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The problem is, is supposedly, upvote = adds to the conversation, downvote = detracts from conversation. In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree.

The 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 ago
  To 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 ago
    Understandable, but I also suspect most of the moderators are at least somewhat sympathetic to the soapboxer’s political agendas.
  - YinglingLight 5y ago
    also, by being paid $0.00, they're extremely easy and cheap to persuade/get on an entity's payroll.
  - CydeWeys 5y ago
    Other way around. They're not paid, so they want to keep the amount of unrelated contentious bullshit on their subreddit to a minimum. I've been a default sub mod and I know how much of a firehose that is. The simplest solution, and the smallest amount of work in total, is to nip unrelated discussions in the bud, delete entire comment trees, and lock the comment section entirely on a post that is (or is looking to) go south. Users quickly learn that "we don't do that here", and stop.
    - nkingsy 5y ago
      Yes, it works and it sort of scales. Why, then, does the outrage porn rise to the top of the Reddit home page? Because it measurably increases sales in a huge way right now. To use a baseball analogy, how do you tell a juiced to the gills superstar that steroids are actually hurting their long-term outlook? There’s no way to show Barry Bonds a future in which he’s shadow banned from the hall of fame and unmentionable even on his own teams broadcasts. The change will come either with regulation or when a new, better system comes along and steals their users.
      - CydeWeys 5y ago
        Outrage has always traveled faster than dry factual information. This isn't a new Internet phenomenon. You can see it in action all the way back in Greek and Roman history as well. It's an inmate feature of human psychology, not a new invention by reddit/Twitter.
        nkingsy 5y ago
        Yes, and the fact that these platforms haven't taken steps to prevent abuse of the cheat code in our psychology means that they find the benefits of outrage to their bottom line outweigh the "unmeasurable" costs such as damage to society and the hollowing out of their platform.
      - intended 5y ago
        The front page of Reddit is not always outrage. Besides, if our brains are designed to zoom in on certain signals, is it rational to expect technology to somehow prevent this?
- Tainnor 5y ago
  I'm not super active on reddit, but I do frequent (mostly as a lurker) some subreddits from time to time, such as r/math, r/learnjapanese, r/history etc. I don't remember running into any sort of heated political argument in any of these subreddits. Of course, for other subreddits it might be different, but this is my experience.
  - codesections 5y ago
    > I do frequent (mostly as a lurker) some subreddits from time to time, such as r/math, r/learnjapanese, r/history etc. I don't remember running into any sort of heated political argument in any of these subreddits. I haven't spent any time there, so I'm genuinely curious: how does r/history avoid political arguments? Some people say that everything is inherently political, but history seems especially adjacent to politics
    - babyblueblanket 5y ago
      r/history is heavily moderated, and primarily political positions need to be backed up with actual historical facts and discussion (and not out-of-context common talking points) or it'll be called for what it is and deleted.
    - hiptobecubic 5y ago
      All of the "successful" subs are either small enough to self-govern effectively because they feel like actual communities or they have hardcore, uncompromising moderator teams that enforce the rules swiftly. askhistorians is the best example I can think of. askscience close behind.
  - sigotirandolas 5y ago
    I do: https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/gwo4o7/in_solidarity_this_sub_is_going_offline_at_8pm_gmt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/gwo4o7/in_so... https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/gw4uca/rmath_will_be_closing_to_new_posts_from_12846pm/ https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/gw4uca/rmath_will_be_... https://old.reddit.com/r/history/comments/gvsvq8/rhistory_is_closing_down_for_the_next_24_hours_in/ https://old.reddit.com/r/history/comments/gvsvq8/rhistory_is...
- paulddraper 5y ago
  That's true. But the solution is to find a subreddit that works the way you want it to. r/offmychest vs r/trueoffmychest r/gaming vs r/truegaming r/movies vs r/truefilm r/unpopularopinion vs r/trueunpopularopinion
numpad0 5y ago
Reddit style up/downvote system is a great “homogenizer” of opinions. Applied correctly, it only leaves the most desirable opinions to survive. It also allows discussions to be steered without commenting. Together it allows majority vote to simply take control of a comment page, and first rule of online voting is it’s always manipulated. You know where that goes. You will end up with a self driving system that represents the richest guy there, with little control input necessary, into the walls.
- Alternitarius 5y ago
  Communities like Reddit are necessarily over-represented by people with a lot of time on their hands: the unemployed, childless, asocial. These people tend to have views outside the mainstream, so its not a surprise that the predominant views there become so skewed.
bagacrap 5y ago
"I disagree" and "detracts from the conversation" have a lot of overlap. A (subjectively) very wrong take on a subject distracts from where you think the conversation should be heading. On Reddit I see many comments, convincingly written, that are (imo) flatly wrong. These comments are potentially very harmful because they're persuading others of a falsehood. Am I supposed to upvote or downvote? (what I actually tend to do is not visit the site)
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  How do you know you aren't the one who's wrong?
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    Provably incorrect comments get upvoted on Reddit all the time. Happens a lot on subs about X where the post involves Y, and somebody says something very authoritatively about Y that is just wrong.
  - sellyme 5y ago
