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> Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wi

by gunn 10y ago

> Only showing upvoted authors would only reinforce your personal echo chamber, see also: Tumblr. Certainly, if you just upvote left-wing and downvote right-wing or vice versa. But if you want to see something better you can get it by upvoting those authors that have valid points you disagree with too. I think currently some amount of upvoting happens because people want to amplify views they agree with even if they don't provide new insight. In the system I'm proposing, this incentive is gone because your votes affect what you see more of in the future, not what other people do.

creshal 10y ago
I'm still unconvinced, most people still self-filter, consciously or not. You already have this filter mechanism right now, in a coarser form, by picking the subreddits, twitter accounts, … you follow – and those you respond to. How'd you get the initial exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here you have the whole community pre-filtered for people who accept HN's comparatively heavy-handed moderation/censorship approach.
- gunn 10y ago
  Scroll to the bottom to see what you're missing out on, or open incognito for a neutral view. I guess the system could throw in some randomness if it's necessary. On reddit, I switch between sorting by top, new, and controversial to try to see different views. It's something but still crude. What would be great would being able to see comments as ranked for e.g. creshal. If someone's yearning for the good old days of civil, insightful commentary you could give them a link to that view. Also, how would /r/space posts look as ranked for/by an astronomer?
- pjc50 10y ago
  > high-quality content you disagree with I think we need to unpack this a lot more in order to work out what it might possibly look like. I mean, if it were truly high-quality wouldn't it change your view so that you agree with it? That's a gross oversimplification of course, but there is a real problem in that people's politics tends to proceed from their values, and there's a very fine line between being "challenged" and being grossly offended. Could a "high-quality" argument for genocide exist, or is that the sort of thing that should be vetoed because it's an unacceptable conclusion no matter what the logic? The only way to have a discussion with people with extremely different views is to go back and find out what points of moral convergence you do have. Or from what background people have developed their views. This is time-consuming, personal and doesn't scale, because it depends on digging to the individual privilege or trauma that embeds people's strongest views. The middle ground is probably something like the Economist, where I'm to the left of it but it's sufficient quality that that doesn't matter. They also avoid advocating for truly stupid things for tribal reasons, which causes most of the left/right noise problem.
rootusrootus 10y ago
In my opinion it is not really possible to have a good comments system when voting is simply up or down. The definition of up and down varies too much by person to really be all that useful for anything other than creating an effective echo chamber. I think we need easy, one-click ways of classifying a comment with a more specific assessment.
- gunn 10y ago
  That's just what this is trying to fix. Currently an up means 'I think this comment is good for everyone'. I'm saying it should mean 'this comment is good for me and people like me'. The one-click assessment would be closer to slashdot's 'interesting', 'insightful', 'funny' etc. approach, which could be an improvement but still runs into trouble because what is 'interesting' still varies too much between people. My idea is that as you continue to vote, you teach it what insightful means to you personally. I think it would mean I could avoid an echo-chamber of ideas because I could avoid being swept along by the status quo of group-think voting, and instead follow more thoughtful people. See my other reply to creshal for more thoughts about this.

by gunn 10y ago

creshal 10y ago

I'm still unconvinced, most people still self-filter, consciously or not. You already have this filter mechanism right now, in a coarser form, by picking the subreddits, twitter accounts, … you follow – and those you respond to. How'd you get the initial exposure to high-quality content you disagree with? HN is the only site where I run across right-wing content that (occasionally) isn't utter garbage, and even here you have the whole community pre-filtered for people who accept HN's comparatively heavy-handed moderation/censorship approach.

gunn 10y ago
Scroll to the bottom to see what you're missing out on, or open incognito for a neutral view. I guess the system could throw in some randomness if it's necessary. On reddit, I switch between sorting by top, new, and controversial to try to see different views. It's something but still crude. What would be great would being able to see comments as ranked for e.g. creshal. If someone's yearning for the good old days of civil, insightful commentary you could give them a link to that view. Also, how would /r/space posts look as ranked for/by an astronomer?
pjc50 10y ago
> high-quality content you disagree with I think we need to unpack this a lot more in order to work out what it might possibly look like. I mean, if it were truly high-quality wouldn't it change your view so that you agree with it? That's a gross oversimplification of course, but there is a real problem in that people's politics tends to proceed from their values, and there's a very fine line between being "challenged" and being grossly offended. Could a "high-quality" argument for genocide exist, or is that the sort of thing that should be vetoed because it's an unacceptable conclusion no matter what the logic? The only way to have a discussion with people with extremely different views is to go back and find out what points of moral convergence you do have. Or from what background people have developed their views. This is time-consuming, personal and doesn't scale, because it depends on digging to the individual privilege or trauma that embeds people's strongest views. The middle ground is probably something like the Economist, where I'm to the left of it but it's sufficient quality that that doesn't matter. They also avoid advocating for truly stupid things for tribal reasons, which causes most of the left/right noise problem.

rootusrootus 10y ago

In my opinion it is not really possible to have a good comments system when voting is simply up or down. The definition of up and down varies too much by person to really be all that useful for anything other than creating an effective echo chamber. I think we need easy, one-click ways of classifying a comment with a more specific assessment.

gunn 10y ago
That's just what this is trying to fix. Currently an up means 'I think this comment is good for everyone'. I'm saying it should mean 'this comment is good for me and people like me'. The one-click assessment would be closer to slashdot's 'interesting', 'insightful', 'funny' etc. approach, which could be an improvement but still runs into trouble because what is 'interesting' still varies too much between people. My idea is that as you continue to vote, you teach it what insightful means to you personally. I think it would mean I could avoid an echo-chamber of ideas because I could avoid being swept along by the status quo of group-think voting, and instead follow more thoughtful people. See my other reply to creshal for more thoughts about this.