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Since the election I've been spending time on HN and to a lesser extent Twitter. Every time I visit Twitter I find myself instinctively reaching for the downvot

by inimino 10y ago

Since the election I've been spending time on HN and to a lesser extent Twitter. Every time I visit Twitter I find myself instinctively reaching for the downvote button, but there isn't one. About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling attention to the very thing you disapprove of. One of the absolute best features of HN is the downvote button and the way it is implemented. Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. A community that lets anyone join has to work hard to maintain a high standard. Downvotes don't kick people out, but they kick bad content off. Twitter has nothing like this, so the worst content gets the most attention. You can choose who you follow but users get no negative feedback on inappropriate tweets. So the norms shift towards whatever creates engagement, which is often outrage, fear, and strongly negative emotional content, with or without any rational foundation. If Twitter wants engaging and constructive dialog, they need a way to take out the trash. Unfortunately, Twitter's problem is that their potential for social good and their potential for revenue may never align. Since they are failing at turning a profit, it is unsurprising that they seem to be giving no consideration whatsoever to social responsibility.

roystonvassey 10y ago
+1. I spent a considerable amount of time on Twitter between August and November of this year. I quit cold turkey primarily because of the widespread negativity. Plus, its endless stream of tweets had a certain cheap novelty factor that coaxes you to spend more time on it than is warranted or necessary. HN and Reddit, to some extent, mitigate this in just the way I want. I'd be interested to hear about what are the reasons and ways people find Twitter useful/interesting.
- inimino 10y ago
  In contrast with HN, I find the most salient characteristic of Twitter is that negativity. In the days after the election I started referring to it as the national amygdala. It just became an echo chamber for fear. I mostly solved it by ruthlessly unfollowing people who are just venting their emotions and not engaging in critical thought. I made up for it by following people I disagree with and randomly following people that are followed by people I respect. The thing I like about Twitter is who you can follow. Where else can you engage with Obama, Trump, etc. in a public forum? Without the big name political users, the press, the public intellectuals, Twitter would have nothing. The way the big shots are effectively equal to ordinary users is very democratic. I can @ the POTUS and at least in theory get a reply. There's nothing else out there that enables that kind of communication. It's a shame that Twitter has done so little with so much. Think of the great newspapers of the past and how seriously many of them took their civic responsibility, and how they crowed about it in their editorial pages. They understood their role in society and the responsibility that came with the power they had. Yet here Twitter finds itself in possession of an unprecendented opportunity and they totally squander it. Completely oblivious to their social responsibility, they chase after ad dollars, and even there they fail.
  - Mathnerd314 10y ago
    The problem IMO is the limits. Humans can only read so many tweets and follow so many people. Beyond Dunbar's number (150 - 1500 depending on selectivity) they just blur into a big mess. Twitter's added some tools for curation (likes, user lists) but they aren't really powerful enough to filter tweets in real-time. They need something like Reddit's automod or a machine-learning filter. The point of Twitter & other social media is empowering the user; they can encourage community members to step up and take civic responsibility, but Twitter's responsibility as such is to provide the platform rather than to run the show. I guess they could openly declare Twitter to be part of the DNC platform, but that would lose a ton of users (although not so much in terms of content). They're better off following a policy similar to Facebook of attempted neutrality.
IgorPartola 10y ago
As a counter argument I present Reddit, which as a downcote button but is even more notorious for its abusive communities. Is it possible that HN is just more heavily represented by mature people who tend to communicate better than average and the Magic isn't really in the downvote algorithm?
- kbart 10y ago
  Yes. I believe, users are they key. I don't know many online communities, where asking for "original, peer reviewed paper" just to prove your point is common.
- inimino 10y ago
  I should have mentioned: yes, the community is key. However the technology and the community together create the system. If the technology fails to support the community norms then the makeup of the community itself will shift. Once the elves start leaving middle-earth, it's difficult to recover. Twitter is a little different because of its scale and the nature of its social graph. HN is a big room where everyone hears everyone else, Twitter is a giant switchboard where you plug in to choose your own mix. Reddit seems to be something else, but I don't participate there so I don't know much. Absolutely you are right that HN has a more mature mix of participants, but how does that situation continue? It cannot be solely by the direct efforts of the admins, however heroic, because the site is already too big for that. The technical Magic has to complement the characteristics of the community.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