    Usually when I find someone posting something I believe is completely false online, I double-check my own belief with reputable sources to make sure I'm not mistaken or out of date. In the 80-90% of cases where I don't find a good argument contrary to my prior understanding, I check the post history of the user in question to see if they're some kind of subject matter expert that might have a deeper knowledge of the topic than the journalists writing articles for a general audience. Unfortunately that's rarely the case. More often three of their last four comments contain racial slurs and misspellings of two-letter words, which doesn't instill a huge amount of confidence that they know what they're talking about.
- lolinder 5y ago
  On HN, if a comment is well-written and appears to be made in good faith but is (in my opinion) wrong, I neither upvote nor downvote, I reply. Downvoting a good-faith comment because you disagree with it does no one any favors. It creates a sense of persecution among those who disagree with you, while not actually providing any counter-argument for the benefit of the undecided. Leave the vote counts alone, make your own convincing argument.
captainmuon 5y ago
Up/downvotes always have multiple conflicting dimensions. - The post is factually right / wrong - Confirms to the site rules / breaks the rules - I agree / disagree - I want to promote / bury this post - Reward poster with XP / punish I am usually very pragmatic and upvote a post when I want other people to read it (because I want to see the discussion, or because I want to spread the idea). I also upvote to reward the poster. I don't tend to downvote factually wrong posts when they are still interesting, because that limits the chance they get good discussion, and because I don't want to punish somebody for Being Wrong On The Internet. I do downvote positions that I find bad in order to reduce their reach. It would be probably possible to have a site that implements two dimensions as a cross (maybe only for users with a certain XP) although the UX might not be to great. Maybe it is a good idea to have "promote/bury" and "reward" buttons?
- padastra 5y ago
  These differences exist conceptually, but my guess is if you did a factor reduction on actual behavior they would all be correlated nearly 100%.
- dmurray 5y ago
  Didn't Slashdot have multiple dimensions, a post could be "+5, insightful" or "-3, off topic". If you squint you could say the same about emoji reactions on Facebook and probably other platforms, this post got 5 :heart and 2 :scary reactions. They don't have a visible one for relevance but presumably the reactions feed into one behind the scenes. I'm not sure any of these have been shown to be clearly superior to the Reddit/HN approach of a single up/down vote.
  - monk_e_boy 5y ago
    Yeah, these were good as you could filter out the "funny memes"
  - mikewhy 5y ago
    > Didn't Slashdot have multiple dimensions, a post could be "+5, insightful" or "-3, off topic". Ars Technica does something similar and it's a great addition to the overloaded upvote/downvote
xwdv 5y ago
> 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. This isn't really why people are awful. The truth is people want something to say, but most of the time their actual opinions are kind of boring and mainstream. So they end up roleplaying as individuals who have some heinous opinion, and revel in the attention they receive. Some people are awful in different ways, by supporting someone who is regarded as terrible for instance. Eventually, little cliques form, and toxicity brews.
codesections 5y ago
> The problem is, is supposedly, upvote = adds to the conversation, downvote = detracts from conversation. > > In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree. Maybe Twitter should go all the way back to the Slashdot model, and let people vote up and down on "insightful", "funny", "normal", "offtopic", "redundant", "interesting", or "troll", etc.
- Majestic121 5y ago
  It might be too complicated, but maybe a 4 directions vote ? Up/Down : Agree/Disagree Left/Right : Makes the discussion go backward/forward This way you could express disagreement while acknowledging that the point is interesting, or like a joke without having it drown a conversation
wyager 5y ago
> 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. This sort of works, but it also disproportionately empowers psychopaths who are not vulnerable to social moderation and in fact can abuse it against other people. The people who are good at winning debates in real life mostly constitute the politician class, who are A) usually pretty psychopathic B) seemingly pretty unconstrained by moral censure. The internet is cool because it kind of makes everyone into a psychopath (because there’s no emotional connection), so actual psychopathic political types don’t have any advantage over normal people. It would be better if you could create a community where no one was a psychopath but I’m not sure this is possible at scale, or even at all.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  The best venues I found are coffeshop/bars where primarily local people gather, with a smattering of interesting people from out of town, with an atmosphere that encourages free speech and inquiry. Enough of a public house to be inclusive but the trolls are well-moderated. There is a level of decorum, granted, a low bar in places I frequent, that people must maintain or you get kicked out. Unfortunately there seem to be less places like this now.
zthrowaway 5y ago
The knitting community has become very political in the past few years. And a lot of people feel left out. My point being that just about every facet of life has been invaded by political stances that nobody wanted to be involved in and some are left to conform or feel pushed out.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  I read an article where an online knitting community was invaded by far-right trolls and it caused a massive rift. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ban-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ba...
blacktriangle 5y ago
Have you been to a knitting forum lately? Holy shit they were one of the first to get heavily politicizes. You'll be ostracized from r/knitting if you're not left of Stalin.
- snegu 5y ago
  Aside from the constant stream of projects with different pride flag colors, what politics have you seen on r/knitting? I never even saw the Karen Templar controversy discussed there. Now, Ravelry is a whole other story...
