8 ms·

this is why i think visible voting (likes, hearts, etc) ruined the internet. It creates teams, draws lines in the sand. Then teams with the most votes thinks th

this is why i think visible voting (likes, hearts, etc) ruined the internet. It creates teams, draws lines in the sand. Then teams with the most votes thinks that means it's in the right. Otherwise, you have to actually read each comment and think about whether you agree with it instead of lazily appealing to votes.

Avicebron 6y ago
Unfortunately I think intentionally or not the mental stimulus of "winning" - getting lots of likes and retweets, is baked into how these companies have very profitable business models. People feel like they are playing a game for social status, maybe one of the most primal human instincts and they tap into that to drive profit.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  It's also keeping people from rebelling against the companies (elites) gaining all the profits (I say this as a business owner). It's like not collaborating with another skateboarder or ecologist because they don't share the same political team as me. "Internet teams" is a complete mental construct, taking advantage of xenophobic, tribal tendencies we have innately to protect us in the physical world. I tend to lean towards low-tech anarchist and I have a lot in common with socialists, fascists, and jeffersonian-democrats (anti-federal govt, pro-working man), and even muslims where I'm against central banking or charging interest. But nobody could ever talk about it because "teams".
  - holler 6y ago
    I agree, the ranking algorithms should be based off genuine engagement in a discussion, not opaque votes or likes. I'm working on a new discussion site https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im, with the intent to foster open, frictionless, and accessible conversations with anyone, where the relevance is determined by other signals including activity. There are different issues to work around with that model but it more closely resembles how we interact irl (real world "vote" is usually just walking away).
    - Avicebron 6y ago
      I'm interested. When you mention activity do you mean something like "total active engagement on a post" or "how active is one particular user relative to others". Also is it your intention to maintain fully anonymous participation with or without moderation? Also one thing I think could be a cool feature would be a reddit style "subreddits" but created by users who then collectively decide what it's going to be about by their participation. Good work.
      - holler 6y ago
        Hey, thank you! By activity I mean chat activity in a given post. Right now the ranking algo for "hot" is based on how many people are chatting + decay time function. It's somewhat simplistic for now (still mvp), but I have ideas for other signals that could be used to determine how relevant a particular conversation is. It's certainly vulnerable to being gamed, but I think there are ways we could try to limit that, and filter out noise etc. One of my goals is to focus as much as possible on the conversation and build features around that. For instance instead of a "like" button, it could require a user to _write_ something relevant (just idea). I think the key is that we try new things, hopefully learn from ideas that have been tried elsewhere, and build a place for high-quality realtime conversations. The site does follow the twitter/IG/twitch model where it's a flat user(nest) hierarchy, but I have considered later enhancing it to allow multiple users to manage a single nest which would allow both community-led or single-entity led. Right now the goal is just to get mvp features and start getting feedback! So thank you :)
        thealienthing 6y ago
        Interesting. I wonder if you could factor in “views” for measuring activity, like how many people have visited a thread and for how long. It’s my understanding that most big websites are extremely interested in minutia like where someone spends most of their time on the page, where their cursor is etc. that may be a useful metric for determining engagement.
        6y ago
- intended 6y ago
  Why companies? When the net was young, it was programmers who put counters in front of content - the urge and obviousness to do so, is so banal and basic that the lack of a counter is comment worthy, not its presence. Imagine a pristine social network without any counter - how many seconds before one of us posts "I made a small change to the site, which looks like this". Metrics are such a basic extension of the programming mindset that without a corporations will being imposed to remove them, I cant imagine a site without a like counter of some sort. (Not that firms will remove them, but their absence can only be achieved by a force from above imposing its will on normal human nature.)
