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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

#511

Post by merpnderp »

dane-pgp wrote: post #472
merpnderp wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's my point, none of these studies ever cite a utility's actual costs. When I got curious and looked at what the actual cost to the utility (not counting any federal rebates) just their actual outlays, versus how much power was generated over the year, it was ridiculous. And the easy way to know this is true is that utilities are still building nat-gas plants. It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money…

> just their actual outlays My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel, or maybe the two types of plants have different financing models that are hard to compare directly, but I wouldn't be qualified to check your results even if you presented all the data. > It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits. Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one…

> My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel

The docs seemed pretty clear that they were the operating costs of the installation. I had to find the install cost and the operating costs separately.

> Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.

That's a good point, but there is also an enormous amount of pressure to go carbon free and these power companies answer to several regulatory bodies all with enormous power of their operations. It's not unreasonable to believe there are requirements to move to wind for continued licensing.

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

#512

Post by sebringj »

_game_of_life wrote: post #402
sebringj wrote: post #232

In my experience of HN and StackOverflow, at first, I did not like people downvoting my naive or thoughtless comments. Throughout the years, my reputation on StackOverflow grew and a little bit on HN since the bar is so much higher seems... but in any case, this has been a learning journey in being a more thoughtful and respectful contributor and without those downvotes, I wouldn't have had the self reflection to be…

This is my experience as well! I usually reflect on my unpopular comments and realize I could have been more considerate or worded things less rashly... Or my viewpoint is just unpopular. I find it genuinely difficult to relate to the other comments on here equating downvotes to oppression or even violence. If anything, my hope would be that Hacker News becomes MORE strictly moderated via downvotes, and maybe even st…

thoughtful and respectful :)

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

#513

Post by cmdrtaco »

smhenderson wrote: post #273
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that, but /. comments devolved into dumb jokes around 2003-2005. Which I think is the main reason that hn down votes jokes so aggressively. I do like the meta-moderator system. however, without holding back mod points to begin with there is no incentive to do it.

I know why people don't like them and I get that you are correct that it got pretty absurd on /. around the time period you mentioned. But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.

No way, that guy is the best.

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

#514

Post by mint2 »

raxxorrax wrote: post #507
anigbrowl wrote: post #372

Earlier 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…

I have been accused of bad faith arguments when that wasn't my intend. > 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). You don't have to evaluate every comment. You just let it stand and let others that want to invest the time come to their own conclusions. Perhaps you misunderstood the commen…

In most cases that’s a cue to re-think how a comment is phrased or to pre-emotively address why most people’s knee jerk reaction to it is too hasty. In some cases, yeah the crowd just isn’t receptive to a point of view but most often it’s a matter of phrasing or another issue that needed a second look before posting.

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

#515

Post by f38zf5vdt »

mindcrime wrote: post #283
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if I desired, or even just for some user subset. This is different from Facebook or YouTube…

In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) o…

The problem with whitelisting users or even attenuation is that you would be able to determine the vote counts of individual users. But perhaps votes being publicly ascribable to users is not a problem. I think they're public by default on twitter.

Another interesting feature would be to set vote significance based on a subset of users from a given subforum. In reddit terms, this would be, maybe you trust the content or membership of a given subreddit more than you do the subset of all users, so you set the website to filter on `r/foo` user upvotes instead of `r/all` user upvotes.

There's a lot of potential here to let users craft their on miniverse of relevance and information filtering.

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

#516

Post by phreeza »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #466
andrewflnr wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually agree, I just think libertarian right wing is a mischaracterization, and I think it matters because the stereotype of the tech nerd is the atlas shrugged-toting libertarian, but HN doesn't really match that stereotype most of the time, I think.

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

#517

Post by nickthemagicman »

shadowgovt wrote: post #329
nickthemagicman wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers So you mean a variety of opinions?

A variety of strongly-held opinions that are not proved against each other and don't intersect to build a coherent narrative.

I would much rather have a variety of perspectives than a coherent narrative.

You learn more that way.

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

#518

Post by seph-reed »

anigbrowl wrote: post #410
seph-reed wrote: post #219

Upvotes and downvotes are both old tech. "Applause" reactions/flags seem promising.

'yay' vs 'boo' is just a different label for the same thing, no?

Nah. A flag is more than a "boo," much in the same way laws are (hopefully/sometimes) different from mob justice. It says: this is bad for x reason.

And a single yay is very little investment of time, but applause can be made to take time. If someone wants to spend a 20s clicking "yay," that says quite a bit more. If combined with "reactions" you get a bit more nuance.

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

#519

Post by atoav »

chii wrote: post #505
wraptile wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to tyranny of the majority is NOT to hide down-voted comments and provide sorting options. Big problem with reddit is that it hides comments below certain threshold essentially silencing minority opinions.

> below certain threshold essentially silencing minority opinions These are not minority opinions, but unpopular opinions. Just because something is downvoted to hell and hidden, doesn't mean it's a minority. A minority opinion is one which few people have, not one which is downvoted by the majority.

If you have a forum with 100 people and your opinion is downvoted by 50 your opinion is (within that forum) the minority opinion.

That doesn't necessarily mean this opinion is a minority opinion in the real world. In fact it doesn't even have to mean those who downvoted don't share your opinion, they might have downvoted you for a heap of reasons (maybe you were rude, or they saw your comment as pointless, maybe they downvoted every comment except their own, etc.)

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

#520

Post by shadowgovt »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #517
shadowgovt wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A variety of strongly-held opinions that are not proved against each other and don't intersect to build a coherent narrative.

I would much rather have a variety of perspectives than a coherent narrative. You learn more that way.

My observations don't suggest that principle holds true for the general poplulation. I fear too many people lack either sufficient knowledge or sufficient critical thinking to independently determine whether strongly-made claims successfully fact-check.

Lacking that ability, consensus of the commons is more likely to be correct than fringe opinion and can back-stop that missing ability.

Much of the Internet-connected world is currently running a fascinating experiment on itself regarding whether a public exposed to a fire-hose of unmodulated opinion can grow in aggregate wisdom or will be dissolved by gibbering foolishness. The results of this experiment are not yet determined.

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