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  The word I get from a knitting friend (absolutely not left of Stalin, more a centrist Democrat and corporate apologist) is that disingenuous right wing trolls started disrupting the knitting forums by being intentionally confrontational.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    Were the trolls also Russians?
jimbilly22 5y ago
This is spot on. The only wrinkle -- Twitter could actually do something to create separate communities if they wanted. Some large investors have asked them to. They've drafted up plans to create a separate space for financial discussion. Just haven't acted on it. I really just think it comes down to Twitter being poorly run. I know Paul Singer made a run to have Dorsey replaced as CEO, but eventually backed off. They seem to lean into the divisiveness. It may be beneficial for short-term engagement but it essentially creates a negative emotional experience for customers. And that's going to come home to roost eventually.
- minitoar 5y ago
  Twitter has announced they are working on a feature called “Communities”.
  - jimbilly22 5y ago
    it's a good move.
Taylor_OD 5y ago
Do you have a lot of unwanted things in your twitter feed? Sure during major events some things creep into mine but it's rare that I get a lot of political talk because I don't follow that many people who tweet political things. You can also use lists to curate this. I'm sure there are great twitter knitting lists that wouldnt have political tweet in them. The lists are less used than reddits subreddits but they function in a similar way.
overspeed 5y ago
> What makes it especially toxic, I think, is its lack of separation of communities. Interesting that you say this because Reddit users will tell you that this is a problem in itself since it creates echo chambers that validate the viewpoints you already hold.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Hobby level “echo-chambers” have never been a problem, eg. kitting will likely have a balanced political view. Problematic groups are the ones that have nothing else but a very specific ideology as a common point, eg. r/conservative or the like (as well as the left-leaning counterparts) — occasionally viewing them is not bad imo, if one spends sufficient time in other places as well. The problem is when somebody wants to spend all of their time there, shutting off any alternative source of information.
thejackgoode 5y ago
>> What makes it especially toxic, I think, is its lack of separation of communities. Jack said in the infamous interview to Joe Rogan, that they have an explicit goal to mix communities to avoid echo-chambering of ideas and views. Not sure if what you mean is an accident or intended effect (IMO they do a bad job)
DaniloDias 5y ago
Upvote: I was entertained or this idea reflects my tribe: Downvotes: almost universally “I hate that tribe” It would be better if they reported on someone’s ratio- so you could intuit if the Milieu of the people who downvote. I’d be nice to discover if the people downvoting you are quantitative haters.
Chris2048 5y ago
What we really need is skin-in-the-game. Voting is free. flag something as bad that isn't and there are no consequences. If a vote represented a stake of some kind, then there would be consequences in being wrong. I'd bury specifics though so that the vote isn't (too) influenced. Maybe even random voting would work (every user must complete a "quota" of questions for comments they have read).
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The problem is, is supposedly, upvote = adds to the conversation, downvote = detracts from conversation. That's the HN theory. The twitter theory is that dislikes, like likes and every other behavior on the site is a signal to feed into an engagement optimization algorithm. Twitter has zero interest in conversation quality for its own sake, and every interest in optimizing audience size and engagement.
ChildOfChaos 5y ago
I used to love twitter back around 2007 to early 2010's but as it became more popular it became more toxic and now Reddit is becoming the same with a lot of people spreading nonsense or politics. The one benefit of reddit is I can choose the subs I go on, the problem is there are still a lot of subs that are of a topic I would enjoy that end up getting toxic as well. So i'm trying to find a balance, because reddit for example does give me a lot of my news in topics I love and it's great for finding stuff, like a good movie, book, youtube stuff etc, but then the downside is getting bigger and bigger each year. I struggle to cut it out completely but I also struggle to find any tool that curates content in a good enough way. Everything is just noise and nonsense online with a small amount of good stuff, but very little that focuses on just giving you that. Everything just needs clicks and attention, I want something that doesn't need that and just gives me the type of stuff I want, not on a schedule, but when there is actually something worthwhile to say.
daaaang 5y ago
> if you just want to talk about knitting, you can avoid the people talking about politics Ever since r/the_donald and the other white supremacy reddits, politics has spilled into pretty much every good subreddit, no matter how niche.
itsoktocry 5y ago
>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. I don't find Twitter any more or less toxic than any other platform, and it's because I'm free to participate in the communities I choose. If the people you follow are constantly talking politics, and that annoys you, why are you following them?
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
They should have dummy agree/disagree buttons that disappear once selected and has no function other than to satisfy the malcontents that the machine has recorded their opinion.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree. I feel its actually We agree, We disagree. The points induce conformity as its now with likes and shares with every social media and in-spite of personal opinions most will stick with what the majority do. This can be easily resolved by hiding the points and if it serves the purpose of validation then showing it to the owner alone, I've done so in the forum I run and has improved the quality of discussions. But those point numbers are the bread and better of social media, Who will let go of those sweet dopamine triggers? Twitter cannot chase both conformity and quality of discussions. Reddit went from latter to now a half-baked social media, But still can produce some quality discussions because of the topic silo of subreddits.