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Since you mention the early internet, some of the earliest websites I remember would have a 'number of visitors' counter usually in the footer. Which in and of itself is an early form of that validation you speak of. When you found a site with lots of visitors, it validated the site, made it seem more legitimate. And lots of early web site owners would react the same way to a new visitor to their page as a user reacts to a like today. Validation culture has always been in some ways a part of the internet. Even before the things I spoke of. But I agree though, today it's taken over too much of culture in general. Whereas back in the day, someone may be happy or excited, chances were it didn't affect their life much. Now people's entire lives and fortunes exist because of those validating likes.
- isoskeles 6y ago
  I think it even encourages reading the content. “Six hundred other morons ‘liked’ this comment so I might enjoy reading it.” Without that social proof, how do I figure out which comments are worthwhile and which are kooky bullshit? I’m being only partly sarcastic here, the social proof is real. But I find it interesting because on Reddit I’ll deliberately read downvoted comments, on YouTube I will not bother with anything below the top 10 presented to me, here I’ll read almost everything (obviously if the thread interests me).
NickGott 6y ago
Well, there's always 4chan, which is exactly what you just said. Not exactly a poster-boy for quality internet discussion. Also, I recommend https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ to remove metrics from twitter.
- praptak 6y ago
  4chan prioritizes active threads, which means a huge boost to trolling and content dumps.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    That's the thing about trying eliminate voting. If comments essentially serve as votes, you actually get the worse kind of filter - the way the filth rises to the top on Youtube comments for example (Youtube sorts by most commented even though it allows voting - so hateful stuff remains even when downvoted).
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      The best solution I've seen for this is to have a separate subforum for highly contentious discussions, and anything with more than a threshold number of comments per hour gets automatically moved there and flagged for moderator review. Then the moderator can move it back, delete it entirely or just leave it in the separate subforum so that interested parties can flame each other in the fire pit instead of out where everybody else hangs out.
- diarrhea 6y ago
  While you're right, I really do like 4chan. It doing away with any voting really creates a wholly different culture. It requires a completely different approach to reading it. Now, the people there are outcasts in one form or another, in real life or digitally. That can get you mixed results and tainted content, but the principle of how that 'forum' is set up I like a lot.
  - 6y ago
this_user 6y ago
Voting certainly has its problems, but the alternative is given trolls and spammers free reign. Not having any kind of selection mechanism may have worked in the past when the Internet was much smaller, and when the majority of people still cared about making quality posts. But those days are long gone. Even in its current state, I find Twitter borderline unusable, because > 95% of posts are worthless noise.
- staplers 6y ago
  You can have voting mechanisms without their results being visible. It isn't very transparent but social media is still curated and moderated by platforms regardless of "voting".
- ng12 6y ago
  I don't think the problem is with trolls and spammers necessarily, I think the problem is with scaling the community out. 4chan is the best example of this: the less populated, hobby-based boards are wonderfully useful resources and generally of much higher quality than similar communities on Reddit. Reddit is just too big and the clout-chasing inevitably infects smaller subs. The larger 4chan communities like /b/ and /pol/, on the other hand, are irredeemable cesspits compared to Reddit's default subs.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    I second this, I frequent the /lit/ (literature) board on 4chan and its really good. It's still quite irreverent but its good when studying philosophy, where it was always rebellious (e.g. Nietzsche's "God is Dead").
- praptak 6y ago
  It didn't work in the past. Usenet groups were like that and they got eaten by spammers and trolls.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  IMHO, that was more a result of the very high barrier to entry to get access to the internet, than its size. I still fantasize about creating a community with such a high barrier to entry today, but where it is done better than just making it depend on your technical chops and internet connections in the mid-nineteens.
TigeriusKirk 6y ago
Even semi-visible voting such as HN has creates bad incentives. The retweets/likes culture of twitter is orders of magnitude worse, though. People start chasing the likes, tailoring them to what people want to hear rather than genuine expression of thought.
badRNG 6y ago
