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>The same thing happens on Stack Overflow. On both sites I've use Ublock Origin to block all scores. All of them. [...] But, I honestly believe the world would

by jasode 6y ago

>The same thing happens on Stack Overflow. On both sites I've use Ublock Origin to block all scores. All of them. [...] But, I honestly believe the world would be a much better place without this gamification and I believe that HN and Stack Overflow and Reddit and all the rest are acting irresponsibly by having these features. Not sure if you're talking more more about "user profile scores" vs "comment scores" but I'll speak about the usefulness of upvotes/downvotes: it helps readers save time by seeing the most likely interesting reply first. E.g. Stackoverflow would be much less useful if I couldn't rely on "wisdom of the crowd" to rank the various answers on my behalf. Usually, the best answers are at the top and the worst buggy answers are at the bottom. I lived through the old computer discussion forums without scores such as USENET, Compuserve, etc, and the lack of ranking wasted more of my reading time than Reddit/HN. In the marketplace of ideas, discussion forums with scoring/ranking work better when contributors are anonymous because you can't rely on non-text signals such as reputation/integrity/competency. You don't need scoring when every participant's identity is known such as Slack channel of business colleagues. Hopefully, the previous bar for getting hired in the first place at the company means one is typing worthwhile things for coworkers to read.

CuriouslyC 6y ago
In most cases downvotes quickly degenerate into a way for toxic people to punish those that disagree with them. Upvotes can work, but they tend to result in people showing support for people they like, more so than ideas. Personally, I think having a limited number of upvotes based on how many upvotes you've received, and allowing users to flag posts for moderator attention is the least toxic setup that still works.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  I would like a system whereby the individual users likes and interests are used to weight everything. What we have now everywhere is basically a "majority of the moment" sorting and censoring the comments for me. I don't know who that really serves. If the system served me, I wouldn't have to see comments from some whackadoo who feels offended because I wrote about laughing at a cop for not wearing a mask in a crowded retail establishment where everybody else was wearing them. In my preferred system, comments from people I've upvoted in the past (and people they've upvoted in the past, and so on...) would appear more highly ranked than random nobodies. Likewise, if I've downvoted someone in the past, their comments would be ranked very low and might not appear at all if I've downvoted them enough. This is more like real life, where people generally only hang around other people who are agreeable to their world view instead of surrounding themselves with disagreeable folks. I think a system that separates people could work wonders for social media. Let all the racists hang out together. Let all the whackadoos and Karens hang out together. What do I care?
  - quicklime 6y ago
    In real life, if you've got extreme racist views, you can go hang out with other racists. But to find these like-minded racists, you'll have to churn through lots of potential racists - who may often turn out to actually be anti-racist - to find your group to hang out with. In the process of doing so, a lot of people are going to question why it is that so many people dislike their racist views. And the ones that stick through it are going to know that they hold pretty extreme views relative to the rest of society. In contrast, the existing social media platforms have a way of making it feel like you're right, and a lot of people are supporting you (doesn't matter whether it's 1% of society, or 99%). Inside your filter bubble, you're not an extremist, and you don't have to encounter very many anti-racists on your search for like-minded racists. When you do, you've got your fellow racist keyboard warriors backing you, and some people even enjoy getting into these arguments. I think the system you're proposing works well for hobbies and interests like tech or sports. If people who play football aren't aware of what's going on in the world of soccer, it doesn't really matter a great deal. But society - at least a democratic society that depends on informed voters - is worse off if a large number of people get together and encourage each other to think that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza store in Washington. tl;dr - because it encourages political polarization, which is bad for democracy
  - mercer 6y ago
    I suppose part of the reason why current systems don't do this is because I imagine it'd be quite a bit heavier on the servers to calculate these things for every individual user...
- 488643689 6y ago
