhile on reddit/hn when thread drops from front page and then 20 hours pass, then comment section under thread is dead. But it doesn't scale

I've spent a lot of time on old-style (phpBB, SFML) forums of all sorts, and I feel that Reddit and HN are an improvement on them - but there are two factors to disentangle here: discussion shape, and discussion cadence. In terms of shape, I very strongly believe that tree model - like on Reddit and HN - is superior to the linear model. Every discussion naturally keeps trying to sprout new branches. People go off tan…

[deleted]
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