It seems that the most harm is done when the voting system is used to accumulate clout/fame/social capital both on and off platform. Democratized voting systems on pseudonymous platforms can have a content curation effect while limiting this accumulation of social capital, as seen on Hacker News and Reddit. You don't see quite the same level of brands and people building their clout on say Reddit the way they do on Twitter. Conventional cultural leaders like politicians and celebrities don't dominate discourse on these platforms to the degree they do on Facebook and Twitter.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  no, but reddit has the same problem (but amplified IMO) where you self-censor out of fear of saying something unpopular and getting downvoted. It's even more conformist than twitter. Twitter doesn't have downvotes so its a little better in that regard. The common "EDIT: <<apology or excuse here>>" I saw on reddit screamed of insecurity instead of people standing their ground. That mentality is bad for young minds.
  - badRNG 6y ago
    I do agree that downvoting sometimes has a chilling effect on Reddit, but that doesn't seem relevant to the discussion on social capital accumulation and the domination of a platform by these traditionally socially powerful users, at least in the same way that other platforms are. The point was to discuss how Reddit, Hacker News, and other message boards utilizing pseudonymous voting are not monopolized by brands, celebrities, and businesses in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are. The discourse is still more egalitarian than the alternatives, and it isn't these traditional cultural leaders that dominate discussion on Reddit. This isn't to speak on issues of astroturfing, echo chambering, or misinformation, but these aren't relevant to the discussion, and aren't unique issues to Reddit.
    - devmunchies 6y ago
      I think its relevant. a consolidation of opinion (via self-censorship) also leads to a consolidation of products and choice, since alternative product and companies die due to unpopularity. For example I think reddit played a MASSIVE role in the rise of PC gaming in the last 5 years. It's more indirect, admittedly.
Guest42 6y ago
I also think it helps users to craft more genuine responses as opposed to those that get rewarded with votes.
catacombs 6y ago
A bit of irony with you mentioning this as this link received more than 400 points.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  I wouldn't call it irony. It proving my point, that we only interact with the popular posts.
  - catacombs 6y ago
    > I wouldn't call it irony. Correct. It's coincidental.
dilandau 6y ago
Exactly. Inconvenient facts or even just minority views get downvotes. Especially here on hn. If you are going to say something that disagrees with the general hn monoculture, you have to dress it up in the inimitable pseudo-intellectual rational style favored here. Only then do you stand a chance of making yourself heard.
joe_the_user 6y ago
Visible voting might have had some bad effects but I'd say you are basically wrong about it being any kind of fundamental problem. The early Internet had plenty of poison ("flame wars" of that era were the precursor to what we have now). The Internet hadn't solved it's how-to-get-along problem and it just expanded that situation as it became dominant and the "craziness from the Internet" managed to have more real world consequences. As other have mentioned, sorting by active thread turns comments into votes and make the least liked and most disagreeable comment stay visible. So the division between voted and not-voted systems isn't as great as one might imagine. The thing is; then and now, actual moderation is the situation that can solve this. Leadership in humans is sort of divided between attention-focusing behavior and rules-membership-enforcing behavior, both are fine as parts of society. We can see both things at play in online activity but most online forum create a unbalanced in favor of attention-focusing behavior and a certain ideology can this imbalance is great. It's not, it's a part of a rather sick society that America has wound up with, we wind-up literally on the verge of catastrophe from this.
munk-a 6y ago
We do have visible voting and accolades in real life - I wonder if the issue here is that visible voting and accolades along with a history of conduct perform aberrantly when coupled with (seemingly) anonymous identities. In real life people may be reluctant to try and gain fame by taking extreme viewpoints due to their concern over impacting their day-to-day well being - leaving only those fervent believers to tote the flag. Compare that to the internet where you can roll up a new handle and give something a go - maybe getting a lot of encouragement and accolades in a mostly risk-free manner. Whether what I stated above is an indication of a problem of the internet or a problem with the suppression of opinion in the real world is probably open to debate. But I do wonder if that's the reason we see such a rift in the tenor of discussion on the internet.
tayo42 6y ago
What happened to instagrams experiment with removing visible likes? I guess it went negatively in some way because i still have likes heh