  I think, in the end user driven " rapid content curation " is the problem itself. All toxic twists aside: The content we all need may not be the most comfortable in terms of how much time we need investing getting the info. I won't upvote content I haven't read, because it seems too long, or worse I will upvote the content for the first paragraph only. Some things cannot be condensed into a comfortable chunk, but any voting system selects for that. Inherently. Because of the dopamine game, we adapt our expectations and then the content adapts to us. I doubt there will be any "self regulatory" approach to this, which works to our collective benefit. Same with free market bla, bla... All darwinian systems don't care about beauty, stability, right and good, and particularly, they don't care about human wellfare at all.
wott 6y ago
> E.g. Stackoverflow would be much less useful if I couldn't rely on "wisdom of the crowd" to rank the various answers on my behalf. Usually, the best answers are at the top and the worst buggy answers are at the bottom. It works rather well for StackOverflow because comments are not supposed to be a free-form discussion but only technical answers. (I guess we can agree that it is pretty respected.) > I lived through the old computer discussion forums without scores such as USENET, Compuserve, etc, and the lack of ranking wasted more of my reading time than Reddit/HN. That's not my feeling. I don't think ranking is working well on this kind of free-form discussion forums. Here on HN, I see more and more comments which, despite simply stating facts or being personal testimony, are greyed out. I cannot even figure out a possible reason (I am not looking for a reason I would agree with, just any kind of reason, of mechanics): they are not opinionated in a way or another, they are not part of a heated sub-thread, nothing. I just don't understand what goes on. As far as I am concerned, I for example avoid like plague any post or thread that talks about C. I've been a C programmer for 25 years this year, and I know that if I post something about C, it will get downvoted. Opinionated, non-opinionated, based on my decades of personal experience or not, it will be downvoted (and when we say 'it' gets downvoted, of course truth is it feels like 'I' get downvoted). So I try to remember not to comment on those threads or even better: not to open them and let for example the RESF or people who only used C in their introductory programming course at the university repeat their mantra on how dangerous it is, for the 2000th time of the year, in peace. If I post something semi-factual, semi-opinionated, I have to pray that it fits with the mood of the day of the readers of the day of the thread. The same comment could end up positive one day, negative another day depending on the crowd that has been attracted by the post title. Anyway, I know I can always make a joke to get back a few upvotes ("oh no, we are not Reddit", well yes we mostly are, we just dress a bit better when we come over here), after getting a few downvotes for a mostly factual statement :-) If I really wanted upvotes, I'd post a random Wikipedia article and get more upvotes in 4 hours than I'd otherwise get in a year (and the moderator would find that highly 'substantive') :->
- yesenadam 6y ago
  > I know that if I post something about C, it will get downvoted. You "avoid like plague any post or thread that talks about C" because you will lose points?! I suggest you try caring less or not at all about fake internet points and more about saying what's important to you. Post if you have a point worth reading, that contributes to HN and the conversation. Write as well as you can. That's all anyone can do.
greggman3 6y ago
There are plenty of questions where the most upvoted answers is wrong or out of date. I learned stop looking at the highest voted answer and instead read the answers themselves. Hiding the scores helps with that. I wasn't lead to an answer based on popularity. Maybe that's only true for S.O. because there's rarely more than a few answers. For a sight like HN/Reddit I think it might be ok if there was an upvote, no downvote, but the scores were not visible. You'd still get sorting of comments but you wouldn't get the "think like the rest of us or will downvote you" part of downvotes and you (or I) would not get the addictive dopamine hit from seeing my comment get voted up.
- jasode 6y ago
  >There are plenty of questions where the most upvoted answers is wrong or out of date. Of course -- because no system is perfect. Your proposed mechanics for designing discussion forums isn't perfect either. It's about tradeoffs. I don't expect perfection with SO's top-voted answers. Instead, I'm more realistic about the probabilities of the top answer being more useful than the bottom-most answer. Relying on probabilities is a much better usage of my limited time than reading every single answer from unvetted users for every single question on SO and mentally sorting them myself. >For a sight like HN/Reddit I think it might be ok if there was an upvote, no downvote, From a statistics perspective, the downvote mechanism helps with the spread[1] of the scores. Instead of just 2 states of 0 or +positive; you get 3 states of -negative, 0, +positive. That way, 0 and negative being won't be in the the same "undifferentiated category". Again, it's about tradeoffs instead of perfection. Your proposal tries to stop "toxic" downvotes at the expense of asking readers to wade through more undifferentiated comments (which is arguably another form of toxicity from the readers' perspective). (Arguably, there's a 4th category on HN which is "flagged" which goes beyond the downvote.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion

by jasode 6y ago

CuriouslyC 6y ago

In most cases downvotes quickly degenerate into a way for toxic people to punish those that disagree with them. Upvotes can work, but they tend to result in people showing support for people they like, more so than ideas. Personally, I think having a limited number of upvotes based on how many upvotes you've received, and allowing users to flag posts for moderator attention is the least toxic setup that still works.

wayneftw 6y ago
I would like a system whereby the individual users likes and interests are used to weight everything. What we have now everywhere is basically a "majority of the moment" sorting and censoring the comments for me. I don't know who that really serves. If the system served me, I wouldn't have to see comments from some whackadoo who feels offended because I wrote about laughing at a cop for not wearing a mask in a crowded retail establishment where everybody else was wearing them. In my preferred system, comments from people I've upvoted in the past (and people they've upvoted in the past, and so on...) would appear more highly ranked than random nobodies. Likewise, if I've downvoted someone in the past, their comments would be ranked very low and might not appear at all if I've downvoted them enough. This is more like real life, where people generally only hang around other people who are agreeable to their world view instead of surrounding themselves with disagreeable folks. I think a system that separates people could work wonders for social media. Let all the racists hang out together. Let all the whackadoos and Karens hang out together. What do I care?
- quicklime 6y ago
  In real life, if you've got extreme racist views, you can go hang out with other racists. But to find these like-minded racists, you'll have to churn through lots of potential racists - who may often turn out to actually be anti-racist - to find your group to hang out with. In the process of doing so, a lot of people are going to question why it is that so many people dislike their racist views. And the ones that stick through it are going to know that they hold pretty extreme views relative to the rest of society. In contrast, the existing social media platforms have a way of making it feel like you're right, and a lot of people are supporting you (doesn't matter whether it's 1% of society, or 99%). Inside your filter bubble, you're not an extremist, and you don't have to encounter very many anti-racists on your search for like-minded racists. When you do, you've got your fellow racist keyboard warriors backing you, and some people even enjoy getting into these arguments. I think the system you're proposing works well for hobbies and interests like tech or sports. If people who play football aren't aware of what's going on in the world of soccer, it doesn't really matter a great deal. But society - at least a democratic society that depends on informed voters - is worse off if a large number of people get together and encourage each other to think that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza store in Washington. tl;dr - because it encourages political polarization, which is bad for democracy
- mercer 6y ago
  I suppose part of the reason why current systems don't do this is because I imagine it'd be quite a bit heavier on the servers to calculate these things for every individual user...
488643689 6y ago
I think, in the end user driven " rapid content curation " is the problem itself. All toxic twists aside: The content we all need may not be the most comfortable in terms of how much time we need investing getting the info. I won't upvote content I haven't read, because it seems too long, or worse I will upvote the content for the first paragraph only. Some things cannot be condensed into a comfortable chunk, but any voting system selects for that. Inherently. Because of the dopamine game, we adapt our expectations and then the content adapts to us. I doubt there will be any "self regulatory" approach to this, which works to our collective benefit. Same with free market bla, bla... All darwinian systems don't care about beauty, stability, right and good, and particularly, they don't care about human wellfare at all.

