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Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

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

#521

Post by touristtam »

musicale wrote: post #480
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…

> In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion I wish I saw more consensus - things that are agreed upon by multiple sides - but in practice I tend to see a tyranny of the majority - whoever can win the upvote vs. downvote contest. The winning side rises to the top, while dissenting voices are silenced. One sensible thing that I thought HN did but I don'…

reddit has a contested mode that is quite nice to balance the winner take all approach that seems to plague all other systems.

Another thing I have noticed is SO, that remove "karma" for each downvote you action (Note that I have seem that behaviour documented).

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

#522

Post by nickthemagicman »

shadowgovt wrote: post #520
nickthemagicman wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You make interesting points.

My observations suggest that human beings above 18 are adults and can think for themselves.

"Benevolent" attempts at manipulating the crowds by people who think they are wiser or more knowledgeable...leads to more harm than good.

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

#523

Post by shadowgovt »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #522
shadowgovt wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You make interesting points. My observations suggest that human beings above 18 are adults and can think for themselves. "Benevolent" attempts at manipulating the crowds by people who think they are wiser or more knowledgeable...leads to more harm than good.

If by manipulation you mean discourse, then there's a whole history of more knowledgeable people sharing their knowledge to manipulate crowds to great benefit. Thomas Payne. Thomas Jefferson. Martin Luther King Jr.

If you instead mean regulation of what information enters a consensus... That's basically every history book. Every encyclopedia. The curated speaker list at a convention. The moderated comment stream on Hacker News.

And yes, such regulation can be used for ill also. The fascists in World War II used direct control of broadcast media to shape the thinking of the population. Of course, so did Roosevelt with his fireside chats.

I don't know what the future of information exchange in social media looks like. But I'm getting a strong sense that it doesn't look like Facebook and Twitter. I don't think those systems provide the right tools to build consensus.. instead, they seem to build cacophony. They reward enragement (because it drives engagement) and make it difficult for people unfamiliar with the topic to distinguish mainstream opinion from fringe.

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

#524

Post by LinuxBender »

underseacables wrote: post #494
LinuxBender wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opt-In self moderation is great. You can even do that here on HN with add-ons like uBlock. From My Filters ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political) ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr+tr More examples [0] and there are a few other incantations of this. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/it…

Filters would be fantastic. I would love very much to be able to filter out specific words and phrases from my HN view.

A simpler add-on for words and phrases is FoxReplace. [1]

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/

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

#525

Post by esyir »

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.

Good the main issue with jokes is they're the text equivalent of a Meme pic or "look what I did" type post. Easy to consume content with little actual meat. They attract upvotes easily when accepted because of that lack of substance.

Without a culture that rejects them, they, by nature, rapidly overwhelm most communities in content if a voting system is present.

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

#526

Post by esyir »

bena wrote: post #83
acover wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking how to counter this effect. How to give power to the silent majority. I've been slowly writing a version of Reddit with an added level of moderation via direct democracy but made efficient by using proxy votes and statistical sampling. People with time and interest provide most is the content but moderation incentivizes behavior beneficial to the majority. It's a fools errand as it's a double-sided…

It probably is. Moderation itself is an attempt at a solution. And it is a solution on a small enough scale. But when you're literally dealing with moderating the entire world 24/7, there just aren't the resources to deal with that. You're attempting to automate that or kick that can back to the users. But just like here, just like reddit, just like StackOverflow, just like every single site that relies on community…

I've always had this idea that reputation systems and enforced, systematic gatekeeping might be a way to build stronger communities.

The fundamental issue of any fully open community is scale. From what I've seen, no online community really resists the swarm that comes when it goes viral. Whatever community that was there before, for all it's values and culture, gets replaced by the masses by sheer virtue of numbers.

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

#527

Post by whoaisme »

wraptile wrote: post #502
musicale wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion I wish I saw more consensus - things that are agreed upon by multiple sides - but in practice I tend to see a tyranny of the majority - whoever can win the upvote vs. downvote contest. The winning side rises to the top, while dissenting voices are silenced. One sensible thing that I thought HN did but I don'…

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.

On reddit it's a big problem but on HN Dang is a dictator and that's okay?

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

#528

Post by romwell »

aeturnum wrote: post #435
romwell wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

Reddit says to only downvote if a comment does not contribute to the discussion, not if you disagree.

So downvoting is an implicit choice of only "good" reasons.

Putting a drop-down list with "good" reasons is as good as displaying a pop-up: "Are you sure you are downvoting for ?" - which will be promptly ignored.

Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote.

The only thing you can do with categories is display the distribution / most prevailing category alongside the score (like Slashdot has been doing for decades).

In all of this, you seem to want to control why people downvote.

Instead, examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that.

It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it?

Unless you add categories like "I think the author of this comment is a moron and I hate them", people will shoehorn your categories for this use case.

And if you do that, I'm not convinced the result will be necessarily positive.

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

#529

Post by romwell »

klyrs wrote: post #455
smellf wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like you both agree that mod-with-reason alone didn't save Slashdot's level of discourse :)

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

#530

Post by romwell »

pessimizer wrote: post #449
romwell wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I don't think that the suggestion was to tell people what to do, but to replace the downvote button with multiple buttons that represent different reasons one would downvote. One of the buttons could be "this is wrong and stupid." If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes. If I'm reading it correctly, this suggestion would just…

I didn't get the impression that the parent comment meant the same, but I fully agree with what you are saying.

>If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes.

My point essentially.

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