dpcan 6y ago
Twitter is the worst with this as it ONLY has a heart. Even if you disagree, you click the heart to save it. There is no way to show another emotion and it desperately needs something like this, similar to Facebook. And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE. "Like" basically means I agree, but "mad" doesn't always mean I disagree. I can disagree with something and not have it make me "mad". I'm not sure what this emoji is, maybe it's just a thumbs down, but I think it's necessary.
- Smoosh 6y ago
  I think this reveals that Facebook don't care if you love it, hate it, or just find it interesting - all they care about is engagement.
- _-o-_ 6y ago
  > Even if you disagree, you click the heart to save it. There is actually a "bookmark" function that save tweet into a private list (as opposed to public list of likes). > And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE There are downvotes on HN. Do they really make this community better?
  - james-skemp 6y ago
    HN: I think yes. I maybe check HN a couple times a day, have never added a new item, but have posted comments. Due to this after however many years (Edit: almost 8 years) I don't have enough points to down vote. Like SO was at the beginning I think graduated access like this can definitely help a community. However, like any other gated community it's easy for the ones with high rep to form a bubble. I think what's prevented HN from turning into SO, Twitter, etcetera is that a) there are no real profile pages. The reason for coming here is to see what tech news has been shared. Sort of like subreddits, the driving content is a shared interest, not a personality. b) there's no profit motives at work. We're not customers (or data to sell), we're people with a shared interest. This is a sort of hobby project, with the 'benevolent dictator' coming by as needed, fixing titles and links, and letting us know about technical issues with the platform. c) anyone can upvote and see buried comments. I have the option enabled to see people who have been downvoted to gray text. Rarely do I think it's undeserved. If for some reason someone is getting buried for a legit comment usually there's a comment reply questioning the votes, by someone else, and clarifications are worked out. d) (I assume) a lot of lurkers who can't downvote, but can, and do, upvote. And there's probably other reasons. Which I guess means it's a combination of things, one of which is how downvoted are handled.
esperent 6y ago
Social media has become a whole lot better for me thanks to Ben Grosser's demetricator extensions. They even work on Firefox mobile. I use the Twitter and Facebook extensions. With the you can see that something has been liked/retweeted/shared, but no longer by how many people. https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/
hnick 6y ago
Vote-piling is so obvious on Reddit but it's more than that. On a personal level, even when the numbers are hidden from the public like on HN, it has a weird effect on me. It's nice to post something and get a bunch of upvotes, but (even though it doesn't really matter) just getting that single point drop to zero hurts so much more. I don't know if it's loss aversion or the idea that some random internet person dislikes me. I don't dwell on it, I'm notice it and move on, but I still get that little sinking feeling for some reason. Over time, just like a dog being trained we'll learn to conform to the consensus.
- zeroimpl 6y ago
  Yeah I don’t really understand downvoting on HN. If I see a grey post that looks well written and making reasonable arguments, I like to upvote. If people want to disagree they should reply rather than downvote. Edit: I don’t mean all down voting is bad - It’s good when people start making personal attacks - but just as often it seems to be used to suppress an unpopular viewpoint.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  It's pretty funny that I will a huge number of votes for a trivial factual correction and get no votes for what I'd consider insightful points. Not showing votes makes it easy for everyone to upvote these trivial factual corrections.
  - hnick 6y ago
    I think one reason for a vote is when someone was going to say something, but someone else already did so it's redundant to say it again - vote instead to show approval to the poster, or add weight to it where votes are public. It makes sense that simple corrections would so often fall into this category.
ALittleLight 6y ago
This project, subreply, was posted here recently. It's very much like Twitter without voting. I greatly enjoy it. https://subreply.com/about https://subreply.com/about
Thorentis 6y ago
Which raises a related issue of whether the number of likes/hearts can even be trusted. Given the positive feedback loop they create (posts with many likes are more likely to receive further likes), manipulation of these numbers can be used for influencing opinion and drawing the battle lines. I am highly suspicious of both Twitter and Reddit in this regard.

