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My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive

My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message of my own. It'll show up in the conversation feed but doesn't affect the original message. And each disagreement stands alone, so they'll never accumulate a high score, so even the people who see them won't consider them as important as the original message. Let's say somebody posts a Twitter message about, oh, how they've just tried cleaning their ear using trained caterpillars. It gets passed around a bit among the ear-canal-caterpillar-cleaning community, all five of them. But then a friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance retweets it, and suddenly thousands of people see it, and it's off-the-wall enough that a small percentage of them pass it on. Suddenly it's got thousands of retweets. It's become a movement. Bloggers write about it, a few mainstream journalists comment on it, and abruptly Caterpillar-Facilitated Ear-canal Maintainance is a thing. Meanwhile have written a tweet about how this is a really crazy idea and don't do it, seriously, it's just dumb. It'll get passed on a bit among my friends and will peter out. It's not just Twitter; most social media networks do this. Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.

pdonis 11y ago
> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.
- emp_zealoth 11y ago
  And I personally think it is even more insidious. When I'm on facebook and see some extreme rightwing nutjob upvote ring I see what's going on On HN on a lot of downvoted commets it makes sense, they are poorly written and full of bs. But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt. It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)
  - HCIdivision17 11y ago
    Each community specializes in something (which may be a bit tautological), but they do not do so well in the other things, too. So when I see some sort of political post on HN, I go in knowing it's going to be a little bit pants. Probably not terrible, probably a bit noisy as an echochamber, but certainly not what this community is good at. By contrast, if there's a bug writeup for how a screen redraw glitch was fixed by bitfiddling, well, that's the cake I came here for.
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    > But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt. Yes. > It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity) Let me add a little detail here for non-Europeans. "Far right" in some western European countries has come to mean about Obama-ish politics (health insurance for all instead of government-pays-everything-for-everybody like those contries have today.) As emp_zealoth points out this constant framing of anything that isn't way left and politically correct as "brown" and "extreme right" is now starting to backlash. People starts to question mainstream media and conservative/right wing media/pro Israel groups/conservative political parties seems to see a surge in readers/participation.
    - bitwize 11y ago
      It so happens that Western Europe has settled on a political system or set of systems which aren't perfect, but basically work well for everybody. Europeans have much less "stuff" than Americans, but when it comes to the basics -- health, education, public infrastructure, in some cases even housing -- everybody, rich and poor, has more or less equal access. America, by contrast, has got its shit so not in one sock that despite vast increases in productivity, the vast bulk of the excess wealth has gone to the 1%, with the remaining classes not much better off than they were 30 or 40 years ago. And how healthy you can expect to be is positively correlated with how rich you are. So when people say that America is a two party system: a right-wing corporatist party and a far-right-wing corporatist party, they're not blowing smoke. They're reckoning from a different origin than you. Apparently, relative to your political origin, sane policies are considered "way left and politically correct".
- cJ0th 11y ago
  > 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes. I'd say that even though upvotes and downvotes are somewhat helpful it is the mentality that differentiates HN from other communities most significantly. We can't outsmart human stupidity with technology. Sure, we have loads of people who want to game HN to push their own agendas but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view. There is nothing wrong wrong with, say, fighting for animal rights. But the moment you consider yourself an animal rights activist you're very likely to give up common sense and the ability to value any input that doesn't conform with your peers' opinion. Basically you become a one-dimensional character. Pleas note I used the word "likely." I am not ruling out that there are open-minded animal rights activists!
  - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
    > but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view. No. Try posting anything here that opposes the groupthink. You'll get the downvote hammer used against you very quickly.
    - blakeyrat 11y ago
      This is one of the few tech sites where you can post something positive about Microsoft and not get moderated into oblivion. I agree that there's some "groupthink" going on here, but it's not nearly as bad as any other sites I've used.
Outdoorsman 11y ago
I don't use Twitter, but I agree with your point that crowd-sourced opinion, without constraints--the "dislike" option you offer, for instance--often produces a questionable consensus... Consider 1} Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer." Only somewhat whimsical with more than a bit of truth to it...implying that if you post something without much merit someone will be along shortly to set you straight... Unchecked commentary allows a "conversation" to run headlong...speculation...rumors...gossip... We all have different preferences for entertainment I guess...I prefer thoughtful sources... 1} https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
- EvanPlaice 11y ago
  Awesome. I've never heard it referred to as Cunninham's Law but I've used this a lot. People are overly concerned with being 'correct' all the time. Sometimes I'll talk out of my ass and pick a side on a topic I know little about because usually thr person who knows more will either confirm or correct my assumptions. It's a surprisingly useful tool to learn in-depth knowledge from others on just about any topic. You just have to be careful not to over use it as blind skepticism has a tendency to piss people off.
inanutshellus 11y ago
> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. FWIW, this is coming very soon to FB in the form of "reactions" rather than a simple "dislike" feature. http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/27/facebook-reactions-launch-soon/ http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/27/facebook-reactions-launch...
- humanrebar 11y ago
  Does that feature allow negative feedback? A frown for bad news is positive feedback. I'm concerned that all reactions might be treated as good reactions. That is, that there is no way to politely disapprove. Does anyone have any more details on this?
  - Nelson69 11y ago
