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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

#461

Post by AnimalMuppet »

pessimizer wrote: post #456
Pxtl wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

That sounds like a recipe for creating filter bubbles.

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

#462

Post by breuleux »

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…

The clustering could possibly be leveraged into an anti-polarization tool, if you start promoting the content within each cluster that is the least objectionable to opposite clusters. Basically, show leftists the leftist content that rightists like the most/dislike the least, and show rightists the rightist content that leftists like the most/dislike the least. I assume this system for countering echo chambers would require good clustering.

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

#463

Post by hashkb »

anigbrowl wrote: post #378
hashkb wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But it's a double edged sword. "You should wear your mask" is getting downvoted (edit: I'm using the term loosely here, I hope it tracks) across the country and responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. We need to engage with ideas we don't like, and be open to persuasion. Downvotes preclude that.

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…

There could be a collection of more meaningful one-click reactions ("I disagree", "This contains too many errors to address", "I don't like this person", "This is misinformation/abuse/dangerous"). The downvote (and the upvote, too) don't communicate enough.

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

#464

Post by joe_the_user »

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.

That's where moderation comes in. Honestly, I think good moderation is better for weeding out trolls and terrible ideas than downvotes. All sorts of idiocy makes it to the top of Reddit, for example.

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

#465

Post by smolder »

smolder wrote: post #54
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Facebook's engine score similarity between posts, exactly?

Part of this is their capability of processing image posts and giving it a text description. For example Facebook will look at a jpeg of an old man with some text on it and use image recognition to actually determine a description of "photo of old man saying 'top text bottom text'". I've seen these descriptions appear in the page and they're pretty impressive accuracy-wise. Beyond that, comparing posts for similarity…

FYI, you can see these descriptions by inspecting the alt text for an image posted to FB. It's there for accessibility, I assume.

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

#466

Post by JulianMorrison »

andrewflnr wrote: post #296
JulianMorrison wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The groupthink here isn't straight party-line, but it does have a lean.

That's moving the goalposts quite a bit from "...absolutely be voted all the way down."

Not really. It just means the topics people are touchy about don't follow the party line. They're still touchy and political about them.

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

#467

Post by SomewhatLikely »

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 was going to speculate this could be a phenomenon of audio chatting as I've seen clubhouse described in a similar way. But then I remembered the toxicity of many multiplayer video games with voice chat.

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

#468

Post by nashashmi »

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…

I like your explanation. Makes a case for premium paid Twitter tweets to feature downvotes as part of its thread to only allow for consensus based discussion.

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

#469

Post by pvg »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #344
pvg wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really work because every bad comment would have to generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations of its badness. It's also worth thinking about why this logic is so readily applied to downvotes but not upvotes. Presumably you learn nothing from a plain upvote so upvotes should come with a note as well, right?

> generate a massive subthreads of repetitive explanations I just recently heard about a system where upvotes/downvotes themselves could be upvoted/downvoted. I could see a system like that to avoid the duplication, and if every original vote came with explanation, it would be nearly indistinguishable from regular conversation. Plus, something getting downvoted would presumably get less traction over time since it’d…

Such a system would mostly add ceremony, complexity and meta without obvious benefit to conversation interestingness. I think the other thing is a more fruitful line of inquiry - how come nobody wants notes on upvotes? The answer, I think, is getting downvoted feels bad and people naturally want more friction, 'accountability', etc when something makes them feel bad. However natural, though, this isn't a great way to design forum systems - it's more elabourate rationalization than design. The question of whether a particular forum's negative feedback system is too punishing, imbalanced, makes users feel too bad too easily or too soon is a perfectly sensible one and worth exploring, of course.

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

#470

Post by fleddr »

I fully agree with the statement, although the solution may be difficult. In general, there has to be a way to give negative feedback. Without any correction feedback loop at all, the worst of the worst is thriving.

Negative feedback is not just for consensus, also as a quality filter. I'll start with the example of Medium, the blogging platform.

The idea of this platform is to encourage long form high quality writing. But that's not what's happening. Every topic is hijacked by people gaming the system, producing endless streams of lazy articles that lack any original thought, any sources, nuance, any quality.

There's no way at all to give negative feedback other than blocking each individual author or writing a critical comment. Both don't solve the problem. I consider it an existential problem for the platform as only crap comes to the surface. Why would I possibly pay for this garbage? There has to be a way to clean the garbage.

So here, the idea of negative feedback is to serve as a quality filter.

On Twitter, it's a different use case. It's to reduce harm. Twitter is an outrage platform. Saying dumb, extreme, unhinged things will maximize engagement. The goal of negative feedback here would not be to censor anything, instead to tell the algorithm to dampen the "spread" factor. Show the post with lots of negative feedback less prominently in timelines, which will reduce the amount of retweets, new followers, etc. Somebody consistently extreme should not be rewarded for it.

Arguably, on Twitter it's going to be difficult. The way things work currently is their business model. Further, there's the mob mentality likely to abuse any such mechanism.

I'll end with an example where negative feedback is implemented extremely well. It's the dutch site tweakers.net. They have a pretty sophisticated comment system.

You vote on individual comments roughly like this:

-1: troll, offensive 0: off-topic, irrelevant +1: on-topic (this is the default level) +2: informative (enriches the topic) +3: excellent (well researched essential addition)

So you give a quality vote, not an opinion/agreement vote. Some people still opinion vote, say a comment like this:

"Microsoft sucks"

And then give it a +3, instead of the -1 or 0 it should get. Do this a few times and they take away your voting rights entirely. You get one chance to get it back by begging, and if you promise to better your ways. Screw it up again and it's gone forever.

A fairly involved system, which will obviously not work everywhere, but it's really good.

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