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upvote/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 defini

upvote/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 ago
I upvoted you for this comment.
- tester34 5y ago
  Welcome to my guild, comrade.
input_sh 5y ago
While 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 ago
  Meaning , that twitter or facebook discourse improved?
arcturus17 5y ago
What is the state of the art nowadays?
- tester34 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917179
yreg 5y ago
I 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.
- IanCal 5y ago
  I'd say that it's perhaps more tied to moderation. Reddit communities vary dramatically in quality of discussion and one thing that seems to separate the highest quality from the lowest is heavy moderation. AskHistorians for example is extremely strict and has very high quality answers. Another example that's strict in a different way is CasualUK, where even vague references to politics or politicians is an immediate day ban (I was banned for making a joke that someone looked like a particular politician) and this results in a high quality "discussion" (the goal is not debate but fun friendly chats and it achieves that perfectly). edit - evidence on the voting system not always helping is that quick, low effort posts and comments quickly rise to the top and drown out all other things. To the point where banning direct image posts so users have to click twice rather than once makes a difference in what's posted and rises.
  - swarnie_ 5y ago
    I think Reddit might be fundamentally flawed because of its voting system and its need for high moderation to make it workable. Mods influence so much power over what people are and aren't allowed to talk about. You use the example of CasualUK which is indeed a very good if slightly "police state" sub but it only exists because the other UK subs became unviable. The old defence has always been "if you don't like it go away and make your own sub", unfortunately with so many obvious subs being squatted its difficult to get exposure to newer communities. From memory we have: /r/unitedkingdom - Mostly teenage lefties, often resembles a 6th form common room, mostly dislike the UK. /r/ukpolitics - Similar to above, slightly quicker on the banhammer. /r/england - cybersquatted and shutdown for years by a power mod, just opened back up but the power mod won't give top rank over to active mods. /r/scotland - A borderline anti-English hate sub, harsh group think in most threads. /r/baduk - The less said the better. I don't know what the solution is because as i said, reddit is flawed at a base level. The only positive change i can think of is to cap active participants in a sub to a specific small number.
kace91 5y ago
> but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. What would the better version be? I can only think of chronological order (the most active/noisy wins) or any kind of engagement metric like number of retweets/hearts/followers, that it's basically a worse version of arrows since it only measures engagement without caring if it's positive or negative.
- Ieghaehia9 5y ago
  If you make an optimization system, you can optimize for things besides just raw up/downvotes. E.g. up- or downvotes from a broad selection of people (as deduced from the social graph) could count as more than up- or downvotes from a smaller group piling on the post.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Honestly I found the Slashdot system to be pretty good, but it doesn't seem like any big site is doing anything similar nowadays, in terms of identifying different kinds of comments you'd like to upvote (Insightful, Funny, Troll etc.).
- tester34 5y ago
  >What would the better version be? in my opinion? Forums with mature community and competent moderators. Forums have way better model for discussions - better than fb, reddit, hn, twitter. Discussions on forums can last weeks / months, meanwhile on reddit/hn when thread drops from front page and then 20 hours pass, then comment section under thread is dead. But it doesn't scale
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I've spent a lot of time on old-style (phpBB, SFML) forums of all sorts, and I feel that Reddit and HN are an improvement on them - but there are two factors to disentangle here: discussion shape, and discussion cadence. In terms of shape, I very strongly believe that tree model - like on Reddit and HN - is superior to the linear model. Every discussion naturally keeps trying to sprout new branches. People go off tangents, or mention multiple distinct points that others then try to elaborate on[0]. Tree-shaped discussions support this naturally - tangents end up branched off as subtrees[1]. In contrast, the linear model only supports one main thread. Any tangent is either short-lived or takes over the main thread. Attempts at carrying multiple tangents can easily destroy the whole thread[2]. And you have to read through all of them, in sequence, mentally keeping track of their evolution, even if you only care about the (current) main topic. So, UX-wise, in my opinion, the ultimate discussion platform has to be non-linear[3]. In terms of cadence, I'd also like to see a platform that encourages longer discussions, conversations happening over weeks or months. Forums ain't it - of the ones I've been on, all considered replying to a week-old conversation as "necroposting"[4]. Yes, individual threads can last many months - but these are not really single discussions any more. The limitations of the linear form mean that people can't jump in and fully participate - they'd have too much material to work through. The tip of the thread becomes its own living thing, bearing little relation to its topic, or 90% of its content. The kind of platform I'd like to see would allow the discussions to grow over time while remaining readable in entirety, so that a topical thread could accumulate knowledge. That necessitates a non-linear form, and possibly some meta-level UX for abridging long conversations. And, of course, a notification system (which HN, notably, doesn't have), so you could track the old threads as they're displaced from the front page by new ones. Culture-wise, this would necessitate the reversal of