    The genius of it all is there is no 'hate' or 'dislike' button. It only allows 'positive' or no results. I suspect facebook and company will come up with a solution to the problem of how do you indicate that you saw something without commenting when it's not socially acceptable to 'like' it. For example a funeral announcement, you don't want to 'like' it but you want to say 'thank you' or something yet you might not want to comment. A real dislike or hate button would simply result in a lower signal/noise ratio. Maybe new types of bullying where lot's of people 'hate' on somebody.
- greggman 11y ago
  It's already been shipping for a while. 3-4 weeks?
fweespeech 11y ago
> My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date. Scalable agreement systems where large numbers of users agree X is good, then X is not spam. > Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. Reddit clearly functions in such a manner [as does HN]. Twitter / Facebook hide this but fundamentally its the same concept and it is largely ineffective for what your goal is [publicizing useful discussion, including disagreements]. We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately. Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the various algorithms.
  - effie 11y ago
    > I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN This bothers me too. I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. Why? Was it because they violated some rule, or was it because they were unpopular opinion? I have no way to know. This is the largest problem with HN I can see.
    - yorwba 11y ago
      > I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. You mean they were so faded that the text merged with the background? Highlighting it with the mouse usually works for me in this case.
pixl97 11y ago
Dislike/down votes have there own for of abuses such as vote brigades. I'm pretty sure there is not an easy answer to this problem.
- Shog9 11y ago
  So, this - the pile-on voting - is something folks get really frustrated about. Every system I've ever used that allows down-ranking has these regular screeds from one side or another about how the system is being ruined by gangs of like-minded voters blindly censoring dissent. And for sure, it happens. And sometimes discourse suffers for it: good arguments get buried instead of being heard. Then again, there are much worse things than getting your argument buried on the Internet. And Twitter has some of best examples of this... People being harassed, doxed, threatened, driven out of their jobs, their homes, their communities... All over <= 140 characters that some brigade didn't like and couldn't just downvote. In a system mostly optimized for pithy one-liners, I'd argue it's a pretty serious defect that a bad joke can so easily escape the bounds of its intended audience and any semblance of context and cost you your reputation. But it appears that's what we've ended up with... Twitter's userbase has a fine tradition of building social conventions to paper over the deficiencies of the system. In this case, they've reinvented the pillory to replace the hated censor.
- drostie 11y ago
  Well, maybe. I would instead say that the rapid churn of social networks is a "reincarnation"-type solution to the problem. Fry's leaving of Twitter is precisely the answer to the problem. To see why, let's focus on what the problem actually is: we're social animals who crave authentic connection with others, not just to hear but to be heard. We can't just be passive consumers of news but wish to comment on it and be heard and replied to and have meaningful discussion. The problem is that a voting bloc systematically muffles some peoples' speech, ostracising them from the community due to their disagreement -- but then the community becomes an echochamber and fails to satisfy our needs for diversity. One solution to this has been randomization -- think Omegle etc. -- which works but encourages a different sort of inauthenticity due to anonymity. Another has been the Reddit/LiveJournal model: make it easy to spawn new communities when old ones die out. It's a lot less clear why, say, LiveJournal has mostly died, but probably it was a little too egotistical and people therefore as they grew up got bored with just sharing their own viewpoints without some sort of cohesive blogging narrative, and it just died. Somewhere there's some room for a solution which batches together communities of 50 people more-or-less randomly with some form of self-selection, and encourages them to talk about some sort of topic-of-the-day that would be relevant to all of their interests. In the meantime our solution is to join a social network and have fun until our community gets too large and we cannot get the attention we crave, at which point we'll swap to another and repeat the process again.
skybrian 11y ago
The problem with downvoting (at least simple versions) is that it allows separate communities to interfere which each others' communications. So, say you have hunters and animal-rights activists. They should be able to talk among themselves on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook without interference from the other side. You don't want one side to start downvoting the other side's posts into oblivion so they can't even talk among themselves. Downvoting works okay in places like Hacker News that are basically a single community with good moderation and some common values. It doesn't work in large-scale systems where many distinct communities have little in common beyond using the same social network. The average for a controversial post isn't going to tell you much. Perhaps some form of negative feedback would be helpful; an intelligent system could use it to avoid sharing posts into communities where they're not wanted. But the system could probably figure this out from people not upvoting or resharing things.
- derekp7 11y ago
  I've often thought the same thing, that the score you see should be based on your own voting history. Either based on you voting specifically, or agreeing / disagreeing with existing votes. Extend it even further by having posts from people that you normally agree with get highlighted even if they haven't had upvotes for the specific post. Just out of curiosity, how much of that data is available via HN's public API (or other large enough forum)? I'd like to see someone run some analysis on it to see if up/down votes do tend to cluster like this.
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    I know specifically of one community that tracks these metrics internally (Stack Overflow) and from which there is also a specific term for someone that mostly only downvotes things ("Vampire").
- Kalium 11y ago
  A lot of people believe it's their right to disrupt the communities of others. They call it "activism" or "advocacy" or "defending family values" or whatever the justification du jour is. It's all basically trying to stake a claim to the whole service as the territory of your tribe. I like the idea of reinforcing some separation, but I also fear it may be too late. A lot of people seem to derive joy from attacking the community of others, to the point where that's the focal point of some whole communities. Trying to stop this internecine fighting really is an attack on such communities...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