wott 6y ago

> E.g. Stackoverflow would be much less useful if I couldn't rely on "wisdom of the crowd" to rank the various answers on my behalf. Usually, the best answers are at the top and the worst buggy answers are at the bottom. It works rather well for StackOverflow because comments are not supposed to be a free-form discussion but only technical answers. (I guess we can agree that it is pretty respected.) > I lived through the old computer discussion forums without scores such as USENET, Compuserve, etc, and the lack of ranking wasted more of my reading time than Reddit/HN. That's not my feeling. I don't think ranking is working well on this kind of free-form discussion forums. Here on HN, I see more and more comments which, despite simply stating facts or being personal testimony, are greyed out. I cannot even figure out a possible reason (I am not looking for a reason I would agree with, just any kind of reason, of mechanics): they are not opinionated in a way or another, they are not part of a heated sub-thread, nothing. I just don't understand what goes on. As far as I am concerned, I for example avoid like plague any post or thread that talks about C. I've been a C programmer for 25 years this year, and I know that if I post something about C, it will get downvoted. Opinionated, non-opinionated, based on my decades of personal experience or not, it will be downvoted (and when we say 'it' gets downvoted, of course truth is it feels like 'I' get downvoted). So I try to remember not to comment on those threads or even better: not to open them and let for example the RESF or people who only used C in their introductory programming course at the university repeat their mantra on how dangerous it is, for the 2000th time of the year, in peace. If I post something semi-factual, semi-opinionated, I have to pray that it fits with the mood of the day of the readers of the day of the thread. The same comment could end up positive one day, negative another day depending on the crowd that has been attracted by the post title. Anyway, I know I can always make a joke to get back a few upvotes ("oh no, we are not Reddit", well yes we mostly are, we just dress a bit better when we come over here), after getting a few downvotes for a mostly factual statement :-) If I really wanted upvotes, I'd post a random Wikipedia article and get more upvotes in 4 hours than I'd otherwise get in a year (and the moderator would find that highly 'substantive') :->

yesenadam 6y ago
> I know that if I post something about C, it will get downvoted. You "avoid like plague any post or thread that talks about C" because you will lose points?! I suggest you try caring less or not at all about fake internet points and more about saying what's important to you. Post if you have a point worth reading, that contributes to HN and the conversation. Write as well as you can. That's all anyone can do.

greggman3 6y ago

There are plenty of questions where the most upvoted answers is wrong or out of date. I learned stop looking at the highest voted answer and instead read the answers themselves. Hiding the scores helps with that. I wasn't lead to an answer based on popularity. Maybe that's only true for S.O. because there's rarely more than a few answers. For a sight like HN/Reddit I think it might be ok if there was an upvote, no downvote, but the scores were not visible. You'd still get sorting of comments but you wouldn't get the "think like the rest of us or will downvote you" part of downvotes and you (or I) would not get the addictive dopamine hit from seeing my comment get voted up.

jasode 6y ago
>There are plenty of questions where the most upvoted answers is wrong or out of date. Of course -- because no system is perfect. Your proposed mechanics for designing discussion forums isn't perfect either. It's about tradeoffs. I don't expect perfection with SO's top-voted answers. Instead, I'm more realistic about the probabilities of the top answer being more useful than the bottom-most answer. Relying on probabilities is a much better usage of my limited time than reading every single answer from unvetted users for every single question on SO and mentally sorting them myself. >For a sight like HN/Reddit I think it might be ok if there was an upvote, no downvote, From a statistics perspective, the downvote mechanism helps with the spread[1] of the scores. Instead of just 2 states of 0 or +positive; you get 3 states of -negative, 0, +positive. That way, 0 and negative being won't be in the the same "undifferentiated category". Again, it's about tradeoffs instead of perfection. Your proposal tries to stop "toxic" downvotes at the expense of asking readers to wade through more undifferentiated comments (which is arguably another form of toxicity from the readers' perspective). (Arguably, there's a 4th category on HN which is "flagged" which goes beyond the downvote.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion