I would be fine with downvoting on stuff like news, interest groups, etc. I absolutely don't want to see it on personal feeds though. I don't need that drama in my social media feed, but if you could downvote the trolls and spammers on facebook (so the posts would be hidden if negative, or filterable), that would be awesome.
Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
481–490 of 553 posts
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#482Downvotes seem to work fine in small niche communities without much politics and whose focus is truth-seeking about their topic. But not so much in larger politically charged communities.
In the former, the community members tend to use downvotes as they should, to hide spam and trash comments, while remaining open to new or unpopular ideas that are well-reasoned and presented.
But in the latter, downvotes are too often abused to suppress ideas the majority disagree with, even if well-reasoned or presented. In that context, I find a better combination is having a "flag" button instead of downvote. Flag makes it clearer that the purpose is to flag spam, misinformation, or troll speech, rather than merely things you disagree with.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Experiencing a negative emotion is not always, or even most of the time, the same thing as being hurt.
I think that's going to fall into an argument of semantics. Can you give an example?
I mean, I experience several negative emotions (frustration, anger, etc.) reading the average comment thread on the internet, but to say that I am “hurt” by them would be a grotesque exaggeration …
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would have downvoted here instead of arguing with you as I am doing, lol. I disagree. I strongly dislike moderation ( it feels like an unfair boss coming in and using tricky stuff to avoid directly addressing the moderated party. Cowardice. Injustice. Etc…and such lousy grammatical constructions as “you are posting too fast”. Someone inform the HN bot that quickly is an adverb and that fast is an adjective, many incorrectly written street signs notwithstanding.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#485I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to r…
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Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like this is more about your ego. Not to be glib, but if you have written out a thoughtful statement, who cares if it gets downvoted? You can’t control how other people are going to react, and getting upset that you lack that control, takes away from your arguments and makes it about you. How do you respond when colleagues or students disagree? Perhaps working in academia so long has given you a false sense…
A downvote is not "disagreeing". It doesn't require the downvoter to be able to justify their action, they can just do it, and it is closer to violence than to communication.
Come and see the violence inherent to the system!
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would have downvoted here instead of arguing with you as I am doing, lol. I disagree. I strongly dislike moderation ( it feels like an unfair boss coming in and using tricky stuff to avoid directly addressing the moderated party. Cowardice. Injustice. Etc…and such lousy grammatical constructions as “you are posting too fast”. Someone inform the HN bot that quickly is an adverb and that fast is an adjective, many in…
"Fast" may also be used as an adverb. See: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fast
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#488I'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…
My experience is that on predominantly (left) liberal communities, that a gun rights topic’s top post will rarely represent the view of gun owners. Everything else you said resonated, but that part strongly contradicted for me.
This is because the moderators will often ban all disagreeing members. I’m not talking about trolls, but genuine and good faith discussion.
Saying something like you don’t agree that investment properties should be illegal is enough to get you banned in many parts of reddit.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#489I'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…
> Without the downvotes, the top post is often misinformation or just trash. Because a small, motivated group pushes it up
Nonsense.
A small group has a small impact, so as soon as there is more than 1 post, a bigger group will quickly “win”.
Re: Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It
#490I'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…
My experience is that on predominantly (left) liberal communities, that a gun rights topic’s top post will rarely represent the view of gun owners. Everything else you said resonated, but that part strongly contradicted for me.
I'm specifically thinking of the CanadaPolitics subreddit which is solidly centre-left, where this happens consistently. Ditto the Ontario subreddit. General issues subs with centre-left politics that shift hard when a subject that was fixated on by an interest group popped up.
Likewise, threads on covid policy were generally supportive of the scientific consensus... Until the subject of keeping gyms closed comes up, where the bro-science faithful would appear to declare all covid restrictions a crime against humanity.
It's not astriturfing or anything malicious, just the natural result of a subject being a disproportionate interest to a highly motivated subset of the community.