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I think up and down voting could actually help the discourse on twitter if it's implemented correctly. Currently every way to interact with a tweet drives its

by skohan 5y ago

I think up and down voting could actually help the discourse on twitter if it's implemented correctly. Currently every way to interact with a tweet drives its engagement score: likes, retweets and replies all result in more visibility for a tweet. So if you think a tweet is unproductive or wrong, you can express that in a reply, but even that is resulting in more visibility for the original tweet. This incentivizes bad behavior, because even if someone does is get a lot of people upset or outraged, this is going to result in more attention and prominence on the platform. But if you have a button which is essentially saying: "twitter, please de-rank this", it allows a way to respond to comments which are not worthy of engaging with but you don't want them to stand uncontested. Also with up/down votes, it's much healthier if the numbers are hidden. Otherwise the incentive becomes to win the game rather than to have a discussion.

34679 5y ago
Mute works fine.
- skohan 5y ago
  Mute is fine if you personally don't want to hear from someone. Downvote is to prevent an outsized influence of bad actors on the platform as a whole.
pjc50 5y ago
This is far from guaranteed: "The company also said it’s not currently using this vote information to rank the replies at this time"
lifthrasiir 5y ago
I too think negative signaling is valuable, but I doubt Twitter will ever correctly implement that. This is evident from the state of "report tweet" menu. Reporting can be thought as a strong negative signal that happens to be also ToS violation, but its implementation is far from working; not just political figures, but I've seen even direct death threats against minorities with numerous reports ignored multiple times. Twitter seems to have no incentive to fix reporting and I don't think downvotes will be different.

by skohan 5y ago

34679 5y ago

Mute works fine.

skohan 5y ago
Mute is fine if you personally don't want to hear from someone. Downvote is to prevent an outsized influence of bad actors on the platform as a whole.

pjc50 5y ago

This is far from guaranteed: "The company also said it’s not currently using this vote information to rank the replies at this time"

lifthrasiir 5y ago

I too think negative signaling is valuable, but I doubt Twitter will ever correctly implement that. This is evident from the state of "report tweet" menu. Reporting can be thought as a strong negative signal that happens to be also ToS violation, but its implementation is far from working; not just political figures, but I've seen even direct death threats against minorities with numerous reports ignored multiple times. Twitter seems to have no incentive to fix reporting and I don't think downvotes will be different.