traditional approach to necroposting. Where forums don't like reviving threads, and HN won't even let you (it won't pop back on the front page just because you commented on it), this new kind of platform would have to encourage people to find and continue previous discussions instead of starting new ones. -- [0] - Case in point: this comment. My response covers two distinct topics: tree vs. linear model, and cadence. [1] - Going back to [0], someone can reply to this comment and talk about just one of the two topics, someone else can reply to cover the other - and now you have two separate, focused subthreads, that can evolve independently and don't interfere with each other. [2] - You've likely seen plenty of discussions where, at some point, replies start to consist mostly of quotes from previous replies, covering several different topics. This quickly gets impossible to trace and people just either drop most of the tangents, or stop replying altogether. It can sometimes stabilize to the main branch covering 2-3 topics simultaneously - through quotes, or alternating replies. [3] - That doesn't necessarily mean trees. A question I've learned to always ask myself when modeling things as trees is, what if we used a directed graph instead? I haven't seen this tried, but I think DAG-based discussion would be better. A problem with tree-shaped threads is that you can't merge subthreads back when their discussion converges. You can see this frequently on HN: unrelated top-level comments end up each having the same discussion 2-3 levels down. Even this very thread. DAG-based UX could help reduce that duplication, and as a bonus, it could offer better experience for cross-references between comments. [4] - See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274439.
rpastuszak 5y ago
I prefer upvotes/downvotes to likes, but there's an issue with "I downvote because I disagree" instead of "I downvote because the content is of poor quality". I also 100% agree that groupthink can be an issue, it's almost like the highlighted notes on kindle--I feel like once they reach a critical mass, people start highlighting the same text without really thinking about it. So, the ideal, for me is to allow for up/downvotes but not display them on the screen (like in certain Mastodon setups).
- ookdatnog 5y ago
  Upvote/downvote have a design flaw. They are intended to be asymmetrical (one for "I like this or agree with this or find it interesting", the other is _intended_ for "irrelevant, doesn't contribute" and not "don't like this/disagree"), but their design is symmetrical. They are equally prominent in the UI, they have mirrored names, etc. So no wonder people use downvotes as the mirror concept of upvotes.
  - geraltofrivia 5y ago
    I always think that these interactions should be modeled as: upvotes as ‘I want others to read this’, and downvote as ‘I don’t want others to read this’. I believe your intended behaviours (I like this or agree with this or find it interesting/irrelevant, doesn't contribute" and not "don't like this/disagree) also fit the aforementioned model.
    - kortex 5y ago
      That gives me the interesting idea of a twitter UX where the buttons are volume-greater and volume-less (just like sound control). With or without limits. It's pretty much what people are trying to accomplish already; this just makes it explicit. Would be neat to see how people react to hitting "max volume". You could model it in all sorts of ways. Do you silently accumulate, or do you keep hysteresis, such that you need a constant stream of positive engagement to keep it up?
- remram 5y ago
tonfreed 5y ago
Twitter has a new target of the two minutes of hate every day. I doubt this will add anything but white noise to an already terminally cancerous platform.
wanderingmind 5y ago
Works great at Hacker news. I rarely come across anti-scientific, illogical nonsense.
- mtgx 5y ago
  HN has moderators. Twitter doesn't, other than their own malgorithm.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  You must have missed the comments about how colonization of Mars is going to save our specie … (for instance, the first comment of this post which reached the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600)
  - bufferoverflow 5y ago
    One of the points of going to Mars is to save our species. One large enough asteroid can wipe us out, along with all high-level life, animals, insects. Being multiplanetary is very important.
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      Oh, and that take is definitely not an example of “anti-scientific, illogical nonsense” and definitely not group thinking, right? /s BTW, the odds that we wipe ourself out of this planet on our own thanks to global warming are much higher than the odds of a “one every ten million year” event.
      - detaro 5y ago
        Because a comment with lots of replies disagreeing and discussion is an awesome example of groupthink, yes...
- jstx1 5y ago
  I wouldn't attribute this to the upvoting system - HN is highly moderated and somewhat specialised as a community. This can't scale to a platform as large and as broad as Twitter.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
I think using a combination of vote rank and number of comments is a good compromise. Reddit is one extreme which is a pure vanity contest while things like traditional forums or chan boards where ranking is purely based on bumps from new posts is another. There's no reason not to use both, and by adding biases we can tune it to a particular community. Too much of a circlejerk we can increase the influence of the comment rank, too many flamewars and we can increase the influence of the vote rank. You could even vary these parameters based on the time of day, for example one forum I was part of some time ago would vary enormously based on what parts of the globe were awake.

hughrr 5y ago

I upvoted you for this comment.

tester34 5y ago
Welcome to my guild, comrade.

input_sh 5y ago

While 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 ago
Meaning , that twitter or facebook discourse improved?

arcturus17 5y ago

What is the state of the art nowadays?

tester34 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917179

yreg 5y ago

I 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.

