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

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#261

Post by Blikkentrekker » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 1:49 PM 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…

I find myself agreeing. I utilize a few subreddits from time to time, mostly about entertainment, and all of them have very homogeneous opinions and aggressively downvote subjective dissent and verbally gang up against it, which I've certainly not noticed elsewhere.

The internet king of pluriformity and aggressive dissent still remains 4chan. A lack of identity does seem a good way to facilitate dissent.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#262

Post by blacktriangle » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

machinehermiter wrote: post #177

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...

I just don't understand why people are so terrified of opinions they don't agree with. I am just so glad I am old enough to have been exposed to a wide variety of different opinions and ideas before this crack down on such. Being exposed to bullshit ultimately hones your bullshit detector. If you grow up on twitter it just seems to me you will be easy to fool. Like a person who lives in a bubble afraid of germs so th…

When you did not reason yourself into your opinions but adopted them in order to get a sense of belonging to a group, the existence of other opinions is an existential threat.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#263

Post by CydeWeys » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

nkingsy wrote: post #254

CydeWeys wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other way around. They're not paid, so they want to keep the amount of unrelated contentious bullshit on their subreddit to a minimum. I've been a default sub mod and I know how much of a firehose that is. The simplest solution, and the smallest amount of work in total, is to nip unrelated discussions in the bud, delete entire comment trees, and lock the comment section entirely on a post that is (or is looking to) g…

Yes, it works and it sort of scales. Why, then, does the outrage porn rise to the top of the Reddit home page? Because it measurably increases sales in a huge way right now. To use a baseball analogy, how do you tell a juiced to the gills superstar that steroids are actually hurting their long-term outlook? There’s no way to show Barry Bonds a future in which he’s shadow banned from the hall of fame and unmentionable…

Outrage has always traveled faster than dry factual information. This isn't a new Internet phenomenon. You can see it in action all the way back in Greek and Roman history as well. It's an inmate feature of human psychology, not a new invention by reddit/Twitter.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#264

Post by Blikkentrekker » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

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…

I find C.M.V. essentially failed due to the vote system.

All the upvoted, visible views are the same trite repetition topics that have been done a thousand times before that are also about hot button political issues: more interesting apolitical C.M.V.'s are often downvoted for not being political enough. I've seen views about optiomality of certain cooking methods be downvoted there.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#265

Post by naasking » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

rolleiflex wrote: post #123

Y_Y wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, quadratic voting is one of the potential solutions to this, but ultimately that removes the ‘fraud load’ by mostly moving it to another place, to number of accounts. That is arguably worse because it incentivises the malicious users to create as many accounts as there are votes so as to not be subject to quadratic voting (1 vote = 1 energy point equivalency only holding at one vote), and it’s substantially hard…

> ultimately that removes the ‘fraud load’ by mostly moving it to another place, to number of accounts. That is arguably worse because it incentivises the malicious users to create as many account

Arguably the common social media policy of not having your account tied to a unique identity needs to change. It permits all sorts of problematic incentives like you describe, and which lead to bot accounts and more.

Of course, your identity doesn't need to be disclosed in your profile for when anonymity is important.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#266

Post by monk_e_boy » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #260

captainmuon wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up/downvotes always have multiple conflicting dimensions. - The post is factually right / wrong - Confirms to the site rules / breaks the rules - I agree / disagree - I want to promote / bury this post - Reward poster with XP / punish I am usually very pragmatic and upvote a post when I want other people to read it (because I want to see the discussion, or because I want to spread the idea). I also upvote to reward t…

Didn't Slashdot have multiple dimensions, a post could be "+5, insightful" or "-3, off topic". If you squint you could say the same about emoji reactions on Facebook and probably other platforms, this post got 5 :heart and 2 :scary reactions. They don't have a visible one for relevance but presumably the reactions feed into one behind the scenes. I'm not sure any of these have been shown to be clearly superior to the…

Yeah, these were good as you could filter out the "funny memes"

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#267

Post by rolleiflex » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 1:58 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #251

rolleiflex wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, quadratic voting is one of the potential solutions to this, but ultimately that removes the ‘fraud load’ by mostly moving it to another place, to number of accounts. That is arguably worse because it incentivises the malicious users to create as many accounts as there are votes so as to not be subject to quadratic voting (1 vote = 1 energy point equivalency only holding at one vote), and it’s substantially hard…

Adding other factors into this system might help. What about: weighting a vote by the "degree of separation" of the voter? (ie., friends count more) hyperbolic discounting of karma acquisition limiting the number of voters per item new accounts can't vote until achived a network & karam status (eg., shares, by friends, are upvoted). accounts which primarily upvote/downvote outside of their network are ignored etc. I…

Yes, these are all different kinds of logic that can be executed, and none of them are ‘right’, it just depends on personal preference and situation.

We call that user-selectability ‘subjective moderation’, but it’s basically a client-side compiler for a people-based raw data feed.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#268

Post by mikewhy » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 1:58 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #260

captainmuon wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up/downvotes always have multiple conflicting dimensions. - The post is factually right / wrong - Confirms to the site rules / breaks the rules - I agree / disagree - I want to promote / bury this post - Reward poster with XP / punish I am usually very pragmatic and upvote a post when I want other people to read it (because I want to see the discussion, or because I want to spread the idea). I also upvote to reward t…

Didn't Slashdot have multiple dimensions, a post could be "+5, insightful" or "-3, off topic". If you squint you could say the same about emoji reactions on Facebook and probably other platforms, this post got 5 :heart and 2 :scary reactions. They don't have a visible one for relevance but presumably the reactions feed into one behind the scenes. I'm not sure any of these have been shown to be clearly superior to the…

> Didn't Slashdot have multiple dimensions, a post could be "+5, insightful" or "-3, off topic".

Ars Technica does something similar and it's a great addition to the overloaded upvote/downvote

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#269

Post by babyblueblanket » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

codesections wrote: post #252

Tainnor wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I haven't spent any time there, so I'm genuinely curious: how does r/history avoid political arguments? Some people say that everything is inherently political, but history seems especially adjacent to po…

r/history is heavily moderated, and primarily political positions need to be backed up with actual historical facts and discussion (and not out-of-context common talking points) or it'll be called for what it is and deleted.

Re: Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons

#270

Post by Blikkentrekker » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

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…

It was solved long ere that: no votes.

There are many boards were ranking is simply decided by recent activity of replies. I find that DeviantArt has the ideal forum: a tree-based structure like Reddit, and H.N., and the top comment within a branch of the tree is simply the one which had the most recent reply to a child recursively, and any new replies always end up at the top.

This achieves two important goals:

1) visibility is dictated by activity and nothing more: a good comment is a comment that generates discussion

2) visibility is statistical in nature: less active trees still sometimes end up in the most visible spot, simply less often than more active trees

I dislike votes and the idea of “soft bans”: a comment is either against the rules, in which case it should be removed altogether and appropriate actions should be taken against the user, or it is within the rules and should not be “soft banned” by being faded out or something similar.