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 ago
To 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 ago
  Understandable, but I also suspect most of the moderators are at least somewhat sympathetic to the soapboxer’s political agendas.
- YinglingLight 5y ago
  also, by being paid $0.00, they're extremely easy and cheap to persuade/get on an entity's payroll.
- CydeWeys 5y ago
  Other way around. They're not paid, so they want to keep the amount of unrelated contentious bullshit on their subreddit to a minimum. I've been a default sub mod and I know how much of a firehose that is. The simplest solution, and the smallest amount of work in total, is to nip unrelated discussions in the bud, delete entire comment trees, and lock the comment section entirely on a post that is (or is looking to) go south. Users quickly learn that "we don't do that here", and stop.
  - nkingsy 5y ago
    Yes, it works and it sort of scales. Why, then, does the outrage porn rise to the top of the Reddit home page? Because it measurably increases sales in a huge way right now. To use a baseball analogy, how do you tell a juiced to the gills superstar that steroids are actually hurting their long-term outlook? There’s no way to show Barry Bonds a future in which he’s shadow banned from the hall of fame and unmentionable even on his own teams broadcasts. The change will come either with regulation or when a new, better system comes along and steals their users.
    - CydeWeys 5y ago
      Outrage has always traveled faster than dry factual information. This isn't a new Internet phenomenon. You can see it in action all the way back in Greek and Roman history as well. It's an inmate feature of human psychology, not a new invention by reddit/Twitter.
      - nkingsy 5y ago
        Yes, and the fact that these platforms haven't taken steps to prevent abuse of the cheat code in our psychology means that they find the benefits of outrage to their bottom line outweigh the "unmeasurable" costs such as damage to society and the hollowing out of their platform.
    - intended 5y ago
      The front page of Reddit is not always outrage. Besides, if our brains are designed to zoom in on certain signals, is it rational to expect technology to somehow prevent this?
Tainnor 5y ago
I'm not super active on reddit, but I do frequent (mostly as a lurker) some subreddits from time to time, such as r/math, r/learnjapanese, r/history etc. I don't remember running into any sort of heated political argument in any of these subreddits. Of course, for other subreddits it might be different, but this is my experience.
- codesections 5y ago
  > I do frequent (mostly as a lurker) some subreddits from time to time, such as r/math, r/learnjapanese, r/history etc. I don't remember running into any sort of heated political argument in any of these subreddits. I haven't spent any time there, so I'm genuinely curious: how does r/history avoid political arguments? Some people say that everything is inherently political, but history seems especially adjacent to politics
  - babyblueblanket 5y ago
    r/history is heavily moderated, and primarily political positions need to be backed up with actual historical facts and discussion (and not out-of-context common talking points) or it'll be called for what it is and deleted.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    All of the "successful" subs are either small enough to self-govern effectively because they feel like actual communities or they have hardcore, uncompromising moderator teams that enforce the rules swiftly. askhistorians is the best example I can think of. askscience close behind.
- sigotirandolas 5y ago
  I do: https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/gwo4o7/in_solidarity_this_sub_is_going_offline_at_8pm_gmt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/gwo4o7/in_so... https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/gw4uca/rmath_will_be_closing_to_new_posts_from_12846pm/ https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/gw4uca/rmath_will_be_... https://old.reddit.com/r/history/comments/gvsvq8/rhistory_is_closing_down_for_the_next_24_hours_in/ https://old.reddit.com/r/history/comments/gvsvq8/rhistory_is...
paulddraper 5y ago
That's true. But the solution is to find a subreddit that works the way you want it to. r/offmychest vs r/trueoffmychest r/gaming vs r/truegaming r/movies vs r/truefilm r/unpopularopinion vs r/trueunpopularopinion