grzm 10y ago
Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. I haven't seen this mentioned before, nor does it match with my observations of behavior on the site, though I admit the calculations of how down/up votes contribute to dimming is not transparent. Do you have a reference of where the relative weighting of up vs down votes is discussed?
- inimino 10y ago
  Sorry, I don't. And I imagine that discussing the details in public would just create more work for the admins and limit their options for tweaking it; probably more trouble than it would be worth to make it transparent. Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst content just disappears. This is the best possible outcome for things that you just don't want to see. Of course there are community norms about what gets downvoted and so it works as well as it does partly because we have a pretty good crowd here that values rational, constructive discussion. The second-order effect is that people don't post things that are going to get downvoted, and even delete or edit posts in response to downvoting. This is the dominant effect and the main reason why the system works so well, because really toxic stuff just doesn't get posted very often. The users that don't care about downvotes can still get banned. The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. They are inherently democratic. They also scale, which direct moderation obviously does not.
  - grzm 10y ago
    I agree that it would be more trouble than it's worth to make all of the algorithms open. It's minor, but I think the effect you're seeing can work just as well without differential weighting of up and down votes. The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. Agreed!
    - inimino 10y ago
the8472 10y ago
The problem with that is that twitter is a single platform with different communities. Implementing downvotes would mean that group A could just downvote posts of group B and vice versa. If downvotes weigh heavier than upvotes then even small groups could bury larger groups into oblivion. Add in sockpuppets and it gets worse. I don't think users attempting to moderate others is a solution. It would reduce the diversity of opinions. The largest group would just push out unpopular opinions. Instead you need tools that allows users to give themselves peace without punishing others. Maybe with the help of the followed/followers, i.e. some assistance from the social graph.
- inimino 10y ago
  Indeed. I didn't go into this level of detail, but this would clearly be a different problem than what we have on HN, where downvoting enforces norms across the whole community. Twitter is exactly as you said, a group of (overlapping) communities sharing a platform. We all see the same comments on HN, but on Twitter everyone has their own feed. Downvoting on Twitter would need to have very different characteristics for the reasons you mention. On the other hand, you actually do need users to moderate other users if you want to maintain a civil community. The alternatives are heavy moderation, which doesn't scale and introduces an institutional bias, or a free-for-all, where emotion drowns out thought, which is roughly where Twitter is today. I absolutely agree the social graph should be leveraged. What if downvotes only by people you follow affect your feed? You already see retweets only from people you follow, so the idea that your followees influence what you see is part of the platform today. This just extends that influence into the negative direction. Posters absolutely need to see the downvotes they are getting, the point of the feature is to moderate behavior, not just to create a filter bubble. Obviously it's not a trivial issue and rolling out new features at Twitter's scale isn't easy either. However I'm pretty confident, with all the engineering talent they have, they could make progress if it was actually a priority.
cmod 10y ago
I found "resetting" my timeline to be helpful. Post-election the entire Twitterverse felt like an indignation machine, but then I realized it was a machine I had made. This Chrome extension worked perfectly for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-unfollow/mmbbkpclbfmdacknjehonbfcilcfnkmb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-unfollow/m... I've unfollowed everyone (eight years worth of following!), and have been slowly rebuilding the timeline. Strangely cathartic, and the FOMO fades quickly. It's also nice to start from zero again, rebuilding your interests and filling your universe with thoughtful people in a deliberate and considered way. I wish more social networks made un-collecting as intuitive and organic as following/collecting.
pjc50 10y ago
Unfollow is the right answer! Twitter is somewhere where there is no "forum" or "topic", you have to build your own out of people you find benefit from following. If someone's posting stuff you consider bad, then don't follow them. You control the quality of your twitter feed. Big trending hashtags are always going to have a large proportion of garbage in. Report the spam and pick out the gems with RT; it's even possible to make friends this way. I don't think it's actually appropriate to just decide what random people who haven't @-ed you and are talking among themselves is inappropriate. If it's one person harassing another, then sure step in and/or report. The big problem is when a celebrity turns their followers on someone.

