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Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

theapeiron.co.uk

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Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#171

Post by graeme »

nindalf wrote: post #156
dahart wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you have a lot more fear and assumption than experience here. In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted you? Are you sure you weren’t just wrong and didn’t know it? I’ve been wrong in good faith and gotten fairly downvoted for it far, far more often than I’ve been unf…

Look, for what it's worth I agree. In my experience, HN is welcoming of my viewpoints. My karma is over 9000, so I'm not worried if a few comments get downvoted. But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They perceive a difficulty in contributing to the conversation because they're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still a legitimate concern…

They’re also positing a conspiracy against them, with people making multiple alts to downvote their comments. It’s more than just fear: it’s an empirical claim.

That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more likely.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#172

Post by dmpk2k »

minikites wrote: post #121
JohnWhigham wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

everything is political Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere. People will try and justify it with walls of text about the oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue intersects with their politics.

Name a subject or domain that involves people which isn't "political".

Me taking a shit? :)

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#173

Post by underseacables »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #67

I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is. I vote very rarely here, and when I do, it's almost exclusively as a vague nod of acknowledgement to someone who responded to me but to whom I have nothing else to say. It's weird to me when I get a large burst of 100+ positive votes on a comment. I think in general voting is pretty good as implemented on HN, but I would insist that voting rights be taken away for any thre…

> I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is.

Voting is power and people love one thing more than power, and that’s greater power. Imagine if there were no up or down votes, and how people might respond to having no ability to silently express their opinions.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#174

Post by marcosdumay »

blacktriangle wrote: post #36
crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

This really is an interesting problem, and I'm not sure if there's an answer. Sometimes I think the whole idea of HN/Reddit type sites is just doomed to ultimate failure. Dunbar's number is every bit as real in a digital space as it is in a physical space. I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. So instead of a global channel, your primary feed would come from y…

Isn't that Reddit? I'm not sure you can cut a "village" over the internet population in any way that doesn't breed harmful behavior. Reddit is on the most harmless end of those possibilities, but it causes problems there too.

Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your comment?

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#175

Post by dec0dedab0de »

brightball wrote: post #149
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if I desired, or even just for some user subset. This is different from Facebook or YouTube…

It’s probably not popular, but I always thought that Slashdot had the best voting system for comments or was at least on the right track.

I used to think that, but /. comments devolved into dumb jokes around 2003-2005. Which I think is the main reason that hn down votes jokes so aggressively. I do like the meta-moderator system. however, without holding back mod points to begin with there is no incentive to do it.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#176

Post by Pxtl »

I've noticed a difference between downvoting and non-downvoting discussions systems.

In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion. Note that this isn't "the truth" or "the consensus of the community" but of the people engaged on the subject. For example, if you see an otherwise-liberal community discussing gun-rights, the gun owners within that community will flood in and are highly motivated on the subject, and so the consensus will reflect their interest in the subject.

But either way, consensus.

Without the downvotes, the top post is often misinformation or just trash. Because a small, motivated group pushes it up, and the rest of the participants can only argue against it but not drive it back down... this creates the "engagement-based content" that aggregators crave.

The problem, of course, is that bots and sockpuppets are treated the same as established community members and can skew the "consensus". Realistically, the leadership of an online community needs to be able to identify who are credible voices on a subject and give them the power to steer the conversation. Yes, it's not egalitarian, but these systems never have been.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#177

Post by karaterobot »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #143
crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

I whole heartedly disagree. Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down votes the first few comments would have an even bigger advantage than they do now. [1]…

Downvoting to disagree is my knee-jerk reaction, too. But in most cases it's not as helpful as leaving a comment.

Any time I leave a comment, there is usually at least some thought and effort behind it, and a downvote without explanation doesn't teach me anything, or persuade me to change my mind.

If I don't know the reason for the downvote, my frequent assumption is "this person has poor reading comprehension, or isn't very bright, and just didn't understand what I'm saying. People often dislike things they don't understand. I guess it's true what they say: judge a man by the people who disagree with him."

That's completely unfounded, sure, but lacking any additional information, it's as valid as any other conclusion about why I got downvoted. Maybe I've made some obvious error, but how would I know? In general, getting downvoted tends to make me less respectful of other people on HN, and more confident in my own (flawed) reasoning, compared to getting a thoughtful disagreement.

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#179

Post by wutbrodo »

crazy_horse wrote: post #21

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…

> But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it)

/snip

> It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.

I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact, it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of exposure.

I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture. This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters. Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general, downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and not worth complaining or even thinking much about.

Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but".

[1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with them

Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

#180

Post by soperj »

semireg wrote: post #144
gwking wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW every time I have ever flagged something on HN it’s been a fat finger mistake on mobile. Probably a drop in the bucket but worth considering that the signal is still polluted even with perfectly good faith user behavior.

I’m entering grey beard territory, been on HN for years, and I still don’t know what the [-] button does. Is it a downvote? Or does it just collapse the parent so I can read more without clutter? You’d hope downvote UI would be more explicit.

You don't have the ability to downvote. It's a down arrow right below the upvote (up arrow).

[-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also unvote if you change your mind on your vote.

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