pdonis 11y ago

> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.

emp_zealoth 11y ago
And I personally think it is even more insidious. When I'm on facebook and see some extreme rightwing nutjob upvote ring I see what's going on On HN on a lot of downvoted commets it makes sense, they are poorly written and full of bs. But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt. It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)
- HCIdivision17 11y ago
  Each community specializes in something (which may be a bit tautological), but they do not do so well in the other things, too. So when I see some sort of political post on HN, I go in knowing it's going to be a little bit pants. Probably not terrible, probably a bit noisy as an echochamber, but certainly not what this community is good at. By contrast, if there's a bug writeup for how a screen redraw glitch was fixed by bitfiddling, well, that's the cake I came here for.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  > But every time there is a little more political and/or contentious issue on all I see is Political Correctness police mercilessly downvoting and flagkillig anything that dares to even doubt. Yes. > It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity) Let me add a little detail here for non-Europeans. "Far right" in some western European countries has come to mean about Obama-ish politics (health insurance for all instead of government-pays-everything-for-everybody like those contries have today.) As emp_zealoth points out this constant framing of anything that isn't way left and politically correct as "brown" and "extreme right" is now starting to backlash. People starts to question mainstream media and conservative/right wing media/pro Israel groups/conservative political parties seems to see a surge in readers/participation.
  - bitwize 11y ago
    It so happens that Western Europe has settled on a political system or set of systems which aren't perfect, but basically work well for everybody. Europeans have much less "stuff" than Americans, but when it comes to the basics -- health, education, public infrastructure, in some cases even housing -- everybody, rich and poor, has more or less equal access. America, by contrast, has got its shit so not in one sock that despite vast increases in productivity, the vast bulk of the excess wealth has gone to the 1%, with the remaining classes not much better off than they were 30 or 40 years ago. And how healthy you can expect to be is positively correlated with how rich you are. So when people say that America is a two party system: a right-wing corporatist party and a far-right-wing corporatist party, they're not blowing smoke. They're reckoning from a different origin than you. Apparently, relative to your political origin, sane policies are considered "way left and politically correct".
cJ0th 11y ago
> 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes. I'd say that even though upvotes and downvotes are somewhat helpful it is the mentality that differentiates HN from other communities most significantly. We can't outsmart human stupidity with technology. Sure, we have loads of people who want to game HN to push their own agendas but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view. There is nothing wrong wrong with, say, fighting for animal rights. But the moment you consider yourself an animal rights activist you're very likely to give up common sense and the ability to value any input that doesn't conform with your peers' opinion. Basically you become a one-dimensional character. Pleas note I used the word "likely." I am not ruling out that there are open-minded animal rights activists!
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  > but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view. No. Try posting anything here that opposes the groupthink. You'll get the downvote hammer used against you very quickly.
  - blakeyrat 11y ago
    This is one of the few tech sites where you can post something positive about Microsoft and not get moderated into oblivion. I agree that there's some "groupthink" going on here, but it's not nearly as bad as any other sites I've used.