numpad0 5y ago

Reddit style up/downvote system is a great “homogenizer” of opinions. Applied correctly, it only leaves the most desirable opinions to survive. It also allows discussions to be steered without commenting. Together it allows majority vote to simply take control of a comment page, and first rule of online voting is it’s always manipulated. You know where that goes. You will end up with a self driving system that represents the richest guy there, with little control input necessary, into the walls.

Alternitarius 5y ago
Communities like Reddit are necessarily over-represented by people with a lot of time on their hands: the unemployed, childless, asocial. These people tend to have views outside the mainstream, so its not a surprise that the predominant views there become so skewed.

bagacrap 5y ago

"I disagree" and "detracts from the conversation" have a lot of overlap. A (subjectively) very wrong take on a subject distracts from where you think the conversation should be heading. On Reddit I see many comments, convincingly written, that are (imo) flatly wrong. These comments are potentially very harmful because they're persuading others of a falsehood. Am I supposed to upvote or downvote? (what I actually tend to do is not visit the site)

matheusmoreira 5y ago
How do you know you aren't the one who's wrong?
- jaywalk 5y ago
  Provably incorrect comments get upvoted on Reddit all the time. Happens a lot on subs about X where the post involves Y, and somebody says something very authoritatively about Y that is just wrong.
- sellyme 5y ago
  Usually when I find someone posting something I believe is completely false online, I double-check my own belief with reputable sources to make sure I'm not mistaken or out of date. In the 80-90% of cases where I don't find a good argument contrary to my prior understanding, I check the post history of the user in question to see if they're some kind of subject matter expert that might have a deeper knowledge of the topic than the journalists writing articles for a general audience. Unfortunately that's rarely the case. More often three of their last four comments contain racial slurs and misspellings of two-letter words, which doesn't instill a huge amount of confidence that they know what they're talking about.
lolinder 5y ago
On HN, if a comment is well-written and appears to be made in good faith but is (in my opinion) wrong, I neither upvote nor downvote, I reply. Downvoting a good-faith comment because you disagree with it does no one any favors. It creates a sense of persecution among those who disagree with you, while not actually providing any counter-argument for the benefit of the undecided. Leave the vote counts alone, make your own convincing argument.

captainmuon 5y ago

Up/downvotes always have multiple conflicting dimensions. - The post is factually right / wrong - Confirms to the site rules / breaks the rules - I agree / disagree - I want to promote / bury this post - Reward poster with XP / punish I am usually very pragmatic and upvote a post when I want other people to read it (because I want to see the discussion, or because I want to spread the idea). I also upvote to reward the poster. I don't tend to downvote factually wrong posts when they are still interesting, because that limits the chance they get good discussion, and because I don't want to punish somebody for Being Wrong On The Internet. I do downvote positions that I find bad in order to reduce their reach. It would be probably possible to have a site that implements two dimensions as a cross (maybe only for users with a certain XP) although the UX might not be to great. Maybe it is a good idea to have "promote/bury" and "reward" buttons?