Avicebron 6y ago

Unfortunately I think intentionally or not the mental stimulus of "winning" - getting lots of likes and retweets, is baked into how these companies have very profitable business models. People feel like they are playing a game for social status, maybe one of the most primal human instincts and they tap into that to drive profit.

devmunchies 6y ago
It's also keeping people from rebelling against the companies (elites) gaining all the profits (I say this as a business owner). It's like not collaborating with another skateboarder or ecologist because they don't share the same political team as me. "Internet teams" is a complete mental construct, taking advantage of xenophobic, tribal tendencies we have innately to protect us in the physical world. I tend to lean towards low-tech anarchist and I have a lot in common with socialists, fascists, and jeffersonian-democrats (anti-federal govt, pro-working man), and even muslims where I'm against central banking or charging interest. But nobody could ever talk about it because "teams".
- holler 6y ago
  I agree, the ranking algorithms should be based off genuine engagement in a discussion, not opaque votes or likes. I'm working on a new discussion site https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im, with the intent to foster open, frictionless, and accessible conversations with anyone, where the relevance is determined by other signals including activity. There are different issues to work around with that model but it more closely resembles how we interact irl (real world "vote" is usually just walking away).
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    I'm interested. When you mention activity do you mean something like "total active engagement on a post" or "how active is one particular user relative to others". Also is it your intention to maintain fully anonymous participation with or without moderation? Also one thing I think could be a cool feature would be a reddit style "subreddits" but created by users who then collectively decide what it's going to be about by their participation. Good work.
    - holler 6y ago
      Hey, thank you! By activity I mean chat activity in a given post. Right now the ranking algo for "hot" is based on how many people are chatting + decay time function. It's somewhat simplistic for now (still mvp), but I have ideas for other signals that could be used to determine how relevant a particular conversation is. It's certainly vulnerable to being gamed, but I think there are ways we could try to limit that, and filter out noise etc. One of my goals is to focus as much as possible on the conversation and build features around that. For instance instead of a "like" button, it could require a user to _write_ something relevant (just idea). I think the key is that we try new things, hopefully learn from ideas that have been tried elsewhere, and build a place for high-quality realtime conversations. The site does follow the twitter/IG/twitch model where it's a flat user(nest) hierarchy, but I have considered later enhancing it to allow multiple users to manage a single nest which would allow both community-led or single-entity led. Right now the goal is just to get mvp features and start getting feedback! So thank you :)
      - thealienthing 6y ago
        Interesting. I wonder if you could factor in “views” for measuring activity, like how many people have visited a thread and for how long. It’s my understanding that most big websites are extremely interested in minutia like where someone spends most of their time on the page, where their cursor is etc. that may be a useful metric for determining engagement.
        6y ago
intended 6y ago
Why companies? When the net was young, it was programmers who put counters in front of content - the urge and obviousness to do so, is so banal and basic that the lack of a counter is comment worthy, not its presence. Imagine a pristine social network without any counter - how many seconds before one of us posts "I made a small change to the site, which looks like this". Metrics are such a basic extension of the programming mindset that without a corporations will being imposed to remove them, I cant imagine a site without a like counter of some sort. (Not that firms will remove them, but their absence can only be achieved by a force from above imposing its will on normal human nature.)
- grawprog 6y ago
  Since you mention the early internet, some of the earliest websites I remember would have a 'number of visitors' counter usually in the footer. Which in and of itself is an early form of that validation you speak of. When you found a site with lots of visitors, it validated the site, made it seem more legitimate. And lots of early web site owners would react the same way to a new visitor to their page as a user reacts to a like today. Validation culture has always been in some ways a part of the internet. Even before the things I spoke of. But I agree though, today it's taken over too much of culture in general. Whereas back in the day, someone may be happy or excited, chances were it didn't affect their life much. Now people's entire lives and fortunes exist because of those validating likes.
isoskeles 6y ago
I think it even encourages reading the content. “Six hundred other morons ‘liked’ this comment so I might enjoy reading it.” Without that social proof, how do I figure out which comments are worthwhile and which are kooky bullshit? I’m being only partly sarcastic here, the social proof is real. But I find it interesting because on Reddit I’ll deliberately read downvoted comments, on YouTube I will not bother with anything below the top 10 presented to me, here I’ll read almost everything (obviously if the thread interests me).