by inimino 10y ago

roystonvassey 10y ago

+1. I spent a considerable amount of time on Twitter between August and November of this year. I quit cold turkey primarily because of the widespread negativity. Plus, its endless stream of tweets had a certain cheap novelty factor that coaxes you to spend more time on it than is warranted or necessary. HN and Reddit, to some extent, mitigate this in just the way I want. I'd be interested to hear about what are the reasons and ways people find Twitter useful/interesting.

inimino 10y ago
In contrast with HN, I find the most salient characteristic of Twitter is that negativity. In the days after the election I started referring to it as the national amygdala. It just became an echo chamber for fear. I mostly solved it by ruthlessly unfollowing people who are just venting their emotions and not engaging in critical thought. I made up for it by following people I disagree with and randomly following people that are followed by people I respect. The thing I like about Twitter is who you can follow. Where else can you engage with Obama, Trump, etc. in a public forum? Without the big name political users, the press, the public intellectuals, Twitter would have nothing. The way the big shots are effectively equal to ordinary users is very democratic. I can @ the POTUS and at least in theory get a reply. There's nothing else out there that enables that kind of communication. It's a shame that Twitter has done so little with so much. Think of the great newspapers of the past and how seriously many of them took their civic responsibility, and how they crowed about it in their editorial pages. They understood their role in society and the responsibility that came with the power they had. Yet here Twitter finds itself in possession of an unprecendented opportunity and they totally squander it. Completely oblivious to their social responsibility, they chase after ad dollars, and even there they fail.
- Mathnerd314 10y ago
  The problem IMO is the limits. Humans can only read so many tweets and follow so many people. Beyond Dunbar's number (150 - 1500 depending on selectivity) they just blur into a big mess. Twitter's added some tools for curation (likes, user lists) but they aren't really powerful enough to filter tweets in real-time. They need something like Reddit's automod or a machine-learning filter. The point of Twitter & other social media is empowering the user; they can encourage community members to step up and take civic responsibility, but Twitter's responsibility as such is to provide the platform rather than to run the show. I guess they could openly declare Twitter to be part of the DNC platform, but that would lose a ton of users (although not so much in terms of content). They're better off following a policy similar to Facebook of attempted neutrality.

IgorPartola 10y ago

As a counter argument I present Reddit, which as a downcote button but is even more notorious for its abusive communities. Is it possible that HN is just more heavily represented by mature people who tend to communicate better than average and the Magic isn't really in the downvote algorithm?

kbart 10y ago
Yes. I believe, users are they key. I don't know many online communities, where asking for "original, peer reviewed paper" just to prove your point is common.
inimino 10y ago
I should have mentioned: yes, the community is key. However the technology and the community together create the system. If the technology fails to support the community norms then the makeup of the community itself will shift. Once the elves start leaving middle-earth, it's difficult to recover. Twitter is a little different because of its scale and the nature of its social graph. HN is a big room where everyone hears everyone else, Twitter is a giant switchboard where you plug in to choose your own mix. Reddit seems to be something else, but I don't participate there so I don't know much. Absolutely you are right that HN has a more mature mix of participants, but how does that situation continue? It cannot be solely by the direct efforts of the admins, however heroic, because the site is already too big for that. The technical Magic has to complement the characteristics of the community.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

grzm 10y ago

Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. I haven't seen this mentioned before, nor does it match with my observations of behavior on the site, though I admit the calculations of how down/up votes contribute to dimming is not transparent. Do you have a reference of where the relative weighting of up vs down votes is discussed?

