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

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

#451

Post by tonyedgecombe » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #137

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the downvote brigading is getting more frequent. Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them. Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.

Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC / Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as an expected behavior, despite it being relevant to many "I thought Enterprise had more control than thins!" conversations.

I could see that happening if you are presenting it as a solution to some problem and the downvoters perceive it as an unrealistic alternative. As far as I’m aware it isn’t that easy to obtain.

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

#452

Post by MisterBastahrd » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

Veen wrote: post #423

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made it 4 words into your reply before using veiled political language regarding your relationship with whomever you are romantically involved with. "Partner" became common in the mid 80s because it was a way for gay people to refer to their love interests without revealing their gender. You say that art and love aren't political, but that's only useful when trying to split hairs about the subject.

You're missing the distinction I am trying to make. The language may be political, but my love for my partner is not the same thing as the language I use to describe it. It's why this conversation is important: we are not merely symbol processing units, we are human beings with perceptions and feeling that are not entirely mediated by language and politics. That may seem to you as if I am splitting hairs. For me it's…

I'm not missing anything.

You sit there and you tell us that there are things that you enjoy that cannot be described in a political manner. Nobody has ever suggested that your love for anyone is directly political.

Where you can live, who you can openly love, what jobs you can hold, what education you can have, what art you can view, and who you can fraternize with... these are all impacted, sometimes substantially, by political decisions.

Love is not some tangible item that sits apart from the rest of lived experience. It is created and nurtured THROUGH that lived experience. You love your partner in the way that you do because you have the freedom to do it. Your perception is colored by the free society in which you live, and by the attitudes of the people within that society.

I have a black friend from high school... a nationally celebrated former athlete, who started dating another high school classmate of mine in college. As soon as they were able, they moved away. She was a white girl with a black man, and even people they had grown up with were uncomfortable with the pairing. Her friends literally sat her down and informed her that her kids would look like her father, and didn't want her to experience the sort of emotional distress that a parent of a black child suffers when living in society. The negative attitudes of people around them at the time forced them to leave the state.

Most of my gay classmates also moved away, all to California, for similar reasons.

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

#453

Post by rspeele » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

MrStonedOne wrote: post #437

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…

> 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…

Well, that might be an example of how my perception is swayed by these recommendations. There are probably plenty of people out there making YouTube videos purely advocating for equal treatment in things like the draft, or allocation of child custody in divorce, or whatever.

But if I were to watch a few of their videos I suspect I would be swamped with recommendations for other videos which are more in line with what I was referring to. Stuff made by and for men who are bitter and resentful of women and spend a lot of time online seething about it.

I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair.

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

#454

Post by nitwit005 » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #442

Facebook is worth $1 trillion. Twitter also very successful. I think they know what they are doing and do not need the advice of some random writer. Down-votes suck. They feel much worse on an absolute basis than the pleasure of up-votes. I am all in favor of removing them from all sites.

Facebook has been rather open about moderation struggles, and they shifted their strategy as recently as two weeks ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57836319 . It's hard to see that as "they know what they're doing".

You have to be careful of assuming successful companies are making the right choice in individual decisions. Success has a way of hiding failure. People tend to overlook all of Facebook's failed products and features, because their overall income is so large, but bad decisions must have happened.

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

#455

Post by klyrs » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

smellf wrote: post #438

nemo44x wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it was pretty good in the late 90s, very early 00s. Then it got competition from digg and reddit, and lost readership. Only the trolls perservered, and here's the key, without quality conversation, dedicated readers couldn't earn enough meta-karma to moderate. The 'never delete a comment' policy remained for about a decade wherein every story was quickly brigaded by racist, sexist and homophobic slurs, but mostly the n word; with only a handful of diehard commenters remaining.

