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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

#391

Post by neartheplain »

dmkolobov wrote: post #336
tasty_freeze wrote: post #291

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 the…

Something that I've learned: nobody owes you an explanation for why they disagree with you, nor are they bound to care whether you learn something. Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.

>Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.

It's easier to practice empathy when you're not blindly guessing at what bothered the downvoter.

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

#392

Post by anigbrowl »

rpz wrote: post #373

Society doesn't need a downvote or an upvote. I'd be happier with the removal of both buttons.

First reply!

How are you gonna deal with the spam that we know to appear and clutter up time-ordered systems? What's to stop me (or m tribal group) wrecking a good discussion by flooding it with 50 nonsense posts to take over the front page?

Votes are absolutely imperfect and are not working as hoped. But they gained currency because sometimes any ranking system is better than none at all.

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

#393

Post by jjoonathan »

alach11 wrote: post #389
dmkolobov wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that I've learned: nobody owes you an explanation for why they disagree with you, nor are they bound to care whether you learn something. Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.

In many communities (HN, Reddit, etc.) downvotes are ostensibly not to be used for disagreement. Forcing users to supply a reason could introduce enough friction to encourage more thoughtful usage of the downvote.

Please kindly enter a constructive reason for your downvote:

"ur dumb and wrong .stay mad!"

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

#394

Post by wutbrodo »

throw1f78aa0a80 wrote: post #357
wutbrodo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples of downvote-bombing simple claims that climate change is real? I'd be beyond surprised to find out this phenomenon is real, even just based on the demographic prior of HN. No worries if not, I get that it's not a trivial ask to dig up an example.

Not climate change. But three days ago this is a bit strange. Article regarding to anti-vax and astroturfing. First submission flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946430 Lots of comments saying it is being artificially vote inflated. Second submission more objections https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951293 stating conspiracy voting. Not sure what to make of it. And just one example.

Thank you for the links, but I was asking about the (since-edited-out) claims that these comments were being downvote-bombed. Submission ranking is considerably more complicated, and is not what I was asking about.

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

#395

Post by anigbrowl »

username3 wrote: post #63

Society needs downvotes with context. Show me downvotes by left leaning and right leaning users. Left and right downvoting each other is noise. Show me when an echo chamber disagrees with itself.

Yes. Downvotes are vectors and amendable to cluster analysis. I've been proposing this on HN for a long long time but the answer has always been 'data explosion, arc is meant to be small and fast and this will break it.'

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

#396

Post by sfink »

Perhaps the model simply isn't rich enough. Right now, we model posts as either belonging to the good bucket or the bad bucket, and do various things (upvoting, downvoting, AI, ...) to guess the "right" bucket. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that a system based on polarization results in polarization?

Which is not to say that just adding complexity is the right fix. Sure, you can add dislike + disagree + ijusthateyourguts buttons, or force votes to be justified (funny/incorrect/disagree/...), or whatever. But it's not obvious what's worth the overhead (UX-wise), and if it ends up boiling down to just finding more nuanced reasons to toss things into one bucket or another (or even a single score), I'm not sure if we're any further ahead.

Perhaps clustering is a better model than polarized buckets? As in, this comment belongs to the set of things that left-leaning people seem to support. This other comment belongs to the conspiracy theory #1 cluster. (The system would likely not know or care what the clusters mean.) If you choose to engage with the idiots who love cluster A, you can do so, and if you want their noise out of your feed then you can do that too.

You'd still need to decide what input signals will enable this -- you could do it with just upvotes and correlating users' activity across a site, but you would need to evaluate that in terms of what best supports the model (clusters instead of buckets).

And clusters aren't the end-all be-all either. A racist, misogynistic comment that also says something that group X strongly agrees with isn't going to be fully described by being in the "jerk comment" cluster. But we have to deal with a low-dimensional approximation in order for any mechanism to be worthwhile.

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

#397

Post by anigbrowl »

robertwt7 wrote: post #124

Downvote is unwelcoming for newcomer, create possibility for toxic environment, and useless See downvotes in stackoverflow and reddit. Why not flag instead? I’ve seen many people being afraid to get downvoted that they finally back off from posting question

Downvoting is like saying people disliked what you posted. Flagging is like saying you shouldn't even have posted it (because it's spam or severely violates the guidelines). There's even less transparency around flagging and vouching and it's just as easily abused.

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

#398

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

Then threads just fill up with people going 'agree, yup, right on.' Upvotes are like applause. Are concert audiences trying to put performers in their place by clapping, or just expressing their enthusiasm?

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

#399

Post by anigbrowl »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #235

I think opining on the internet should be rethought. I think that instead of the relatively opaque up/down, it should be a 2D grid of agree/disagree and good/bad argument. Allowing you to still commend users that you disagree with by noting they make solid logical arguments.

Just look at the patterns of voting by user. If we interact regularly but only pay attention to the content of each others' comments, and sometimes agree and sometimes disagree, then there will be little correlation between our accounts. But if I have a personal dislike o you and make a thing out of downvoting every comment of yours that I see, that will become obvious very quickly.

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

#400

Post by graeme »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #205
graeme wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh it does happen. But it isn’t the norm in my experience, both personally and in the communities I mod. I rarely see sensible comments having negative karma.

And my own innocuous comments tend to be “1” rather than anything negative. If downvotes rings were more common you’d expect more negative karma comments.

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