padastra 5y ago
These differences exist conceptually, but my guess is if you did a factor reduction on actual behavior they would all be correlated nearly 100%.
dmurray 5y ago
Didn't Slashdot have multiple dimensions, a post could be "+5, insightful" or "-3, off topic". If you squint you could say the same about emoji reactions on Facebook and probably other platforms, this post got 5 :heart and 2 :scary reactions. They don't have a visible one for relevance but presumably the reactions feed into one behind the scenes. I'm not sure any of these have been shown to be clearly superior to the Reddit/HN approach of a single up/down vote.
- monk_e_boy 5y ago
  Yeah, these were good as you could filter out the "funny memes"
- mikewhy 5y ago
  > Didn't Slashdot have multiple dimensions, a post could be "+5, insightful" or "-3, off topic". Ars Technica does something similar and it's a great addition to the overloaded upvote/downvote

xwdv 5y ago

> 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. This isn't really why people are awful. The truth is people want something to say, but most of the time their actual opinions are kind of boring and mainstream. So they end up roleplaying as individuals who have some heinous opinion, and revel in the attention they receive. Some people are awful in different ways, by supporting someone who is regarded as terrible for instance. Eventually, little cliques form, and toxicity brews.

codesections 5y ago

> The problem is, is supposedly, upvote = adds to the conversation, downvote = detracts from conversation. > > In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree. Maybe Twitter should go all the way back to the Slashdot model, and let people vote up and down on "insightful", "funny", "normal", "offtopic", "redundant", "interesting", or "troll", etc.

Majestic121 5y ago
It might be too complicated, but maybe a 4 directions vote ? Up/Down : Agree/Disagree Left/Right : Makes the discussion go backward/forward This way you could express disagreement while acknowledging that the point is interesting, or like a joke without having it drown a conversation

wyager 5y ago

> 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. This sort of works, but it also disproportionately empowers psychopaths who are not vulnerable to social moderation and in fact can abuse it against other people. The people who are good at winning debates in real life mostly constitute the politician class, who are A) usually pretty psychopathic B) seemingly pretty unconstrained by moral censure. The internet is cool because it kind of makes everyone into a psychopath (because there’s no emotional connection), so actual psychopathic political types don’t have any advantage over normal people. It would be better if you could create a community where no one was a psychopath but I’m not sure this is possible at scale, or even at all.

SyzygistSix 5y ago
The best venues I found are coffeshop/bars where primarily local people gather, with a smattering of interesting people from out of town, with an atmosphere that encourages free speech and inquiry. Enough of a public house to be inclusive but the trolls are well-moderated. There is a level of decorum, granted, a low bar in places I frequent, that people must maintain or you get kicked out. Unfortunately there seem to be less places like this now.

zthrowaway 5y ago

The knitting community has become very political in the past few years. And a lot of people feel left out. My point being that just about every facet of life has been invaded by political stances that nobody wanted to be involved in and some are left to conform or feel pushed out.

BizarroLand 5y ago
I read an article where an online knitting community was invaded by far-right trolls and it caused a massive rift. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ban-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ba...

blacktriangle 5y ago

Have you been to a knitting forum lately? Holy shit they were one of the first to get heavily politicizes. You'll be ostracized from r/knitting if you're not left of Stalin.

snegu 5y ago
Aside from the constant stream of projects with different pride flag colors, what politics have you seen on r/knitting? I never even saw the Karen Templar controversy discussed there. Now, Ravelry is a whole other story...
SyzygistSix 5y ago
The word I get from a knitting friend (absolutely not left of Stalin, more a centrist Democrat and corporate apologist) is that disingenuous right wing trolls started disrupting the knitting forums by being intentionally confrontational.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Were the trolls also Russians?

jimbilly22 5y ago

This is spot on. The only wrinkle -- Twitter could actually do something to create separate communities if they wanted. Some large investors have asked them to. They've drafted up plans to create a separate space for financial discussion. Just haven't acted on it. I really just think it comes down to Twitter being poorly run. I know Paul Singer made a run to have Dorsey replaced as CEO, but eventually backed off. They seem to lean into the divisiveness. It may be beneficial for short-term engagement but it essentially creates a negative emotional experience for customers. And that's going to come home to roost eventually.

minitoar 5y ago
Twitter has announced they are working on a feature called “Communities”.
- jimbilly22 5y ago
  it's a good move.

