Downvotes aren't going to fix anything until algorithms stop segregating us into individual groups of uniform opinion. How can you downvote what you never even see in the first place?
Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
201–210 of 553 posts
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Has anyone yet written an article headlined “is the Betteridge law of headlines a reliable way to asses article contents”?
There's this: http://calmerthanyouare.org/2015/03/19/betteridges-law.html
Delightfully, the article itself seems to assess the letter of Betteridge's Law while ignoring, and therefore embodying, its spirit.
And also, naturally, deliciously, walks straight into the obvious trap in the end.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#203I'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). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological
I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained me at doing. Comment and walk away.
By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most any forum, including Reddit.
Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting pattern, that process might be discouraging.
My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here. That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Name a subject or domain that involves people which isn't "political".
My love of my partner and my nephews and nieces. My enjoyment of art. My appreciation of the natural world. You can do a political analysis of those things, but they are not intrinsically political. Of course, some on the left believe that there is nothing that isn't political. But I don't think they're correct.
For lots of people around the world the ability to love their partner is a very political thing - homosexuality being illegal in a majority of Africa, and punishable by death in parts of the world.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#205Earlier 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.
I've actually had someone message me on Reddit (years ago) with several alt accounts that a reply I posted in a programming-related subreddit was wrong (it wasn't), and they were right, and they'd be mass downvoting my account. This was back when reporting actually did something I guess, because a couple of the alt accounts did get banned a few weeks later. Later another new account messaged me a censored screenshot of their bank account with a few million dollars in it and saying some crap along the lines of "I earned this money by selling a software startup, so I know more about C++ than you".
That's only one time I definitely know I was getting downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now how do I know it hasn't happened several times since except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough ego that they need to PM me proof of it.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#206I'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…
There's definitely a downvote squad. I've noticed my comments tend to do much better their first few hours and downvotes tend to come later after the submission has fallen off the front page.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many threads here about the politics of technology (big tech, open source vs closed source software, cryptocurrency and finance, the fabrication industry and China, etc) and there are also plenty of threads about politics unrelated or tangentially related to computers (off the top of my head, housing and homelessness, the schooling system, and climate change get discussed here not infrequently). HN isn't fo…
I agree. I guess it’s just not dogmatic. Moderators and HNers are very strict about being constructive on more political topics.
Just for the record, the reply to this comment by bopbeepboop that was downvoted to "dead" status is a good example of the type of downvoting I disagree with.
I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I have no control over the behavior of others on this site. I'm just putting that out there.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#208I'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…
But with downvotes, we ensure that only popular opinions get visibility, defeating the entire purpose of sharing ideas within a community.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#209I'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…
As an academic experiment, one could post a message here on HN and on Usenet to see how the interaction plays out on each platform. On Usenet, people can not vote or moderate your message. Messages are only removed from Usenet relays if they violate law for the most part. Anyone can reply if interested in doing so, with any text or content. Has anyone done this experiment recently?
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#210Has this person even used Reddit? Or StackOverflow? Or even GitHub? I’ve used social platforms with downvote buttons; saying that they make you feel bad and should be removed is like saying that cigarettes should be removed because they smell bad. But to be specific, instead of just using metaphors: * A downvote carries less information than an upvote does. If a feature request gets a lot of upvotes, the voters are s…
> * Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really think strengthening the filter bubble would help?
Discerning between truth and misinformation is also a "filter bubble". Any community-driven system that discerns between "this is what we like" and "this is what we hate" is also being used to discern between "this is what is true" and "this is what is false".
Online communities with healthy cultures and downvotes quickly destroy misinformation. In those circumstances, the filter bubble is a good thing. People pushing misinformation should be pushed either to stop posting misinfo or leave.
The challenge is that the people who are doing the most work on this subject - like Facebook and Twitter - have chosen to make it invisible. We don't know how Twitter and Facebook rank their posts and replies. But they obviously have invisible powers as leadership to identify which voices on their systems are "good" and which aren't, and give those "good" voices outsized power in communication.
But to me it seems obvious that something that takes Reddit's simple up/down interface but combines it with the kind of credibility ranking that Twitter does (where people who've been established as harmful don't actually have as much visibility or influence in the system) would be ideal.
Give the leadership tools to establish a preference for fact, and you also give them tools to establish a preference for their particular worldview. You can't separate those.
If you want a discussion system that supports fact over misinfo, you need to have a discussion system that enforces a community bias and creates a filter bubble, and then give the leadership the tools to control that filter bubble and bias, in the hopes that the leadership prefers truth over misinfo. Otherwise the community will organically create its own filter bubble on whatever biases it develops.
And if you have no filtering at all, you get 4chan, where abuse and misinformation run rampant.