NickGott 6y ago

Well, there's always 4chan, which is exactly what you just said. Not exactly a poster-boy for quality internet discussion. Also, I recommend https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ to remove metrics from twitter.

praptak 6y ago
4chan prioritizes active threads, which means a huge boost to trolling and content dumps.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  That's the thing about trying eliminate voting. If comments essentially serve as votes, you actually get the worse kind of filter - the way the filth rises to the top on Youtube comments for example (Youtube sorts by most commented even though it allows voting - so hateful stuff remains even when downvoted).
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The best solution I've seen for this is to have a separate subforum for highly contentious discussions, and anything with more than a threshold number of comments per hour gets automatically moved there and flagged for moderator review. Then the moderator can move it back, delete it entirely or just leave it in the separate subforum so that interested parties can flame each other in the fire pit instead of out where everybody else hangs out.
diarrhea 6y ago
While you're right, I really do like 4chan. It doing away with any voting really creates a wholly different culture. It requires a completely different approach to reading it. Now, the people there are outcasts in one form or another, in real life or digitally. That can get you mixed results and tainted content, but the principle of how that 'forum' is set up I like a lot.
- 6y ago

this_user 6y ago

Voting certainly has its problems, but the alternative is given trolls and spammers free reign. Not having any kind of selection mechanism may have worked in the past when the Internet was much smaller, and when the majority of people still cared about making quality posts. But those days are long gone. Even in its current state, I find Twitter borderline unusable, because > 95% of posts are worthless noise.

staplers 6y ago
You can have voting mechanisms without their results being visible. It isn't very transparent but social media is still curated and moderated by platforms regardless of "voting".
ng12 6y ago
I don't think the problem is with trolls and spammers necessarily, I think the problem is with scaling the community out. 4chan is the best example of this: the less populated, hobby-based boards are wonderfully useful resources and generally of much higher quality than similar communities on Reddit. Reddit is just too big and the clout-chasing inevitably infects smaller subs. The larger 4chan communities like /b/ and /pol/, on the other hand, are irredeemable cesspits compared to Reddit's default subs.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  I second this, I frequent the /lit/ (literature) board on 4chan and its really good. It's still quite irreverent but its good when studying philosophy, where it was always rebellious (e.g. Nietzsche's "God is Dead").
praptak 6y ago
It didn't work in the past. Usenet groups were like that and they got eaten by spammers and trolls.
tomjen3 6y ago
IMHO, that was more a result of the very high barrier to entry to get access to the internet, than its size. I still fantasize about creating a community with such a high barrier to entry today, but where it is done better than just making it depend on your technical chops and internet connections in the mid-nineteens.

TigeriusKirk 6y ago

Even semi-visible voting such as HN has creates bad incentives. The retweets/likes culture of twitter is orders of magnitude worse, though. People start chasing the likes, tailoring them to what people want to hear rather than genuine expression of thought.

badRNG 6y ago

It seems that the most harm is done when the voting system is used to accumulate clout/fame/social capital both on and off platform. Democratized voting systems on pseudonymous platforms can have a content curation effect while limiting this accumulation of social capital, as seen on Hacker News and Reddit. You don't see quite the same level of brands and people building their clout on say Reddit the way they do on Twitter. Conventional cultural leaders like politicians and celebrities don't dominate discourse on these platforms to the degree they do on Facebook and Twitter.