Taylor_OD 5y ago

Do you have a lot of unwanted things in your twitter feed? Sure during major events some things creep into mine but it's rare that I get a lot of political talk because I don't follow that many people who tweet political things. You can also use lists to curate this. I'm sure there are great twitter knitting lists that wouldnt have political tweet in them. The lists are less used than reddits subreddits but they function in a similar way.

overspeed 5y ago

> What makes it especially toxic, I think, is its lack of separation of communities. Interesting that you say this because Reddit users will tell you that this is a problem in itself since it creates echo chambers that validate the viewpoints you already hold.

kaba0 5y ago
Hobby level “echo-chambers” have never been a problem, eg. kitting will likely have a balanced political view. Problematic groups are the ones that have nothing else but a very specific ideology as a common point, eg. r/conservative or the like (as well as the left-leaning counterparts) — occasionally viewing them is not bad imo, if one spends sufficient time in other places as well. The problem is when somebody wants to spend all of their time there, shutting off any alternative source of information.

thejackgoode 5y ago

>> What makes it especially toxic, I think, is its lack of separation of communities. Jack said in the infamous interview to Joe Rogan, that they have an explicit goal to mix communities to avoid echo-chambering of ideas and views. Not sure if what you mean is an accident or intended effect (IMO they do a bad job)

DaniloDias 5y ago

Upvote: I was entertained or this idea reflects my tribe: Downvotes: almost universally “I hate that tribe” It would be better if they reported on someone’s ratio- so you could intuit if the Milieu of the people who downvote. I’d be nice to discover if the people downvoting you are quantitative haters.

Chris2048 5y ago

What we really need is skin-in-the-game. Voting is free. flag something as bad that isn't and there are no consequences. If a vote represented a stake of some kind, then there would be consequences in being wrong. I'd bury specifics though so that the vote isn't (too) influenced. Maybe even random voting would work (every user must complete a "quota" of questions for comments they have read).

dragonwriter 5y ago

> The problem is, is supposedly, upvote = adds to the conversation, downvote = detracts from conversation. That's the HN theory. The twitter theory is that dislikes, like likes and every other behavior on the site is a signal to feed into an engagement optimization algorithm. Twitter has zero interest in conversation quality for its own sake, and every interest in optimizing audience size and engagement.

ChildOfChaos 5y ago

I used to love twitter back around 2007 to early 2010's but as it became more popular it became more toxic and now Reddit is becoming the same with a lot of people spreading nonsense or politics. The one benefit of reddit is I can choose the subs I go on, the problem is there are still a lot of subs that are of a topic I would enjoy that end up getting toxic as well. So i'm trying to find a balance, because reddit for example does give me a lot of my news in topics I love and it's great for finding stuff, like a good movie, book, youtube stuff etc, but then the downside is getting bigger and bigger each year. I struggle to cut it out completely but I also struggle to find any tool that curates content in a good enough way. Everything is just noise and nonsense online with a small amount of good stuff, but very little that focuses on just giving you that. Everything just needs clicks and attention, I want something that doesn't need that and just gives me the type of stuff I want, not on a schedule, but when there is actually something worthwhile to say.

daaaang 5y ago

> if you just want to talk about knitting, you can avoid the people talking about politics Ever since r/the_donald and the other white supremacy reddits, politics has spilled into pretty much every good subreddit, no matter how niche.

itsoktocry 5y ago

>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. I don't find Twitter any more or less toxic than any other platform, and it's because I'm free to participate in the communities I choose. If the people you follow are constantly talking politics, and that annoys you, why are you following them?

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

They should have dummy agree/disagree buttons that disappear once selected and has no function other than to satisfy the malcontents that the machine has recorded their opinion.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree. I feel its actually We agree, We disagree. The points induce conformity as its now with likes and shares with every social media and in-spite of personal opinions most will stick with what the majority do. This can be easily resolved by hiding the points and if it serves the purpose of validation then showing it to the owner alone, I've done so in the forum I run and has improved the quality of discussions. But those point numbers are the bread and better of social media, Who will let go of those sweet dopamine triggers? Twitter cannot chase both conformity and quality of discussions. Reddit went from latter to now a half-baked social media, But still can produce some quality discussions because of the topic silo of subreddits.