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Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons
- ggm 5y agoIt's an experiment. There is no widespread visible commitment to change. Personally, I suspect they won't do this "live" at scale, without a huge PR campaign. Because smarter people than me (ie most of HN) can workshop half a hundred potential problems with it, in less time than it takes me to read the article online. (which I did btw. They're testing at least two forms of up/down)
- wnevets 5y agoaren't retweets and/or likes kinda the same as upvotes?
- devmunchies 5y agoa downvote cancels out somebody else's upvote. its like being able to remove "hearts" from a post. i don't like it at all. it trains people to be even more hyper-sensitive to judgement. also encourages tyranny of the 99 over the 1. Extinguishes any eccentric ideas.
- zuhayeer 5y agoHere's what Alexis had to say about it haha: https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/1417930918942150671?s=20 https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/1417930918942150671...
- kart23 5y agowow, that old reddit screenshot looks incredibly similar to the HN interface.
- drannex 5y agoI don't know if you meant that as a joke, sarcastic, or you just didn't know but just in case: they were developed at the same time, by Alexis and Co when Reddit was initially funded by YC.
- kart23 5y agoI was being serious, I knew Reddit was funded by YC, but didn't know if there was any connection to HN.
- jsbdk 5y agoWhy is he acting as if he invented upvotes and downvotes?
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoI personally don't like this. Hackernews and slashdot do good jobs of moderation by making you have to be a participant that's contributed with well thought out comments. Reddit fails because the "upvotes/downvote machine" is just an opinion meter. Also the gaming of it is not good either so it's a matter of time before Twitter publicly displays your stats as you tweet. It's another slippery slope for them to show ignorance at the top and not legitimate criticism that often gets downvoted because it doesn't fit the norm. Reddit died in the sense that /r/popular is as unique as 9gag. It's all content from other sites and 1 word top comments.
- sanxiyn 5y agoReddit is alive and well. If Reddit is a failure, I want such failures.
- tayo42 5y agoIt's alive and well as far as numbers and users and time spent. I think it can be considered a failure in other ways. Is it creating healthy online communities, things like that. Are good things coming out of it, or is it effecting the real world in a negative way.
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- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoI tried to refrain from making reddit out to be a "failure" but it's undeniable they're not the same as they were 10 years ago. Reddit definitely felt more HackerNews like: decent articles, articulated comments, and the moderation was not nearly as bad. I am fully aware that they're successful and they're keeping it that way. Reddit however has gone the ways of just following the mob. They're not trying to foster a reason for people to stay on aside from addiction and boredom.
- paxys 5y agoEvery single upvote/downvote mechanism on the internet (including on HN) is an opinion meter, regardless of what rules/etiquette the site tries to push. And I'm pretty sure that's what Twitter wants, because it means that all the safe, popular replies to a Tweet will automatically bubble up on top and they won't have to deal with the controversial ones because the community will take care of them.
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- ottomanbob 5y agoThis is a small step in a generally right direction. Should be celebrated!
- throwawayswede 5y agoNo it's not.
- badRNG 5y agoTo the people downvoting this comment: I see you disagree with an upvote/downvote system, but use that same system to communicate that belief. Curious.
- useragent86 5y agoYou walk into a convention center. The greeter at the door hands you a banana cream pie. A few moments later, you're hit in the face with a banana cream pie. After the sense of shock subsides, you hit the nearest person in the face with your banana cream pie. You wish that no one had been given banana cream pies, but after getting hit with one, you certainly weren't going to not hit someone else with one, too.
- jay754 5y agoI been waiting for other companies to do this for years. Its a much better overall feature than just likes.
- tester34 5y agonot really it just allows manipulation by downvoting
- endisneigh 5y agoI think up and down voting are great, however what is dumb is that neither has a cost. If you think of karma as an economy, taking an action should have a cost. Of course this leads to the question: if voting has a cost, then how do people accumulate irrespective of themselves receiving a vote? You could give everyone say, a fixed number of karma to begin with that could then be allocated. You can then give people more karma for successfully being a user without being flagged or receiving certain amounts of negative karma for a time period. It's a shame there's not more experimentation here. This could lead to more interesting sort of dynamics. For example, if the #1 person believes something is being said that is really damaging in some way, they could put at stake the entirety of their karma and downvote it, which would pretty much obliterate the comment. Conversely, if someone is speaking a truth no one else is acknowledging someone with a lot of karma could sacrifice a good chunk to bring it right to the top.
