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Binary social feedback systems often run into the same issues - people game the system and people use downvotes to disagree. There's no nuance in positive senti
by brownbat 7y ago
Binary social feedback systems often run into the same issues - people game the system and people use downvotes to disagree. There's no nuance in positive sentiments either - people conflate upvotes with reputation.
It makes me feel like early experiments with multi-variate moderation deserve a second look. I know that simpler systems generally increase engagement, that's probably why everyone (even Netflix) converged to a simple up / down model. But there might be simple ways to split out the types of feedback we're always worried about conflating. You could add little emoji or stickers below each post that are default grayed out, as an option instead of replying.
One of them could be a "this makes me angry because I disagree"-sad-thunderstorm sticker. Another could be spam. That approach would funnel downvotes into separately bins for spam, low effort, and controversial. That sorting could nudge the crowd into providing much more useful feedback. People wouldn't have to ask why they were downvoted.
Gaming would probably happen, but it'd be more diffuse. If there are multiple positive bins, not everyone is going to be gaming in the same way, they won't be comparable.
Allowing this to be customizable on each subreddit could allow for some really crazy experiments. The unpopular opinion reddit could create a user interface that actually encourages the sort of voting they want, as opposed to constantly complaining that people are voting incorrectly.
- xiphias2 7y agoWhat I would like to see is a system which is still binary, but the people that I personally upvote matters. Just as an example I just upvoted you and I would like to see your future comments, I care less about how many people are upvoting a content and care more about who upvoted it, and whether that person is selective to upvote constructive content only.
- davidivadavid 7y agoI've wondered for the longest time about the feasibility/consequences of having a recursive, private karma system (with decay). I upvote you, so I see your stuff, and more of the stuff you upvoted, and less of the stuff you downvoted. You can repeat the process recursively and add decay as you go further. Every user holds their own version of the karma network.
- Xeago 7y agoWhile I read this I tried modeling storage and query models for implementing such decaying recursive karma network. Not quite sure how, it felt hard. If someone knows how to do this, from an abstract perspective or from a systems implementation look, I’d greatly appreciate that! :)
- jakear 7y agoThat would be interesting. Might have to add it to the backlog of “cool things to look into implementing”. My main concern is if it would increase the echo-chamberyness of social media.
- davidivadavid 7y agoIt definitely would, but I don't feel concerned about it. I think it's an overrated "problem" that misunderstands what people fundamentally want (better ways of building tight communities online). The main problem I see with echo-chambers today is the culture war type of thing. I think there could be interesting solutions to that: based on the karma "distance", build clusters and adapt network topology so that you can only discover clusters that are at a finite distance. Minimize risks of conflict while letting people explore "fringe" ideas (for them).
- zenzen 7y agoYeah this seems like a way to perpetuate media bubbles.
- spencerflem 7y agoThe website Hubski (a fork of hackernews, but without the tech focus) has an interesting system where you follow people and whenever they upvote something it appears in your feed. I dont know how it would work on a bigger site, since there's few enough posts per day that you can reasonably sift through every single post, but it's a cool concept.
- draugadrotten 7y agoHey, that's a retweet.
- spencerflem 7y agoPretty much, it's a Twitter style feed with HN/Reddit style content (links + comments). https://hubski.com/primer https://hubski.com/primer
- xiphias2 7y agoHubski looks really cool, except this part: ,,Hubski is temporarily not accepting new users. Check back soon.''
- brownbat 7y agohttps://hubski.com/pub/425192 https://hubski.com/pub/425192 The trollbots and spammers beat us all there.
- sytelus 7y agoWhat you describe is chain-of-trust model and is very slippery slope. Twitter uses similar model (less emphasis on content, more emphasis on who says it). The result is that when a famous person tweets that he sneezed in the morning, that tweet will get thousand likes and probaby get viral. On the other hand, some nameless person tweets that he found astroid that will hit earth in next 10 hours, no one will notice. In my opinion, one the biggest short term application of AI/NLP would be to rank-by-content and moving away from variants of page-rank.
- fastball 7y agoAll ratings systems should be like psychological questionnaires, where have to respond to statements about the content with an "agreement-based" scale. For example, with Reddit/HN comments, you could have: "This commenter was polite." [strongly disagree | disagree | neutral | agree | strongly agree] "This comment backed up its assertions with sources." [...] "This comment was funny." [...] etc. etc.
- sytelus 7y agoI actually like StackOverflow model: If you downvote someone, both of you loose a karma! This helps make people judicious decision on when to use downvote, at least avoids it becoming "disagree" button. This is super important because otherwise people become afraid of expressing unpopular thoughts and the forums become echo chambers. Disagreements should be expressed by writing comments, not pressing buttons.