inimino 10y ago
Sorry, I don't. And I imagine that discussing the details in public would just create more work for the admins and limit their options for tweaking it; probably more trouble than it would be worth to make it transparent. Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst content just disappears. This is the best possible outcome for things that you just don't want to see. Of course there are community norms about what gets downvoted and so it works as well as it does partly because we have a pretty good crowd here that values rational, constructive discussion. The second-order effect is that people don't post things that are going to get downvoted, and even delete or edit posts in response to downvoting. This is the dominant effect and the main reason why the system works so well, because really toxic stuff just doesn't get posted very often. The users that don't care about downvotes can still get banned. The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. They are inherently democratic. They also scale, which direct moderation obviously does not.
- grzm 10y ago
  I agree that it would be more trouble than it's worth to make all of the algorithms open. It's minor, but I think the effect you're seeing can work just as well without differential weighting of up and down votes. The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. Agreed!
  - inimino 10y ago

the8472 10y ago

The problem with that is that twitter is a single platform with different communities. Implementing downvotes would mean that group A could just downvote posts of group B and vice versa. If downvotes weigh heavier than upvotes then even small groups could bury larger groups into oblivion. Add in sockpuppets and it gets worse. I don't think users attempting to moderate others is a solution. It would reduce the diversity of opinions. The largest group would just push out unpopular opinions. Instead you need tools that allows users to give themselves peace without punishing others. Maybe with the help of the followed/followers, i.e. some assistance from the social graph.

inimino 10y ago
Indeed. I didn't go into this level of detail, but this would clearly be a different problem than what we have on HN, where downvoting enforces norms across the whole community. Twitter is exactly as you said, a group of (overlapping) communities sharing a platform. We all see the same comments on HN, but on Twitter everyone has their own feed. Downvoting on Twitter would need to have very different characteristics for the reasons you mention. On the other hand, you actually do need users to moderate other users if you want to maintain a civil community. The alternatives are heavy moderation, which doesn't scale and introduces an institutional bias, or a free-for-all, where emotion drowns out thought, which is roughly where Twitter is today. I absolutely agree the social graph should be leveraged. What if downvotes only by people you follow affect your feed? You already see retweets only from people you follow, so the idea that your followees influence what you see is part of the platform today. This just extends that influence into the negative direction. Posters absolutely need to see the downvotes they are getting, the point of the feature is to moderate behavior, not just to create a filter bubble. Obviously it's not a trivial issue and rolling out new features at Twitter's scale isn't easy either. However I'm pretty confident, with all the engineering talent they have, they could make progress if it was actually a priority.

cmod 10y ago

I found "resetting" my timeline to be helpful. Post-election the entire Twitterverse felt like an indignation machine, but then I realized it was a machine I had made. This Chrome extension worked perfectly for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-unfollow/mmbbkpclbfmdacknjehonbfcilcfnkmb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-unfollow/m... I've unfollowed everyone (eight years worth of following!), and have been slowly rebuilding the timeline. Strangely cathartic, and the FOMO fades quickly. It's also nice to start from zero again, rebuilding your interests and filling your universe with thoughtful people in a deliberate and considered way. I wish more social networks made un-collecting as intuitive and organic as following/collecting.

pjc50 10y ago

Unfollow is the right answer! Twitter is somewhere where there is no "forum" or "topic", you have to build your own out of people you find benefit from following. If someone's posting stuff you consider bad, then don't follow them. You control the quality of your twitter feed. Big trending hashtags are always going to have a large proportion of garbage in. Report the spam and pick out the gems with RT; it's even possible to make friends this way. I don't think it's actually appropriate to just decide what random people who haven't @-ed you and are talking among themselves is inappropriate. If it's one person harassing another, then sure step in and/or report. The big problem is when a celebrity turns their followers on someone.