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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

#431

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

I think you should only have a set amount of upvotes and downvotes per day. Or have a mod point structure similar to Slashdot. That way it prevents commenting to just get karma, and it allows for people to properly respond in a way that they'd like to without having fear of a downvote brigade. The people who can moderate then at that point will mod appropriately if it is even worthwhile of attention. So, is a troll even worth your time to give mod points over? Or someone who just isn't thinking right but can have a legitimate discussion?

That way it deters someone from just being really scummy and downvoting all your posts, thus bringing your karma down even though what they were mad at had nothing to do with those other posts. Also, voting for karma to be locked after x amount of days/months.

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

#432

Post by nemo44x »

aeturnum wrote: post #421
hashkb wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with downvotes, we ensure that only popular opinions get visibility, defeating the entire purpose of sharing ideas within a community.

An idea I've been interested in trying is requiring people to downvote for a reason: "unproductive," "inaccurate," "off-topic." The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"

No idea if they still do but Slashdot used this back in the day. You were given karma points occasionally to pass out and you'd have to select what you were rewarding/punishing.

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

#433

Post by rspeele »

fpgaminer wrote: post #425
rspeele wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Somewhat related to this, I recently watched a video essay on VR Chat and one of the takeaways was how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet (think around the dawn of Web 2.0 and before). There's no recommendation systems or an algorithm partitioning people into isolated spaces. It's just a bunch of random strangers browsing through uncurated rooms. And, as the author argues, that lends itself to a much heal…

I know what you mean. Tangentially, I also liked the experience of gaming (FPS) more when you would choose a server from a list, which was hosted by some person or group other than the game company, and you played with whoever else happened to join, from outright beginner to expert. Often on community-created and self published maps that wouldn't meet the quality standards of a game company, but could be much more varied and novel. The players would be a mix of one-time visitors and some regulars who you could expect would be on every night or a few nights a week. One such server in TF2 was like the bar from Cheers to me for a couple years in my late teens. The modern experience of matchmaking is simpler to jump into, less intimidating, but it's empty and lifeless. Like candy vs. a meal.

Anyway, back on the social media thing, I fear there is no reason for it to change. Success, for a recommendation algorithm, will always be defined as what keeps you on the site, scrolling and clicking. Success for a person, we can be fairly sure, is not that. So we will always be fighting the algorithms to try to keep our own "engagement" at the level that is good for us, not good for them.

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

#434

Post by nemo44x »

professoretc wrote: post #353
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…

That's kind of how Slashdot used to work: you couldn't just up/down vote, you had to pick a reason why, from a list. "Insightful", "Funny", "Informative", etc. for upvotes, "Incorrect", "Trolling", "Off topic", etc. for downvotes. Of course, Slashdot also had meta moderation, where you could occasionally be given the job of up/downvoting other peoples' votes , which in turn influenced how often they would be allowed…

I think it was the best system. Importantly - not having the power to moderate all the time. You were given a certain amount of moderation points at random times so you felt like you had to use them wisely. This prevents a site from being consumed by the same active up/down voters which creates an echo chamber.

And yes, moderating the moderators was a decent idea too.

I'd also support a system of moderation where you don't get to necessarily moderate whichever comments you want but rather are given moderation points and maybe a few comments within a topic are sent your way and it's you moderate those. This would prevent users from deliberately seeking out other users or topics to +/-.

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

#435

Post by aeturnum »

romwell wrote: post #427
aeturnum wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An idea I've been interested in trying is requiring people to downvote for a reason: "unproductive," "inaccurate," "off-topic." The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"

Hahahahahaha. This is exactly what reddit told its users to do (only downvote due to one of these reasons) - and exactly nobody does it. People will figure out to downvote for whatever "reason" that maximizes the impact of the downvote real fast; groups of people will make sure to weaponize it too even without coordination . E.g.: "the comment I hate doesn't have enough 'inaccurate' downvotes to sink into the abyss,…

> This is exactly what reddit told its users to do

I'm not on reddit much these days but when I opened it just now I was able to downvote without choosing a reason? So I do not think it is using the system I described.

The ability of each user to chose what downvote categories they want to respect would be an important part of making the system harder to "game" (to the degree that one is "gaming" a voting system by voting).

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

#436

Post by gnicholas »

> “If we just gave people a very simple, frictionless way to say, ‘I disagree with this,’ you would probably reduce a massive amount of the sort of negative swaller that exists inside of social media.” — Ashton Kutcher

Is "swaller" a word? I've never heard it and don't see it in my dictionary.

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

#437

Post by MrStonedOne »

rspeele wrote: post #415
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 p…

> 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.

I do not think it is productive to a healthly discussion to link wanting to end discrimination against men with incels or Jordan Peterson

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

#438

Post by smellf »

nemo44x wrote: post #432
aeturnum wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An idea I've been interested in trying is requiring people to downvote for a reason: "unproductive," "inaccurate," "off-topic." The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"

No idea if they still do but Slashdot used this back in the day. You were given karma points occasionally to pass out and you'd have to select what you were rewarding/punishing.

They still do, and the quality of discourse on Slashdot is about as bad as it has ever been.

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

#439

Post by baq »

dmpk2k wrote: post #172
minikites wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a subject or domain that involves people which isn't "political".

Me taking a shit? :)

Pipes to flush your shit into aren’t there because it’s a good idea to have them. They’re there because somebody made a political decision to require them.

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

#440

Post by acituan »

anigbrowl wrote: post #372
hashkb wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with downvotes, we ensure that only popular opinions get visibility, defeating the entire purpose of sharing ideas within a community.

Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith. There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes). Unless you are taking the negative possibilities into account, an all-beneficial 'marketplace' of ideas' does not and will not wo…

> Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith.

It is more than an idea being ahead of time or stupid.

People need to take a lot of cognitive shortcuts in their model of the world to be able to compute it, which is evidently imperfect. But getting poked holes in one's model is nonetheless painful. Being told you might be wrong, and the realizing you were wrong is painful and scary.

Most people do not use up/down votes, blocks, bans this heavy-handedly because of the expected truthiness of the ideas in question; they primarily do it based on the idea's conformity to their sense of identity and to protect themselves from the anxiety of having been wrong.

And this is not their fault. Polarization is ultimately a failure in integration and having a complex model of the world. But it is work, and it is painful. The more that work is postponed, the more the drift between our models and the reality, making it even more painful to catch up. The tools of discourse we have been given give us the perfect mechanisms for facilitating this avoidance, because they feed on engagement and not the truth. It is like saying "I'll keep telling you sweet lies as long as you don't leave me, doesn't matter how much that hurts you on the long run".

> Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad

Or they could be diverting you from mere hard truths. When it comes to ideas, "comfort" is the wrong metric to optimize for.

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