To this day, I prefer Slashdot's summaries over headline-only aggregators, and I wish other sites would adopt features like the mod-with-reason and karma caps per comment. But they designed the system to limit the power of moderators, and those limits didn't scale with the imbalance between trolls and good-faith posters

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

#456

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #424

anigbrowl wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we don't, and no they don't. If you engage with ideas you don't like and debate them in good faith, and the promoters of said ideas keep just pumping them out (perhaps even using botnets or whatever) while ignoring all your good-faith attempts to refute them, then you are wasting your time. At some point you have to cut your losses; you stay open to persuasion by people who consistently exploit your willingness to…

I'd love to see a site like Reddit or HN experiment with using relationship graphs to research this. Start with some fixed points of "this person is a credible source of information" vs "this person is a neo-nazi conspiracy theorist" and examine the networks of people who support them and oppose them, and use that to establish credibility-scoring system-wide and weigh people's votes based on that. I mean, it would be…

Make it even simpler. Mark yourself as the only source of karma. Then when you upvote people, they also become sources of karma; and when you downvote them, they become sinks (their upvotes might actually subtract karma.) This effect should attenuate with distance from you (i.e. your upvote is +1, the person you upvoted's upvote is +0.9.)

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

#457

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

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…

The bubble-ization I see today is less "I am intolerant of your alternative subjective views! The Beatles are totally better than the Rolling Stones!" and are more often a struggle of information vs. willful disinformation.

So many of today's "bubbles" don't even involve subjective ideas; they involve willful distortions of facts such as anti-vaccine propaganda, flat Earth theories, and the like.

     how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet [...] a 
     much healthier environment where people are exposed to and 
     more understanding of those outside of what would otherwise 
     be their bubble

I miss those early days, but I think the notion of the internet as a more tolerant place back then is mostly an illusion.

The internet population itself was kind of... a single bubble back then. It was way less diverse than the general population.

Early internet discourse was dominated by tech-savvy folks at universities, and folks working in the tech/engineering sectors. Therefore users tended to be male, white, college educated, young, technologically savvy, and economically upper/middle class.

We were less likely to see the walls between bubbles because we were in a single bubble.

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

#458

Post by beebeepka » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

I don't like upvotes but I strongly dislike downvotes. Having karma is even worse because it forces people into creating throwaways or accepting the anonymous wrath of the hive mind.

Who up or downvoted you, and why, you will never know. What I find most suspicious is that moderation often travels in packs. Most interesting. As if people have multiple accounts. Crazy, I know

Just take a look at Slashdot. It's been the same 100 guys simultaneously writing and moderating using multiple accounts for literally decades. It's almost dead now for some reason. Maybe people with good karma should start at 5 while the dirty 0 peasants have their posting privileged revoked. That'll fix everything.

Silencing everyone we disagree with is the answer!

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

#459

Post by JohnBooty » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

hashkb wrote: post #208

Pxtl wrote: post #176

I've noticed a difference between downvoting and non-downvoting discussions systems. In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion. Note that this isn't "the truth" or "the consensus of the community" but of the people engaged on the subject. For example, if you see an otherwise-liberal community discussing gun-rights, the gun owners within that community…

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

Yeah.

"Upvote only communities" are more prone to brigading by hyper-motivated cliques or sub-groups.

"Upvote+downvote communities" are more resistant to the above, but also more prone to hivemind.

It's not clear to me that one is better than the other. It is clear to me that both have significant flaws.

Ideally what you really want to promote would be well-reasoned/well-sourced posts from a variety of viewpoints. In practice I simply don't think this can be achieved solely by community voting. It is simply too easy to click an upvote or downvote button for random community members that don't have the incentive to take a more thoughtful approach.

Every successful community I've seen has had some level of strong moderator involvement, including HN.

(The HN mods kill a lot of low-value posts. Because they do their job well, and they do it with a low profile, many folks are unaware of how much moderation they do...)

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

#460

Post by MrStonedOne » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

rspeele wrote: post #453

MrStonedOne wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well, that might be an example of how my perception is swayed by these recommendations. There are probably plenty of people out there making YouTube videos purely advocating for equal treatment in things like the draft, or allocation of child custody in divorce, or whatever. But if I were to watch a few of their videos I suspect I would be swamped with recommendations for other videos which are more in line with what…

>I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair.

and another example of how such algorithms can influence collective thought.

I'm sure there are people who do the same with other equality measures as more divisive content of the same vein like "you're a fucking white male" is gonna be more likely to show up until the viewer links it with social justice entirely.