Outdoorsman 11y ago

I don't use Twitter, but I agree with your point that crowd-sourced opinion, without constraints--the "dislike" option you offer, for instance--often produces a questionable consensus... Consider 1} Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer." Only somewhat whimsical with more than a bit of truth to it...implying that if you post something without much merit someone will be along shortly to set you straight... Unchecked commentary allows a "conversation" to run headlong...speculation...rumors...gossip... We all have different preferences for entertainment I guess...I prefer thoughtful sources... 1} https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

EvanPlaice 11y ago
Awesome. I've never heard it referred to as Cunninham's Law but I've used this a lot. People are overly concerned with being 'correct' all the time. Sometimes I'll talk out of my ass and pick a side on a topic I know little about because usually thr person who knows more will either confirm or correct my assumptions. It's a surprisingly useful tool to learn in-depth knowledge from others on just about any topic. You just have to be careful not to over use it as blind skepticism has a tendency to piss people off.

inanutshellus 11y ago

> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. FWIW, this is coming very soon to FB in the form of "reactions" rather than a simple "dislike" feature. http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/27/facebook-reactions-launch-soon/ http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/27/facebook-reactions-launch...

humanrebar 11y ago
Does that feature allow negative feedback? A frown for bad news is positive feedback. I'm concerned that all reactions might be treated as good reactions. That is, that there is no way to politely disapprove. Does anyone have any more details on this?
- Nelson69 11y ago
  The genius of it all is there is no 'hate' or 'dislike' button. It only allows 'positive' or no results. I suspect facebook and company will come up with a solution to the problem of how do you indicate that you saw something without commenting when it's not socially acceptable to 'like' it. For example a funeral announcement, you don't want to 'like' it but you want to say 'thank you' or something yet you might not want to comment. A real dislike or hate button would simply result in a lower signal/noise ratio. Maybe new types of bullying where lot's of people 'hate' on somebody.
greggman 11y ago
It's already been shipping for a while. 3-4 weeks?

fweespeech 11y ago

> My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date. Scalable agreement systems where large numbers of users agree X is good, then X is not spam. > Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. Reddit clearly functions in such a manner [as does HN]. Twitter / Facebook hide this but fundamentally its the same concept and it is largely ineffective for what your goal is [publicizing useful discussion, including disagreements]. We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.

humanrebar 11y ago
> We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately. Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the various algorithms.
- effie 11y ago
  > I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN This bothers me too. I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. Why? Was it because they violated some rule, or was it because they were unpopular opinion? I have no way to know. This is the largest problem with HN I can see.
  - yorwba 11y ago
    > I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. You mean they were so faded that the text merged with the background? Highlighting it with the mouse usually works for me in this case.

pixl97 11y ago

Dislike/down votes have there own for of abuses such as vote brigades. I'm pretty sure there is not an easy answer to this problem.