IanCal 5y ago
I'd say that it's perhaps more tied to moderation. Reddit communities vary dramatically in quality of discussion and one thing that seems to separate the highest quality from the lowest is heavy moderation. AskHistorians for example is extremely strict and has very high quality answers. Another example that's strict in a different way is CasualUK, where even vague references to politics or politicians is an immediate day ban (I was banned for making a joke that someone looked like a particular politician) and this results in a high quality "discussion" (the goal is not debate but fun friendly chats and it achieves that perfectly). edit - evidence on the voting system not always helping is that quick, low effort posts and comments quickly rise to the top and drown out all other things. To the point where banning direct image posts so users have to click twice rather than once makes a difference in what's posted and rises.
- swarnie_ 5y ago
  I think Reddit might be fundamentally flawed because of its voting system and its need for high moderation to make it workable. Mods influence so much power over what people are and aren't allowed to talk about. You use the example of CasualUK which is indeed a very good if slightly "police state" sub but it only exists because the other UK subs became unviable. The old defence has always been "if you don't like it go away and make your own sub", unfortunately with so many obvious subs being squatted its difficult to get exposure to newer communities. From memory we have: /r/unitedkingdom - Mostly teenage lefties, often resembles a 6th form common room, mostly dislike the UK. /r/ukpolitics - Similar to above, slightly quicker on the banhammer. /r/england - cybersquatted and shutdown for years by a power mod, just opened back up but the power mod won't give top rank over to active mods. /r/scotland - A borderline anti-English hate sub, harsh group think in most threads. /r/baduk - The less said the better. I don't know what the solution is because as i said, reddit is flawed at a base level. The only positive change i can think of is to cap active participants in a sub to a specific small number.

kace91 5y ago

> but it's definitely not state of art nowadays. What would the better version be? I can only think of chronological order (the most active/noisy wins) or any kind of engagement metric like number of retweets/hearts/followers, that it's basically a worse version of arrows since it only measures engagement without caring if it's positive or negative.

Ieghaehia9 5y ago
If you make an optimization system, you can optimize for things besides just raw up/downvotes. E.g. up- or downvotes from a broad selection of people (as deduced from the social graph) could count as more than up- or downvotes from a smaller group piling on the post.
Y_Y 5y ago
Honestly I found the Slashdot system to be pretty good, but it doesn't seem like any big site is doing anything similar nowadays, in terms of identifying different kinds of comments you'd like to upvote (Insightful, Funny, Troll etc.).
tester34 5y ago
>What would the better version be? in my opinion? Forums with mature community and competent moderators. Forums have way better model for discussions - better than fb, reddit, hn, twitter. Discussions on forums can last weeks / months, meanwhile on reddit/hn when thread drops from front page and then 20 hours pass, then comment section under thread is dead. But it doesn't scale
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I've spent a lot of time on old-style (phpBB, SFML) forums of all sorts, and I feel that Reddit and HN are an improvement on them - but there are two factors to disentangle here: discussion shape, and discussion cadence. In terms of shape, I very strongly believe that tree model - like on Reddit and HN - is superior to the linear model. Every discussion naturally keeps trying to sprout new branches. People go off tangents, or mention multiple distinct points that others then try to elaborate on[0]. Tree-shaped discussions support this naturally - tangents end up branched off as subtrees[1]. In contrast, the linear model only supports one main thread. Any tangent is either short-lived or takes over the main thread. Attempts at carrying multiple tangents can easily destroy the whole thread[2]. And you have to read through all of them, in sequence, mentally keeping track of their evolution, even if you only care about the (current) main topic. So, UX-wise, in my opinion, the ultimate discussion platform has to be non-linear[3]. In terms of cadence, I'd also like to see a platform that encourages longer discussions, conversations happening over weeks or months. Forums ain't it - of the ones I've been on, all considered replying to a week-old conversation as "necroposting"[4]. Yes, individual threads can last many months - but these are not really single discussions any more. The limitations of the linear form mean that people can't jump in and fully participate - they'd have too much material to work through. The tip of the thread becomes its own living thing, bearing little relation to its topic, or 90% of its content. The kind of platform I'd like to see would allow the discussions to grow over time while remaining readable in entirety, so that a topical thread could accumulate knowledge. That necessitates a non-linear form, and possibly some meta-level UX for abridging long conversations. And, of course, a notification system (which HN, notably, doesn't have), so you could track the old threads as they're displaced from the front page by new ones. Culture-wise, this would necessitate the reversal of traditional approach to necroposting. Where forums don't like reviving threads, and HN won't even let you (it won't pop back on the front page just because you commented on it), this new kind of platform would have to encourage people to find and continue previous discussions instead of starting new ones. -- [0] - Case in point: this comment. My response covers two distinct topics: tree vs. linear model, and cadence. [1] - Going back to [0], someone can reply to this comment and talk about just one of the two topics, someone else can reply to cover the other - and now you have two separate, focused subthreads, that can evolve independently and don't interfere with each other. [2] - You've likely seen plenty of discussions where, at some point, replies start to consist mostly of quotes from previous replies, covering several different topics. This quickly gets impossible to trace and people just either drop most of the tangents, or stop replying altogether. It can sometimes stabilize to the main branch covering 2-3 topics simultaneously - through quotes, or alternating replies. [3] - That doesn't necessarily mean trees. A question I've learned to always ask myself when modeling things as trees is, what if we used a directed graph instead? I haven't seen this tried, but I think DAG-based discussion would be better. A problem with tree-shaped threads is that you can't merge subthreads back when their discussion converges. You can see this frequently on HN: unrelated top-level comments end up each having the same discussion 2-3 levels down. Even this very thread. DAG-based UX could help reduce that duplication, and as a bonus, it could offer better experience for cross-references between comments. [4] - See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274439.

