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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

#541

Post by manx »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #216

My mental model of downvote systems is that systems without them allow more diverse thoughts. Imagine a topic where everyone feels compelled to vote, skewed about 51% to 49%. Without downvotes, your top comments are going to be a mix of both sides. Opinions are about 50-50 and comments will look like that. It will feel frustrating, like in the article, because you see about half of these posts from those evil Others,…

A bit more information for your mental model:

Afaik, reddit has a pretty stable upvote vs downvote ratio, like 7:1. (Sorry, no source, but I remember the reddit founder saying it in an interview).

And in your calculations you assumed that every post receives the same number of votes. Also that is not true, because of ranking. Higher ranking posts get more views, more votes, more views and so on. In this case the upvote-downvote difference is different for two posts with different popularity, but same upvote:downvote ratio.

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

#542

Post by manx »

anigbrowl wrote: post #395
username3 wrote: post #63

Society needs downvotes with context. Show me downvotes by left leaning and right leaning users. Left and right downvoting each other is noise. Show me when an echo chamber disagrees with itself.

Yes. Downvotes are vectors and amendable to cluster analysis. I've been proposing this on HN for a long long time but the answer has always been 'data explosion, arc is meant to be small and fast and this will break it.'

I'm researching different voting algorithms for HN. If you're interested, please contact me (email in profile).

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

#543

Post by manx »

TchoBeer wrote: post #158
jokoon wrote: post #102

I've been arguing that websites should only allow users to downvote.

I wonder if only allowing downvotes would lead to the same result as only allowing upvotes.

With a different ranking formula it's actually quite promising. I created a simple simulation and some plots: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring

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

#544

Post by jokoon »

manx wrote: post #543
TchoBeer wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if only allowing downvotes would lead to the same result as only allowing upvotes.

With a different ranking formula it's actually quite promising. I created a simple simulation and some plots: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring

I don't understand this simulation, did you have real users who could only downvote?

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

#545

Post by manx »

jokoon wrote: post #544
manx wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a different ranking formula it's actually quite promising. I created a simple simulation and some plots: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring

I don't understand this simulation, did you have real users who could only downvote?

No real users. It's a simplified simulation of a frontpage and how random users interact with it. Have a look at the code: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring/blob/master/scor...

I started to write another simulation with the goal to be more realistic, i.e. backed by real statistics from HN, like "how many votes arrive on each rank of the frontpage", or "what is the distribution of submission arrival".

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

#546

Post by bena »

esyir wrote: post #526
bena wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reputation systems can be gamed. On massive sites, they reward those with the most time.

Gatekeeping (or moderation) works, but like we've both already said, it only works for smaller scales.

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

#548

Post by atoav »

Talanes wrote: post #540
atoav wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your second paragraph invalidates the first. What if all 50 of those people agree with you, but are downvoting you for another reason?

Then you might be in an (possible, but unlikely) edge case scenario and should applaude the complexity of reality surrounding us.

The truth is, you can never be sure if your opinion is minority or majority within any online forum just by looking at up/downvotes of one post in isulation.

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

#549

Post by CRConrad »

mindcrime wrote: post #116

Vis-à-vis HN and the discussion of down-voting here specifically: There are definitely times when the down-voting is pathetically petty and inane. One of the most glaring examples I've noticed is this: any time somebody makes a post asking for book recommendations in any form (eg, "What's a book that influenced you?" or "What books do you recommend for $REASON?", or however they choose to phrase it), no matter what t…

> IF you include anything by Ayn Rand you will get down-voted. [...] I could (almost) understand the occasional downvote at least, just because her stuff is moderately controversial in some circles.

To explain why your post was (as you so correctly predicted) downvoted: Her stuff isn't "moderately controversial in some circles"; it is utter bullshit through and through, and a surefire indicator that the proponent is either stupid, misled, motivated by hateful politics, or two or more thereof. Any downvotes are utterly well-deserved and a valuable life lesson that should be taken to heart.

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

#550

Post by acover »

bena wrote: post #546
esyir wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reputation systems can be gamed. On massive sites, they reward those with the most time. Gatekeeping (or moderation) works, but like we've both already said, it only works for smaller scales.

Has weighting members by arrival order been tried? For example, the 100th member has 10x the voting power as the 1000th and so on.
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