Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by blacktriangle » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #174

blacktriangle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My guess is it was downvoted for calling out that what people really want is to be in a bubble of likeminded culturally similar people. I don't see a problem with this behavior, it just looks like basic human nature to me. But I think some people are offended that they might not be as "enlightned" as they fancy themselves to be.

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

#182

Post by Pxtl » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

drstewart wrote: post #15

peakaboo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit had downvotes which means every thread is full of people agreeing with eachother. Creates an echo chamber. People don't want to get downvoted so they eventually stop posting. It's great for creating perception bubbles. Everyone agrees!

Yeah, my experience has been that any downvote system will turn an audience that's divided 51-49 to one that's partitioned 51-0 in very short order. If anything, I've come to the conclusion that downvoting should be completely removed from most online platforms.

While downvotes can drive people out of communities, I have to contrast what happens in no-downvote communities, where often the top commentary is, to be blunt, far worse because corrections can only exist in the form of responses (and so more engagement).

Downvote-based systems are better at having the consensus viewpoint and quality content bubble to the top, at the expense of pummelling some of the dissenting views.

Upvote-only systems seem to have worse stuff bubble to the top.

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

#183

Post by spywaregorilla » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

underseacables wrote: post #173

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.

> Imagine if there were no up or down votes, and how people might respond to having no ability to silently express their opinions.

This is silly. None of the internet forums I grew up with had these.

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

#184

Post by nindalf » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #171

nindalf wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I'm not endorsing this idea of them being persecuted.

But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting privileges to accounts in good standing but even then it's not easy.

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

#185

Post by not_jd_salinger » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #89

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…

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…

edit: this comment initially made claims that it looked like HN was removing climate change related content from the front page. I still believe this to be the case, but don't really have strong enough evidence to back it up. I'll wait until I have something more convincing before posting about this again.

Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.

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

#186

Post by phreeza » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #165

Ajedi32 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as bad on HN in my opinion, for a few reasons: 1. Comments cannot fall below -4 points 2. Downvoted comments only get greyed out, not hidden entirely 3. Most topics on HN are not political (though there are certainly exceptions) 4. The community here is (usually) a bit more mature than on other sites like Reddit

Surprisingly many topics are political [1], and an answer the very right-wing libertarian consensus here disagrees with will absolutely be voted all the way down. [1] Often, the assertion "this topic is not or should not be political" is political . Because politics is how we organize society on a large scale and saying things should be exempt from that, guess what, is a political opinion.

Dunno, I'm pretty sure I've seen calls to break up or even nationalize Google and similar sentiments at the top quite a lot. That doesn't strike me as particularly right-wing?

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

#187

Post by foobarbecue » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

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…

@crazy_horse, what do you have in mind when you say "we can do much better than downvotes"?

In my opinion, stackoverflow-style downvotes are a good solution. Downvotes cost reputation points to cast, and can only be cast once you are at a certain trust level. SO has other issues, but I think they got downvoting right.

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

#188

Post by rektide » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

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…

Personally I think you're taking things too seriously, even though you're right. I enjoyed "The Great Online Game"[1] recently (1 comment), which stages this engagement as play. Although I would like to see my karma go up faster, that's not the point of the play for me. Unfortunately a lot of ludicrous, non-contributing, downvoting schmoes are part of the game. It's ok, it's still- for me- for fun, and I don't feel the need to adjust myself or my strategy of play because of the directed, biased negativity about.

To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems: Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online, understand each other, and build our own defensive & observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, & growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece of understanding this web ought be able to encompass.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488

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

#189

Post by Veen » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

JohnWhigham wrote: post #62

_v7gu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Avoid political threads. Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political", this is quite impossible to do.

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.

It's not new; it's a variant of the 60s feminist activists' pronouncement that "the personal is political" or "the private is political".

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

#190

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

not_jd_salinger wrote: post #185

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…

edit: this comment initially made claims that it looked like HN was removing climate change related content from the front page. I still believe this to be the case, but don't really have strong enough evidence to back it up. I'll wait until I have something more convincing before posting about this again. Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.

[deleted]