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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

#291

Post by tasty_freeze »

I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to expose their own opinion and risk their own downvotes.

I have no problems with people disagreeing with me and it can be enlightening if I learn something from the exchange. With a naked downvote I learn nothing.

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

#292

Post by laurex »

laurex wrote: post #96

I'm curious why downvoting feels painful or frustrating. Perhaps I'm majorly naive. When I post a comment in HN, I sometimes feel a twinge of nervousness, since I'm not attempting any level of anonymity and I'm aware that some people have strong opinions, sometimes become personal, and cancel culture is a thing, but at the end of the day, if I'm downvoted, it's only a comment on the internet, not something about whic…

Note: I love that this comment was downvoted - very meta - but I would have appreciated hearing more about the thinking behind it :)

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

#293

Post by asiachick »

pugets wrote: post #147
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…

I think it depends on the website. I used Reddit between 2012-2020 and I believe that website's community was ruined by the upvote/downvote system. For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for agrees/disagrees, then the comment s…

The HN downvote is also for disagreement

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

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

#294

Post by nickthemagicman »

shadowgovt wrote: post #250
nickthemagicman wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bre…

> a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers

So you mean a variety of opinions?

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

#295

Post by bmn__ »

avel wrote: post #193
mindcrime wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle. This is one of the more frustrating parts of the whole thing. I try not to care much about votes, but when a "throwaway comment" gets 50…

But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you? Again -- votes don't matter . I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain. Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)

Downvotes matter because they often tie into visibility. On HN, a few downvotes make the post fade out so it is difficult to read. On Reddit, two downvotes collapse a post so that its text becomes hidden.

This means on these platforms downvotes are a weaponised tool wielded by someone who can destroy the effort that went into post with but a mouse click.

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

#296

Post by andrewflnr »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #258
phreeza wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The groupthink here isn't straight party-line, but it does have a lean.

That's moving the goalposts quite a bit from "...absolutely be voted all the way down."

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

#297

Post by ItsMonkk »

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…

Completely agree and basically proposed the same system last month here[0]. I also made a comment matching yours about topic based communities[1].

An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time.

With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen.

Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions.

So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough.

I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625

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

#298

Post by bserge »

detaro wrote: post #94
bserge wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not bots. Bots act on logic, however simple it is. These are mostly people who disengaged their brain.

How do you figure that? Plenty cases where "would I downvote that" is not something you need to think a lot about, so "quick" != "disengaged brain".

Long history participating in and analyzing discussions on Reddit.

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

#299

Post by deegles »

I don't want to downvote articles or posts, I want to downvote people. Especially across multiple platforms. If I downvote a person's blog post, I want their Reddit comments to be less prioritized. I want them to show up less in my Google results. I want that to flow over into the results of people who have upvoted me, creating a web of influence over good vs bad content. I know, tons of pitfalls and shortcomings to an approach like this, but please try to think of an improvement to it rather than shooting it down immediately :)

Of course, 100% accountability rapidly becomes a Black Mirror episode, but I think right now we're at the opposite end of the accountability spectrum.

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

#300

Post by yoran »

gruez wrote: post #229
yoran wrote: post #56

I think Americans don't give enough attention to the bi-party system as an important cause for the current political divide, and increasingly, civil divide. My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling. I've never seen such disdain or hatred towards people on the other side of the political spectrum as in the US. I'm from continental Europe and…

>My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling. any more than a >2 party system?

Yes I believe so.
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