- cjsawyer 5y agoEach user gets 10 votes per day, and can only vote up or down on a topic once?
- abraae 5y agoEach user gets 10 points per day, and can use it in a single vote or spread across hundreds?
- randomdata 5y ago> I think up and down voting are great It is great as a poor man's analytics system, providing knowledge that at least someone read your comment, allowing you to evaluate if it is worth posting more or if your efforts are disappearing into the void. However, having both up and down seems redundant. The both provide the exact same information. > however what is dumb is that neither has a cost. If there is a cost then there will be reduced incentive to let you know that your comment was read, which reduces future engagement, which is not ideal for the platform.
- endisneigh 5y ago
- chimpansteve 5y agoThis seems prone to trouble to me. Twitter is already very groupthink heavy, and I can only see this amplifying that problem. You see it in Reddit all the time - people don't actually read the comments, just upvote the upvoted ones and vice versa. I worry this will just make an already very narrow set of acceptable opinions even narrower.
- user3939382 5y ago> Twitter is already very groupthink Just like all social platforms including this one. Here on HN if you have a controversial opinion the site literally fades your comment away until it disappears.
- rightbyte 5y agoAnd it is bad. The concept of hiding what you don't agree to is really bad for discussions. I wish the fading was only due to flagging not votes.
- hackinthebochs 5y agoFading a comment helps to signal that it has already been downvoted enough. This is to avoid going -100 because no one can see how far you're down already.
- otippat 5y agoHN has a downvote system as well. What you describe happens when a comment gets downvoted enough times, which makes it another good example of downvotes amplifying groupthink.
- eybbus 5y agoI kinda like that I only have upvote button currently here since I haven't hit the karma threshold. I do feel like the HN crowed doesn't downvote comments unless its spam or way out of the current topic. It happens but not like reddit where it acts like a disagree button.
- soheil 5y agoInteresting because at the same time looks like YouTube is testing removing "dislikes" count. I wonder if at some point all social media will converge on a set of standards that they can all get behind.
- InTheArena 5y agogreat. now we can further extend the ideological bubbles, with the brigade wars and political virtue-signaling mono-culture of reddit.
- machinehermiter 5y agoExactly. This is a terrible idea. This is exactly the opposite of what we need as a society.
- trident5000 5y agoI left reddit because of how manipulated it is by hard core activists, contractors acting on behalf of corporations and political parties, and governments. I really hope we dont see this on twitter.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- robertwt7 5y agoDownvote sucks honestly, I think it should be replaced by report button instead.
- tester34 5y agoupvote/downvote system is flawed allows to manipulate, promotes groupthink and kind of harassing people it maybe worked over decade ago or so, but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. edit. or maybe it just doesn't work for e.g news/discussions (especially about politics and other "hot" topics) meanwhile for meme sites it should be fine
- hughrr 5y agoI upvoted you for this comment.
- tester34 5y agoWelcome to my guild, comrade.
- input_sh 5y agoWhile I would agree with you in theory, with Twitter testing it now and Facebook already rolling it out to (some?) groups, it doesn't appear like its time has passed.
- cblconfederate 5y agoMeaning , that twitter or facebook discourse improved?
- arcturus17 5y agoWhat is the state of the art nowadays?
- tester34 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917179
- yreg 5y agoI agree with the flaws you point out, but I still find reddit discussions to be of much higher value than Facebook discussions. I atribute it to the voting system. The Facebook discussions (e.g. under posts by serious media in my country) are overrun by antivaxers, xenophobes and the like. It makes it seem like they hold the opinion of almost everyone. I believe that's not the case, but most non-extremists are tired and don't have energy to argue with extremists all day long. And even when someone does, comments in the subthread only bump the innitial controversial comment to the top. However people might find the time to at least downvote a neonazi when they see one.
- jokoon 5y agoI'm interested/curious to see how a system where you can only downvote would behave. I think users would be much more interested to only downvote, if they could. The front page would only show items that were not downvoted. Of course if would also be possible to see which posts were the most downvoted.
- peytn 5y agoThat’s basically Wikipedia minus the most downvoted view part.