devmunchies 6y ago
no, but reddit has the same problem (but amplified IMO) where you self-censor out of fear of saying something unpopular and getting downvoted. It's even more conformist than twitter. Twitter doesn't have downvotes so its a little better in that regard. The common "EDIT: <<apology or excuse here>>" I saw on reddit screamed of insecurity instead of people standing their ground. That mentality is bad for young minds.
- badRNG 6y ago
  I do agree that downvoting sometimes has a chilling effect on Reddit, but that doesn't seem relevant to the discussion on social capital accumulation and the domination of a platform by these traditionally socially powerful users, at least in the same way that other platforms are. The point was to discuss how Reddit, Hacker News, and other message boards utilizing pseudonymous voting are not monopolized by brands, celebrities, and businesses in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are. The discourse is still more egalitarian than the alternatives, and it isn't these traditional cultural leaders that dominate discussion on Reddit. This isn't to speak on issues of astroturfing, echo chambering, or misinformation, but these aren't relevant to the discussion, and aren't unique issues to Reddit.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    I think its relevant. a consolidation of opinion (via self-censorship) also leads to a consolidation of products and choice, since alternative product and companies die due to unpopularity. For example I think reddit played a MASSIVE role in the rise of PC gaming in the last 5 years. It's more indirect, admittedly.

Guest42 6y ago

I also think it helps users to craft more genuine responses as opposed to those that get rewarded with votes.

catacombs 6y ago

A bit of irony with you mentioning this as this link received more than 400 points.

devmunchies 6y ago
I wouldn't call it irony. It proving my point, that we only interact with the popular posts.
- catacombs 6y ago
  > I wouldn't call it irony. Correct. It's coincidental.

dilandau 6y ago

Exactly. Inconvenient facts or even just minority views get downvotes. Especially here on hn. If you are going to say something that disagrees with the general hn monoculture, you have to dress it up in the inimitable pseudo-intellectual rational style favored here. Only then do you stand a chance of making yourself heard.

joe_the_user 6y ago

Visible voting might have had some bad effects but I'd say you are basically wrong about it being any kind of fundamental problem. The early Internet had plenty of poison ("flame wars" of that era were the precursor to what we have now). The Internet hadn't solved it's how-to-get-along problem and it just expanded that situation as it became dominant and the "craziness from the Internet" managed to have more real world consequences. As other have mentioned, sorting by active thread turns comments into votes and make the least liked and most disagreeable comment stay visible. So the division between voted and not-voted systems isn't as great as one might imagine. The thing is; then and now, actual moderation is the situation that can solve this. Leadership in humans is sort of divided between attention-focusing behavior and rules-membership-enforcing behavior, both are fine as parts of society. We can see both things at play in online activity but most online forum create a unbalanced in favor of attention-focusing behavior and a certain ideology can this imbalance is great. It's not, it's a part of a rather sick society that America has wound up with, we wind-up literally on the verge of catastrophe from this.

munk-a 6y ago

We do have visible voting and accolades in real life - I wonder if the issue here is that visible voting and accolades along with a history of conduct perform aberrantly when coupled with (seemingly) anonymous identities. In real life people may be reluctant to try and gain fame by taking extreme viewpoints due to their concern over impacting their day-to-day well being - leaving only those fervent believers to tote the flag. Compare that to the internet where you can roll up a new handle and give something a go - maybe getting a lot of encouragement and accolades in a mostly risk-free manner. Whether what I stated above is an indication of a problem of the internet or a problem with the suppression of opinion in the real world is probably open to debate. But I do wonder if that's the reason we see such a rift in the tenor of discussion on the internet.

tayo42 6y ago

What happened to instagrams experiment with removing visible likes? I guess it went negatively in some way because i still have likes heh

dpcan 6y ago

Twitter is the worst with this as it ONLY has a heart. Even if you disagree, you click the heart to save it. There is no way to show another emotion and it desperately needs something like this, similar to Facebook. And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE. "Like" basically means I agree, but "mad" doesn't always mean I disagree. I can disagree with something and not have it make me "mad". I'm not sure what this emoji is, maybe it's just a thumbs down, but I think it's necessary.

