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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

#241

Post by asteroidbelt »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #150
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happens to me whenever I say something critical of any given specific country. USA, China, Russia, I get hammered with downvotes and flags. Make a positive comment, hammered with upvotes. It's frustrating.

If you say anything positive or negative about something people hold as part of their identity you're going to get a response. I think it's better that you get votes, instead of a bunch of emotional comments.

No, it is better to get comments, even emotional and not well written. Because with comments I might understand where I was wrong, or at least know where exactly my opponent disagrees with me, because it I could have written a wall of text, not every sentence of it is wrong.

Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the opponent is not interested in productive conversation, so I move on.

And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this is not the place where I'd like to participate in discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful dispute and the extending each other world view.

A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.

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

#242

Post by durbleflorp »

mumblemumble wrote: post #202
kubb wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Glorious, thanks

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

#243

Post by asteroidbelt »

sharken wrote: post #157
antattack wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideological issues get people to use downvote. Technical discourse is more civilized, upvotes are more likely than downvotes.

Absolutely my experience too, tech is not really controversial. But discussions on health, religion and culture that is where the downvotes are used. If you can accept that premise, then HN is a great place to be. Reddit is just not in the same league when it comes to thoughtful, well-articulated discussions where you get some great insights.

> tech is not really controversial

Unless it is a topic about Rust and how it is better or worse than C++.

Try to make a claim C++ is better, and nobody is going to read your bullet point explanations, you just get tons of downvotes.

(I'm not claiming anything is better or worse in this comment, I only present an example.)

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

#244

Post by zug_zug »

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.

Not so.

Reddit's system works that if a post get 1000 upvotes and 500 downvotes (66% liked), it will be scored worse than a post than gets 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.

Basically what it does is penalize controversy, which is the perfect decision for a website that is about mining the most humorous and widely-liked response.

Anything that is 51% liked and 49% disliked (e.g. political individuals mentioned in a non-political thread) gets bombed to the bottom almost immediately, which is exactly what most redditors want.

The other brilliant thing it does it let the user adjust this prioritization if they so desire.

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

#245

Post by LocalChapter »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #73
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'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. Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means…

This isn't true at all.

If it is valid criticism of something you have said that is incorrect or have done wrong, the adult way to deal with this is not to get upset but take the criticism on board, improve and move on.

If the criticism is nonsense you should disregard it as such and forget about it or in my case laugh at it.

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

#246

Post by dahart »

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…

FWIW, I agree and I hear both what you're saying and what @crazy_horse said. My perspective is coming from having lived through that perceived difficulty and hesitancy and come out the other side. @crazy_horse isn't there yet. I was terrified of downvotes early on, and I admit sometimes they still bother me. One of the reasons HN gates the downvotes, I believe, is so that you have time to go through the process of introspecting and reflecting on how you're handling yourself before you start reacting negatively to others.

For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access to the downvote button. The result is that I think more carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases over the years where the downvote button did good things to a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time and some downvotes.

Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy and using the downvote button every once in a while, because over time I can see some of the upside to the downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other people do it so I don't ever have to.

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

#247

Post by isabelc »

Macha wrote: post #132

I find linking the rise in partisanship to social media doesn't appear to be supported by the shared graphs, which indicate whatever caused the state change happened in the 90s, which is before social media took off?

I think the rise of 24-hour news networks are partly to blame.

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

#248

Post by AlbertCory »

This is a silly article. Add downvotes, don't add them -- it doesn't address the polarization issue he identifies.

Many things can be and used to be individual choices and not societal issues open to debate (and mutual hatred). If you refuse to accept that, then everyone who doesn't make your choices becomes your enemy.

I'm not lamenting the bygone days, since they sucked in numerous ways. But they did contains a kernel of truth, in that shrinking the size of public discourse is the only way to keep it civil.

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

#250

Post by shadowgovt »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #170
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…

Down votes create cultural echo chambers and social cooling. What down votes should be for is rudeness or site violations...but they're effectively used to blackball people with counter opinions. There's a social cooling that goes along with anyone who has a counter opinion to the tribes narrative but doesn't want to be digitally outcast. And eventually those with differing opinions who do speak up accumulate enough…

I suspect the original author would agree with your assessment on effects, but doesn't see either cultural echo chambers or social cooling as de-facto negatives. Lacking a downvote signal (i.e. a "most people who saw this disagreed" signal), a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers of equal apparent strength or value, increasingly divided by who upvotes what with no downvote counter-signal to breed some kind of consensus.

I don't think it's assumable that either the inability to converge in a shared space or the alternative to social cooling (shout louder to be bigger, because there's no way to signal the other ideas should be smaller) are a net positive for the global online community (the latter, of course, does drive those engagement numbers up though...).

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