- jhbadger 5y agoI don't think that would work, because it is hard to imagine anything that somebody wouldn't dislike. You see it on Youtube, where even a video getting hundreds/thousands of likes gets a few dozen downvotes.
- Sergiu37 5y agoMy guess is that will bring to the top the most uninteresting stuff that novody even cares about to downvote. Also this might look like the new section as eventually someone will downvote so the new ones will be at the top in the first phase.
- geraltofrivia 5y agoIt might happen that folks downvote things even if they like it, just because its the only interaction possible. From what little I understand of content reception, the drive to interact triumphs the drive to curate/(give your opinion for the collective good, for the lack of a better word). In a few weeks the website would then introduce a ‘controversial’ or ‘worst’ sorting and ironic downvoting would become mainstream till the devs give in and treat the downvote as an upvote, or introduce both downvote and upvote (wherein imo they’d stand a chance of losing their userbase).
- madeofpalk 5y agoSomeone once told me an intense sense of wanting to be involved and a staggering lack of something to add
- aww_dang 5y agoIt will be interesting if they are willing to rank things voted by a user's cohort, rather than straight ranking. However, I suspect Twitter's political biases will play an role. Reddit is interesting in that it offers a "sort by controversial" option. Toxic nonsense generally gets downvoted uniformly, while contentious arguments can float to the top.
- cblconfederate 5y agoI use the love button for bookmarking (one click less) . My timeline is in chronological mode. I dont see the point of the Algorithm, what is it for? The few times it switched back by itself, it was terrible Anyway, the downvoters will have an easy way to defuse their anger, and twitter hopes that it will lead to less cringe replies. Alas
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThe "love" button originally used to be a "bookmark" button, and the icon was a star. When they switched it to "like", bookmarks were automatically converted into likes, which seemed misleading to me.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y agoIf it's a bookmark button, why make this public? I'm glad Firefox does not share my bookmarks with the world, for one.
- nobrains 5y agoFrom the 3 testing examples they have shown, I would have expected them to test an example with the "heart" for upvote and "thumbs-down" for down vote. The 3rd example is too facebooky. The 2nd example, has the twitter DNA, but the downvote looks out of place. The 1st example, while the most correct and reddit-style, totally looses the twitter DNA.
- thinkingemote 5y agoThe way users might benefit is if Twitter learns what users like and dislike and curate a feed based on these preferences. At the very least one could expect them to use it for the list of who to follow. One similar strategy would be how Reddit introduced a subreddit filter feature (which was previously only available in a 3rd party extension) to get metrics on which popular but disliked subreddit to quarantine. These majority disliked subreddits then got filtered from everyone's feed.
- MrGilbert 5y ago> ...and curate a feed based on these preferences. I personally don't need a curated feed on twitter. Hopefully, they'll never deactivate the chronological one.
- oauea 5y agoExcellent, more bubbling.
- rpastuszak 5y agoThat's my worry too, but I don't know if you can already make it worse on twitter. Reddit has the random button and easy access to two "feeds" (chronological and "personalised"), so I'd like more of that.
- oauea 5y agoThat random button is just the top 1000 most popular subreddits by the way. Better than nothing, but still.
- playpause 5y agoI don’t see the post voting mechanism having much effect on bubbling. The problem with a filter bubble is not being aware you’re in it. If you’re aware, then it’s not a filter bubble. I think this comes from architecture, from Twitter’s presentation as one giant global conversation, as opposed to every post being made in the context of a distinct topic-based community. On Reddit you intentionally navigate from place to place, subculture to subculture. You’re less likely to mistake a certain political attitude as the new global norm, because you develop an understanding of which views and attitudes are common to which sub. Even if you only look at the front page, each post is clearly labelled as having come from a particular sub. Twitter in contrast presents itself as one single context for everything in your world, pushing the false idea that what you’re seeing is representative of what other people are seeing. That’s what’s behind the filter bubble effect, I think.
- ranaexmachina 5y agoI just want a linear timeline. :(
- dave_sullivan 5y agoI've been saying twitter needs a downvote button for years. Only having like or retweet means there is only positive signal, so messages can only be amplified. Downvotes allow a signal to be de-amplified. Bravo.
- _pmf_ 5y agoIt just makes it more important to keep you bubble clean from dissenters, thus furthering the divide. Of course, this is probably the point.
- nightcracker 5y agoIt's naive to think that downvotes will cause something to be de-amplified, companies like Twitter know all too well how to use controversy and outrage to their advantage.