Shog9 11y ago
So, this - the pile-on voting - is something folks get really frustrated about. Every system I've ever used that allows down-ranking has these regular screeds from one side or another about how the system is being ruined by gangs of like-minded voters blindly censoring dissent. And for sure, it happens. And sometimes discourse suffers for it: good arguments get buried instead of being heard. Then again, there are much worse things than getting your argument buried on the Internet. And Twitter has some of best examples of this... People being harassed, doxed, threatened, driven out of their jobs, their homes, their communities... All over <= 140 characters that some brigade didn't like and couldn't just downvote. In a system mostly optimized for pithy one-liners, I'd argue it's a pretty serious defect that a bad joke can so easily escape the bounds of its intended audience and any semblance of context and cost you your reputation. But it appears that's what we've ended up with... Twitter's userbase has a fine tradition of building social conventions to paper over the deficiencies of the system. In this case, they've reinvented the pillory to replace the hated censor.
drostie 11y ago
Well, maybe. I would instead say that the rapid churn of social networks is a "reincarnation"-type solution to the problem. Fry's leaving of Twitter is precisely the answer to the problem. To see why, let's focus on what the problem actually is: we're social animals who crave authentic connection with others, not just to hear but to be heard. We can't just be passive consumers of news but wish to comment on it and be heard and replied to and have meaningful discussion. The problem is that a voting bloc systematically muffles some peoples' speech, ostracising them from the community due to their disagreement -- but then the community becomes an echochamber and fails to satisfy our needs for diversity. One solution to this has been randomization -- think Omegle etc. -- which works but encourages a different sort of inauthenticity due to anonymity. Another has been the Reddit/LiveJournal model: make it easy to spawn new communities when old ones die out. It's a lot less clear why, say, LiveJournal has mostly died, but probably it was a little too egotistical and people therefore as they grew up got bored with just sharing their own viewpoints without some sort of cohesive blogging narrative, and it just died. Somewhere there's some room for a solution which batches together communities of 50 people more-or-less randomly with some form of self-selection, and encourages them to talk about some sort of topic-of-the-day that would be relevant to all of their interests. In the meantime our solution is to join a social network and have fun until our community gets too large and we cannot get the attention we crave, at which point we'll swap to another and repeat the process again.

skybrian 11y ago

The problem with downvoting (at least simple versions) is that it allows separate communities to interfere which each others' communications. So, say you have hunters and animal-rights activists. They should be able to talk among themselves on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook without interference from the other side. You don't want one side to start downvoting the other side's posts into oblivion so they can't even talk among themselves. Downvoting works okay in places like Hacker News that are basically a single community with good moderation and some common values. It doesn't work in large-scale systems where many distinct communities have little in common beyond using the same social network. The average for a controversial post isn't going to tell you much. Perhaps some form of negative feedback would be helpful; an intelligent system could use it to avoid sharing posts into communities where they're not wanted. But the system could probably figure this out from people not upvoting or resharing things.

derekp7 11y ago
I've often thought the same thing, that the score you see should be based on your own voting history. Either based on you voting specifically, or agreeing / disagreeing with existing votes. Extend it even further by having posts from people that you normally agree with get highlighted even if they haven't had upvotes for the specific post. Just out of curiosity, how much of that data is available via HN's public API (or other large enough forum)? I'd like to see someone run some analysis on it to see if up/down votes do tend to cluster like this.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  I know specifically of one community that tracks these metrics internally (Stack Overflow) and from which there is also a specific term for someone that mostly only downvotes things ("Vampire").
Kalium 11y ago
A lot of people believe it's their right to disrupt the communities of others. They call it "activism" or "advocacy" or "defending family values" or whatever the justification du jour is. It's all basically trying to stake a claim to the whole service as the territory of your tribe. I like the idea of reinforcing some separation, but I also fear it may be too late. A lot of people seem to derive joy from attacking the community of others, to the point where that's the focal point of some whole communities. Trying to stop this internecine fighting really is an attack on such communities...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]