rpastuszak 5y ago

I prefer upvotes/downvotes to likes, but there's an issue with "I downvote because I disagree" instead of "I downvote because the content is of poor quality". I also 100% agree that groupthink can be an issue, it's almost like the highlighted notes on kindle--I feel like once they reach a critical mass, people start highlighting the same text without really thinking about it. So, the ideal, for me is to allow for up/downvotes but not display them on the screen (like in certain Mastodon setups).

ookdatnog 5y ago
Upvote/downvote have a design flaw. They are intended to be asymmetrical (one for "I like this or agree with this or find it interesting", the other is _intended_ for "irrelevant, doesn't contribute" and not "don't like this/disagree"), but their design is symmetrical. They are equally prominent in the UI, they have mirrored names, etc. So no wonder people use downvotes as the mirror concept of upvotes.
- geraltofrivia 5y ago
  I always think that these interactions should be modeled as: upvotes as ‘I want others to read this’, and downvote as ‘I don’t want others to read this’. I believe your intended behaviours (I like this or agree with this or find it interesting/irrelevant, doesn't contribute" and not "don't like this/disagree) also fit the aforementioned model.
  - kortex 5y ago
    That gives me the interesting idea of a twitter UX where the buttons are volume-greater and volume-less (just like sound control). With or without limits. It's pretty much what people are trying to accomplish already; this just makes it explicit. Would be neat to see how people react to hitting "max volume". You could model it in all sorts of ways. Do you silently accumulate, or do you keep hysteresis, such that you need a constant stream of positive engagement to keep it up?
remram 5y ago

tonfreed 5y ago

Twitter has a new target of the two minutes of hate every day. I doubt this will add anything but white noise to an already terminally cancerous platform.

wanderingmind 5y ago

Works great at Hacker news. I rarely come across anti-scientific, illogical nonsense.

mtgx 5y ago
HN has moderators. Twitter doesn't, other than their own malgorithm.
littlestymaar 5y ago
You must have missed the comments about how colonization of Mars is going to save our specie … (for instance, the first comment of this post which reached the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907600)
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  One of the points of going to Mars is to save our species. One large enough asteroid can wipe us out, along with all high-level life, animals, insects. Being multiplanetary is very important.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    Oh, and that take is definitely not an example of “anti-scientific, illogical nonsense” and definitely not group thinking, right? /s BTW, the odds that we wipe ourself out of this planet on our own thanks to global warming are much higher than the odds of a “one every ten million year” event.
    - detaro 5y ago
      Because a comment with lots of replies disagreeing and discussion is an awesome example of groupthink, yes...
jstx1 5y ago
I wouldn't attribute this to the upvoting system - HN is highly moderated and somewhat specialised as a community. This can't scale to a platform as large and as broad as Twitter.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

I think using a combination of vote rank and number of comments is a good compromise. Reddit is one extreme which is a pure vanity contest while things like traditional forums or chan boards where ranking is purely based on bumps from new posts is another. There's no reason not to use both, and by adding biases we can tune it to a particular community. Too much of a circlejerk we can increase the influence of the comment rank, too many flamewars and we can increase the influence of the vote rank. You could even vary these parameters based on the time of day, for example one forum I was part of some time ago would vary enormously based on what parts of the globe were awake.