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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

#401

Post by goodpoint »

croes wrote: post #214
squeaky-clean wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the GP commenter. It's not about everyone being against you. All it takes is just a couple people, or even one. I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can tell the responder did not even read your full comment... Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating o…

One problem on HN is, that downvotes aren't limited to the comment but include the commenter.

That's a feature, not a bug.

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

#402

Post by _game_of_life »

sebringj wrote: post #232

In my experience of HN and StackOverflow, at first, I did not like people downvoting my naive or thoughtless comments. Throughout the years, my reputation on StackOverflow grew and a little bit on HN since the bar is so much higher seems... but in any case, this has been a learning journey in being a more thoughtful and respectful contributor and without those downvotes, I wouldn't have had the self reflection to be…

This is my experience as well! I usually reflect on my unpopular comments and realize I could have been more considerate or worded things less rashly... Or my viewpoint is just unpopular.

I find it genuinely difficult to relate to the other comments on here equating downvotes to oppression or even violence.

If anything, my hope would be that Hacker News becomes MORE strictly moderated via downvotes, and maybe even starts banning some non-tech oriented politics. Now shower me with downvotes, 500+ karma daddies, to show the little ones it is okay.

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

#403

Post by anigbrowl »

michaelmarion wrote: post #136

Can we bring back the time when there was no social media instead? I feel like that's what society desperately needs.

I have a better idea, why not just un-invent violence and scarcity? Then social media will be wonderful because bad things will no longer exist in the world.

Social media is not the cause of toxicity. It's a mirror for it, albeit a collection of various distorted mirrors that many people aggressively manipulate.

People were shitty to each other on usenet and bulletin boards, people were shitty to each other via broadcast media, people were shitty to each other via newspapers, and people have been shitty to each other in person.

People have tribal tendencies and some tribes are more aggressive than others. Sometimes you have to choose between different tribal affiliations because conflict is happening whether or not you want it to. We are living in one such period and the internet (like many previous iterations of communication technology) is having an accelerative effect.

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

#404

Post by anigbrowl »

temp0826 wrote: post #305
deegles wrote: post #299

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 t…

So like...codify cancel culture?

I think the GP is asking for better filtering to see less of what s/he dislikes in the first place, rather than seeking to limit what I see.

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

#405

Post by Shish2k »

Veen wrote: post #223
NeoTar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We could quibble about this, but I don't think that makes their love political. The repression is external to their love of each other, not part of it. In fact, it would be a diminishment of their love to analyze it purely through a political framework—which is one reason many people don't like "everything is political". It diminishes many of the most important aspects of our lives.

> The repression is external to their love of each other

It’s not very “external” when the police are breaking down your door to force themselves into the middle of your activities. It’s something you need to be constantly aware of - if you want to have love at all, then you need to thread it through the government’s loopholes; if you do it in public, you are “an activist”.

It would be nice if “love” and “government” could be cleanly separated - but for queer people, that seems to be a fantasy that only straight people have the luxury of believing in :/

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

#407

Post by renewiltord3 »

themacguffinman wrote: post #386
renewiltord wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amusing but people will go downvote unrelated stuff once you offend them. I can tell because I’ll get a flood of downvotes across unrelated comments when I make a controversial post. Of course that’s all fine. I have no right to participate in this community and the community has a right to behave how it does. Or perhaps I’m just miscalibrated and I’m saying totally douchey things here (only provided for ex…

I'm just speculating here, I don't think your linked example comment was downvoted because it was douchey or because you offended people in other comments. In my experience, comments like your example are downvoted because they're "obviously" wrong or irrelevant, which is of course very subjective. Clearly you don't think your own comment is obviously wrong or irrelevant, but you were rebutting "people don't want to…

Hey, thanks for the feedback. Have hit my rate limit again. FWIW the comment was upvoted and left so for 36 h or so before I made my other comment on “real engineers” being worse than software engineers because they kill people (which was rather flamebaity).

I don’t want to transform this into a discussion of the original but I specifically intended to mean that to imply that the whole thing is that crypto functions like M3 and that value transfer is the underlying goal, legal tender just being a tool. After all, we use IOUs commonly (Splitwise exists on this principle) and they aren’t legal tender. I felt there was enough there to make the connection.

But anyway, if you think it is a logically incorrect comment, that’s on me to communicate better. Thanks for the feedback.

Anyway, I can’t have this discussion any more with you, because I have to save my comments for the most information transfer (I have an account rate limit).

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

#408

Post by burnished »

neartheplain wrote: post #391
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.

>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.

Except, not? Empathy as a practice is the process of thinking about and correctly guessing the feelings or thoughts of another. If you are given the 'answer' then it does not require any further though. It is trying to cross that gap, 'why did no one like what I said', that I think you find empathy in.

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

#409

Post by motohagiography »

anigbrowl wrote: post #385
motohagiography wrote: post #312

While I don't think they are useful, I have come to relish downvotes because if I have provoked a snide response at least it is sincere, where a downvote means I have threatened the integrity of a narrative - and that's when you know it's quality writing. Downvotes are a substitute for discourse. If want something better, post it. It's like someone wanted to design a product for a braying, superstitious mob and creat…

a downvote means I have threatened the integrity of a narrative - and that's when you know it's quality writing. Neither your premise nor your conclusion are valid. A downvote could simply mean you stated a counterfactual or alleged a fallacy. Nor can any automatic inference of quality be drawn. By your logic, someone who just posts the equivalent of fart noises and is habitually downvoted for doing so is a genius. F…

But a downvote wouldn't correct that, whereas a comment improves the discouse because it captures the best they can do.

What's left in relief is something closer to truth.

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