Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #409

anigbrowl wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dumb

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

#412

Post by addingnumbers » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

loceng wrote: post #371

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.

What makes you think no one owes you an explanation? If they're downvoting you and influencing how visible your comment(s) are I'd argue they do need to explain. Likewise you seem to need to take your own advice to brainstorm to understand why it is likely to add value to someone else leaving a comment and not simply requiring you to brainstorm and make guesses, e.g. bias and blind spots a person may have; what other…

> What makes you think no one owes you an explanation?

What makes you think they do? You think you could use something, that doesn't mean a stranger owes it to you.

If you change seats to get away from someone on a bus, do you tell them why? If not, how would you feel if they followed you and said you embarassed them and you owe them an explanation?

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

#413

Post by jdgoesmarching » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:35 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #363

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…

Shouldn't they do the same if they agree with you? What if they are wrong, or agreeing with you for purely strategic reasons rather than because they sincerely thing you're right? Any argument about downvoting is equally applicable in the opposite direction. Conversely, it's highly inefficient for people to take time to write out their reasons if someone else has already done so and they are merely echoing that. Trol…

The last paragraph really nails it. Especially in these online spaces, how you say something and tailor your voice to specific communities sometimes matters more than your content. No amount of downvoter commentary is going to capture that.

It seems like a lot of opposition to downvotes comes from people who take them personally. The internet is fickle and often dumb, don’t let fake points push your emotional state around. This is coming from someone who likes to share unpopular positions and, as a result, spends a lot of time thinking about fake points.

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

#414

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #409

anigbrowl wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(I don't actually think you're dumb, or that your comment is dumb. I wrote the sibling comment to this one to point out that it's just as easy to degrade discussion with bad comments as with downvotes. I'm sure you can think of many more offensive/asinine comments that you've seen on over the years.)

A downvote says 'I dislike this, and I don't think it's worthy of any more time.' Yes, it's tough on the writer of the comment in that they have to infer the reason something was unpopular, and that inference might not be correct. But that's how it is in the real world. Look at it from the point of view of a busker trying out songs on the sidewalk. Some people stop and listen, some give money, some just express dislike without articulating why, a few are actively hostile.

There's a widespread assumption on HN that any discourse is an improvement on no discourse. It isn't. If I harbor a toxic dislike for you, I can erect a giant billboard saying 'motohagiography is a bad person', and abuse preconceptions about discourse to turn people against you. There are also any number of semantic tactics for doing the same sort of thing, and some people actively weaponize such tactics.

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

#415

Post by rspeele » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

sfink wrote: post #396

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 + ijusthatey…

Perhaps I misunderstand your idea, but this clustering sounds like exactly the thing to drive polarization. Put me in my comfortable bubble where I only see content and comments from like-minded people, and I'll be increasingly unable to understand where people outside the bubble are coming from. The only thing I see about those people is ragebait about how awful and stupid they're being this week, written by other people I agree with. Even if I start on the edge of a cluster or in the overlap between two clusters, the feed will likely drive me towards one or the other.

That's how I feel with YouTube's aggressive recommendation system -- I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. It's a radicalization pipeline where I touch some innocent surface-level stuff and YouTube goes, "hmm, well, of the people who liked that, our most highly-engaged users who click through videos all day long REALLY like THIS" and wants me to become that person.

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

#416

Post by Uhhrrr » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

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.

It's not owed to you, but it is still best practice to do so.

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

#417

Post by astrange » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:42 PM UTC

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…

Reddit's comment quality is actually better than it used to be, though I don't understand what changed. It's true that the #1 comment on every post used to be wrong or a series of unfunny jokes, and then maybe #2 was good.

Currently their main problem (which is unsolvable) is just that everyone uses it and so there's new teenagers to ask trivial gender war questions on AskReddit every week.

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

#418

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #413

anigbrowl wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't they do the same if they agree with you? What if they are wrong, or agreeing with you for purely strategic reasons rather than because they sincerely thing you're right? Any argument about downvoting is equally applicable in the opposite direction. Conversely, it's highly inefficient for people to take time to write out their reasons if someone else has already done so and they are merely echoing that. Trol…

The last paragraph really nails it. Especially in these online spaces, how you say something and tailor your voice to specific communities sometimes matters more than your content. No amount of downvoter commentary is going to capture that. It seems like a lot of opposition to downvotes comes from people who take them personally. The internet is fickle and often dumb, don’t let fake points push your emotional state a…

Well thanks. I too get upset sometimes when a comment I thought was good gets downvoted and I don't know why. Sometimes it's wrong and I only realize that later. Sometimes it's because I'm an asshole. Sometimes it's because other people are assholes. That accounts for (I guess) >90% of comments,a dn keeping an open mind on these possibilities means that I don't get downvoted too often, and that when it does happen I can keep the reasons in perspective and minimize disappointment and hurt feelings.

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

#419

Post by aeternum » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

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…

I would much rather see tags than an upvote/downvote.

Some people downvote all jokes, others downvote opinions they disagree with, others downvote misinformation. It's a very ambiguous signal with little value.

Slashdot had it right very early on with the various tags (insightful, funny, interesting) but also gets it wrong by allowing only a very small percentage of the user-base apply those tags. Tags like misinformation, and agree/disagree would allow more nuanced and better filtering options.

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

#420

Post by pvg » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

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.

HN is not such a forum, downvotes to disagree are perfectly fine here.