- dave_sullivan 5y agoWhat are you talking about? It works effectively on HN and reddit and has for years.
- howaboutnope 5y agoExcept when it's used to "disagree" with comments without actually having or making an argument. Then just reduces the quality of discourse and thought.
- _pmf_ 5y agoMediocracy
- whalabi 5y agoI've wondered why Twitter seems far more toxic than Reddit (certain now-banned subreddits excluded) and I believe the downvote is a powerful tool used to achieve this, along with Reddit's community-style moderation, even though that can border on toxic itself at times. I wrote about it here a little while back https://unlikekinds.com/article/trolls-and-consequences-what-twitter-needs-to-learn-from-reddit https://unlikekinds.com/article/trolls-and-consequences-what...
- antigirl 5y agoTwitter exposes the profile of the user a lot more and people have their own feeds. Reddit in comparison albeit with profiles seems anonymous all the same.
- whalabi 5y agoThat's a good point, seems less enticing to a troll to rip into an anonymous username. Reddit's moved a bit in that direction in recent years, with full fledged profiles, user feeds, profile pics, etc.
- tompazourek 5y agoI'm wondering about the same thing. To me, Reddit feels more like it emphasizes communities. While Twitter is more about the cult of personality, and not too centered around community. Also, on Twitter it's much easier to get to another social bubble by accident (just see some random tweet in the feed, and here it goes). On Reddit, you are much more likely to stay within your chosen subreddits (unless you look at the most popular, news, etc.)
- whalabi 5y agoYeah I thought the same thing re communities, it's a super important aspect and gives you some of the.. social geography you get in the real world. Tgat and the personal, per-community moderation.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
- say_it_as_it_is 5y agoSuppose you're someone who identifies as a member of an activist group. Your goal is to spread ideas. You can't control the spread of a shared tweet but you can control the comment thread by voting en masse. Every popular tweet is then accompanied by top-ranking comments that your group controls.
- throwawayswede 5y agoYeah sure, like that's gonna make advertisers want to advertise more. Seems like reddit and twitter are competing in who can drive their company to the ground faster...
- baq 5y agoslashdot had this covered years ago. literally decades. 1. upvotes limited to +5. 2. votes categorized: funny, informative, insightful, etc. 3. number of votes limited per time frame and user karma. 4. meta-moderation: your votes (up/down both) were subject to voting (correct/incorrect). good score == more upvotes to spend. and yet, simple trumps good. i was very happy to see parts of this implemented in steam reviews.
- Mordisquitos 5y agoAnother alternative, which may be somewhat controversial, was introduced years ago in Menéame [0], a Spanish website which is somewhat of a cross between Slashdot and Reddit. In summary, they made the votes public. For every comment, you can see who gave it an upvote and who gave it a downvote. In my opinion the change was worth it. The positive effects are that it strongly discourages organised vote brigading, cheap "I disagree" downvotes, and shy upvotes supporting actual nasty comments. Of course, even if this were possible to implement on Reddit's backend, the sheer scale of votes in the thousands would probably make it unfeasible. However, it would be a very good way to tackle cross-subreddit vote brigading, and would for instance make /r/SubredditDrama's "Do not vote in linked threads" rule much easier to enforce, rather than relying on the honour system. [0] https://www.meneame.net https://www.meneame.net
- darkerside 5y agoThey should make it a lottery system and show a random 10 people. The threat/possibility may be enough discouragement.
- gruez 5y ago>4. meta-moderation: your votes (up/down both) were subject to voting (correct/incorrect). good score == more upvotes to spend. Doesn't this lead to a keynesian beauty contest situation where people are incentized to vote what they think other people would vote, rather than by their own honest assessment?
- wccrawford 5y ago
- nicky0 5y agoThe best thing Twitter could do is announce that it was all a big mistake and the are shutting down the company and deleting all tweets and accounts.
- tgv 5y agoOne can dream.
- jonny383 5y agoSo, will Twitter ban single-sided up or down voting in accordance with their agenda, similar to how they have start preventing users from even "liking" a tweet?