Smoosh 6y ago
I think this reveals that Facebook don't care if you love it, hate it, or just find it interesting - all they care about is engagement.
_-o-_ 6y ago
> Even if you disagree, you click the heart to save it. There is actually a "bookmark" function that save tweet into a private list (as opposed to public list of likes). > And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE There are downvotes on HN. Do they really make this community better?
- james-skemp 6y ago
  HN: I think yes. I maybe check HN a couple times a day, have never added a new item, but have posted comments. Due to this after however many years (Edit: almost 8 years) I don't have enough points to down vote. Like SO was at the beginning I think graduated access like this can definitely help a community. However, like any other gated community it's easy for the ones with high rep to form a bubble. I think what's prevented HN from turning into SO, Twitter, etcetera is that a) there are no real profile pages. The reason for coming here is to see what tech news has been shared. Sort of like subreddits, the driving content is a shared interest, not a personality. b) there's no profit motives at work. We're not customers (or data to sell), we're people with a shared interest. This is a sort of hobby project, with the 'benevolent dictator' coming by as needed, fixing titles and links, and letting us know about technical issues with the platform. c) anyone can upvote and see buried comments. I have the option enabled to see people who have been downvoted to gray text. Rarely do I think it's undeserved. If for some reason someone is getting buried for a legit comment usually there's a comment reply questioning the votes, by someone else, and clarifications are worked out. d) (I assume) a lot of lurkers who can't downvote, but can, and do, upvote. And there's probably other reasons. Which I guess means it's a combination of things, one of which is how downvoted are handled.

esperent 6y ago

Social media has become a whole lot better for me thanks to Ben Grosser's demetricator extensions. They even work on Firefox mobile. I use the Twitter and Facebook extensions. With the you can see that something has been liked/retweeted/shared, but no longer by how many people. https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/

hnick 6y ago

Vote-piling is so obvious on Reddit but it's more than that. On a personal level, even when the numbers are hidden from the public like on HN, it has a weird effect on me. It's nice to post something and get a bunch of upvotes, but (even though it doesn't really matter) just getting that single point drop to zero hurts so much more. I don't know if it's loss aversion or the idea that some random internet person dislikes me. I don't dwell on it, I'm notice it and move on, but I still get that little sinking feeling for some reason. Over time, just like a dog being trained we'll learn to conform to the consensus.

zeroimpl 6y ago
Yeah I don’t really understand downvoting on HN. If I see a grey post that looks well written and making reasonable arguments, I like to upvote. If people want to disagree they should reply rather than downvote. Edit: I don’t mean all down voting is bad - It’s good when people start making personal attacks - but just as often it seems to be used to suppress an unpopular viewpoint.
joe_the_user 6y ago
It's pretty funny that I will a huge number of votes for a trivial factual correction and get no votes for what I'd consider insightful points. Not showing votes makes it easy for everyone to upvote these trivial factual corrections.
- hnick 6y ago
  I think one reason for a vote is when someone was going to say something, but someone else already did so it's redundant to say it again - vote instead to show approval to the poster, or add weight to it where votes are public. It makes sense that simple corrections would so often fall into this category.

ALittleLight 6y ago

This project, subreply, was posted here recently. It's very much like Twitter without voting. I greatly enjoy it. https://subreply.com/about https://subreply.com/about

Thorentis 6y ago

Which raises a related issue of whether the number of likes/hearts can even be trusted. Given the positive feedback loop they create (posts with many likes are more likely to receive further likes), manipulation of these numbers can be used for influencing opinion and drawing the battle lines. I am highly suspicious of both Twitter and Reddit in this regard.