- bloniac 5y agoThe most toxic device on the internet is the downvote. It’s nothing more that a “criticize” button, or perhaps “attack”, “belittle”, “devalue”. Downvotes make people feel hurt belittled and attacked. Nothing wrong with upvoting - that’s positive. Downvoting destroys all good will. And of course so clever and funny here in HN this comment gets downvoted, which proves my point. The downvote is the tool of the drive by vandal. It allows people to behave like a dickhead anonymously and at no cost.
- cryptica 5y agoI agree; it's a tool for censorship. Also, upvote is a tool for propaganda. If implemented honestly, downvote (and upvote) would be fine, but it's not gonna happen. The downvote functionality will be an excuse to censor content. At the end of the day, it's always about financial interests. Views which promote the interests of the financial elite and wealth centralization are upvoted, views which promote decentralization or work against the interests of financial elites are downvoted.
- useragent86 5y agoAgreed. It's like, imagine being out in public, in a town square, having a conversation with a group of people while others mill about. Suddenly, you're hit in the face with a rotten tomato. You have no idea where it came from, or who threw it, or why. But you are now covered in the stinky remains of an inedible food, and everyone around you recoils in digust. Somewhere, retreating into the crowd, is the coward who threw it at you because he didn't like something you said. He doesn't have to argue against you, nor does he have to put his name and face to his position and action. But he's effectively taken you out of the conversation. Now multiply that by thousands of people and thousands of tomatoes, usually thrown by a certain kind of person on a certain side of controversial issues. Eventually the people on the other side get tired of being hit by rotten tomatoes, so the conversations cease, and the Heckler's Veto has won again. At least in real life, there's a chance that the troll will be seen lobbing fruit, be confronted, and be discouraged from doing it again. But online, with anonymous downvoting, they operate with impunity, silently sabotaging conversations everywhere.
- ficiek 5y agoLink that doesn't try to redirect you to ad websites to fingerprint you. https://archive.is/eU3Gf https://archive.is/eU3Gf
- heurisko 5y agoThe problem is, is supposedly, upvote = adds to the conversation, downvote = detracts from conversation. In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree. However I don't think anything can save twitter from being a toxic platform. What makes it especially toxic, I think, is its lack of separation of communities. Reddit is toxic sometimes, but at least there is some separation: if you just want to talk about knitting, you can avoid the people talking about politics. I think it's important to be able to have controversial debates in real life, as body language and audience response seems to keep people from being truly awful. The Quakers have an interesting history of trying to facilitate such controversial debates. They have been involved in some contemporary ones too. https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/210/International-Mediation-and-Conciliation https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/210/Inte... It's concerning to me, how much of real life discussion we have lost due to the pandemic.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago>”if you just want to talk about knitting, you can avoid the people talking about politics.” I don’t find this to be the case at all. The amount of politics tolerated in each subreddit is almost entirely dependent on the personalities of the mods who run it. And for whatever reason, most Reddit mods tend to be activist friendly or at least look the other way when it comes to obvious soapbox accounts breaking the rules. In my experience most subreddits choose to flair political posts rather than prohibit them.
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoTo be fair to the Reddit moderation staff, they’re also paid $0.00, so being strict about keeping the sub on-topic may not be high up on their list of daily priorities.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y agoUnderstandable, but I also suspect most of the moderators are at least somewhat sympathetic to the soapboxer’s political agendas.
- eplanit 5y agoWasn't K-Pop bombardment working well enough as a downvote mechanism? /s Twitter is a sewer.
- dawnerd 5y agoI just wish they’d add a report option for misinformation. There’s just way too much of it and it doesn’t seem Twitter cares. They’ll do something about high profile cases but it’s the smaller boy accounts that ready spread it. Downvotes/dislikes could help signal their algo if done right and I’d love to see where it goes.
- joshstrange 5y agoInteresting, I was sure this existed but I must be thinking of FB's reporting. Twitter only offers: * I'm not interested in this Tweet * It’s suspicious or spam * It's abusive or harmful * It expresses intentions of self-harm or suicide
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoMaybe it would help the company truly understand the problems they create if they used real Twitter content in their mockups rather than "Looking for some cute lunch reccs".
- thrower123 5y agoThe minute this matters for anything algorithmic, it's going to be abused like a rented mule by bots and insane people to brigade any kind of opinion that they disagree with.
- m3kw9 5y agoA lot of Twitter involves groups of like minded people(echo chambers), when a comment that contradicts that group, I imagine the down vote button won’t look pretty. Depends if the downvoted gets hidden, they risk a seal proof echo chamber.
- jcfrei 5y agoHere's what Twitter (and other social media platforms) should implement instead: They should add a button that a user can click so their interaction with a tweet (retweet, quote tweet, reply) doesn't count towards the engagement metrics of that tweet. The way a lot of accounts increase their reach is by tweeting intentionally divisive or stupid things. Lots of people feel obligated to correct or speak out against these tweets but by doing so they are helping them reach an even bigger audience. That's one of the major reasons why Twitter has gotten so toxic: Stupid and divisive content creates more engagement and spreads faster. So users who just want to correct someone should have the option to do this without increasing the engagement metrics of that tweet and effectively spreading it even further.
- aethertron 5y agoThe point of voting is for a group to make collective decisions about something. But the 'group of twitter users' isn't a community. I don't want this fake community to 'democratically' determine what I see. I'm on Twitter to see stuff from the accounts I follow. There is no need for community consensus to determine what's shown.
- dionidium 5y agoDownvoting is predicated on the existence of a community that ostensibly shares some common interest or set of values. Twitter is more of a melting pot. A naive downvoting system can't work on twitter because tweets are designed to "leak" out into other communities. In fact, people often get the most engagement from their critics. You can't have a community about, say, fast cars that leaks into an anti-car community that's allowed to downvote all pro-car sentiments.
- m3kw9 5y agoThe downvote in a lot of ways become a sort of crowdsourced censorship. It could work well to clean toxic stuff but it could also silence diverse conversations. They need to be smart about how they place incentives with the downvotes, how the downvoted are disincentivized to get down votes, how the downvoters won’t abuse the button.
- aquova 5y agoI'm of several minds about this change. On the one hand, I am rather fond of the 'original' Twitter layout. You had your feed of people you followed displayed in chronological order, retweets would show a post to your followers, likes showed support and served as bookmarks. I still keep my timeline in chronological mode, and I don't really care for any change they've made from that original standard. The up/downvote system will likely corrupt that further. On the other hand, Twitter has gained a reputation (rather deservedly) of being one of the more toxic social media sites. Personally, I'm happy to simply unfollow anyone that starts to get on my nerves, but it seems to be enough of an issue for most people that they need to do something to address the issue. There are frankly too many tweets to keep an eye on, so this adds a community moderation system, which I suspect will be more successful (always hiding the up/down numbers would be even better). On the other other hand, I'm not sure it'll be enough. One of the most glaring reasons why Twitter has a worse reputation than say Reddit (arguably) is that there is no separation between tweets of different topic. If there is a morally corrupt section of Reddit, it is at least in theory contained to a single subreddit, while on Twitter it is available to everyone. I'm not sure what the solution here is. I would be somewhat interested in seeing an addition of feeds categorized by topics, but that might be too drastic of a change.
- BizarroLand 5y agoMakes me wonder if the reason Twitter is toxic is because people in large enough groups tend to become toxic? "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." -Kay, Men in Black
- dcow 5y agoIgnoring the fact that you probably consent to be studied in the Twitter ToS (and perhaps fairly since nobody reads the ToS so I’m not sure it constitutes a contract in spirit), why is it okay for Twitter to run an experiment on their user-base in this manner but not for say a research group to do the same without some sort if ethics review? E.g. is Twitter screening the users they opt in to make sure they don’t include people especially susceptible to seeing negative sentiment who’s day might be ruined by the presence of new downvotes? Not trying to be hyperbolic just thinking of a rhetorical example. What if this introduces more stress into people’s lives and they don't want/can’t/shouldn’t be expected to tolerate it?
- dfxm12 5y agoIs there any meaningful distinction between liking and upvoting? Also, I think it is very important to signal to users that it's OK to just ignore something. You don't have to voice displeasure, take away a fake internet point, it's perfectly OK to just go on with your day. Twitter especially is not meant for discussions. It's a poor way to have a discussion (because of organization, character limits, etc.). It's also too ephemeral. It's great at microblogging, or just throwing out an idea, or piece of news you want to share, but that doesn't mean it should be the standard of all types of communication! And, for what its worth, I already find relevant replies are at the top. Are they the most relevant? I don't know, nor do I care.
- chansiky 5y agoMeta question: I just noticed, I can't downvote on HN, or at least I don't see the button. What's the social logic behind that?