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Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

• new_guy 5y ago
  On my social site we have over 160 different reactions, it's a constantly evolving thing reflecting current trends and memes etc (we also had them long before FB). But the one thing that's really interesting is out of all the 'negative' reactions the 'dislike' was ALWAYS taken personally, people used to qualify it with a comment 'disliking the post, not you' etc. And if they didn't the OP would take it personally. But when we renamed it from 'dislike' to 'disagree' that problem just evaporated. Human nature is just weird.
  • Angostura 5y ago
    Dislike is more emotionally loaded. It's also ambiguous - do you dislike the comment, or do you dislike the commenter? You can't "disagree the commenter"
    • DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      What if the "New post" form required users to choose between "Like/Dislike" or "Other people need to see this/Other people don't need to see this" for their posts' rating? That way it separates the content's "likeability" from people's desire to spread it. I'm thinking of things like Tiananmen Square protest aftermath photos: people don't want to "like" it, but I'm sure they'd agree that people need to see them.
      • celeritascelery 5y ago
        I feel like “other people should not see this” is already the function of a downvote. Problem is, it is used for two different kinds of content; spam/trolling and “things I have a negative ideological reaction to”. And no person wants to admit it’s the second one when they are downvoting.
• helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  The trouble with up and down buttons, or like and dislike is that they often are only used by the lovers or haters - the 10-20% of people at the opposite ends of the 'likeability spectrum'. I've never figured out if up/down votes mean the content is good or that people agree with it? (the old issue of people liking death announcements/obituaries) On HN I tend not to downvote unless the person is writing like they're on Reddit, or in an offensive/confrontational manner.
  • Vaslo 5y ago
    To add to your point (kind of) the dislikes are often caused by brigading and a bunch of people just get onto the site to vote down something in a community they don’t care about, ruining it for normal users to even see.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > I've never figured out if up/down votes mean the content is good or that people agree with it? Most social sites have guidelines that downvotes are only supposed to be used for comments that break their guidelines. On HN and Reddit it seems many people ignore this and readily downvote opinions they disagree with or comments they simply don’t want to hear. This is most obvious on posts about contentious topics (politics, police, social media, drugs) where well-written posts quickly accumulate downvotes if they don’t agree with the popular sentiment on on HN. It only takes a few instances of seeing your well-written, polite comments with citations being downvoted immediately to -3 to know that unpopular opinions aren’t welcome. That’s how the echo chamber is propagated.
    • skissane 5y ago
      > Most social sites have guidelines that downvotes are only supposed to be used for comments that break their guidelines. On HN and Reddit it seems many people ignore this and readily downvote opinions they disagree with or comments they simply don’t want to hear. On HN they aren’t ignoring anything; the original HN guideline, set by pg himself, is that downvoting for disagreement is okay here. (I don’t necessarily agree with that guideline, but I didn’t start this site.)
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Facebook has an option to “See fewer posts like this”. Select the three dots icon on the upper right corner of a post (mobile app) to see it. It doesn’t notify the person that you’ve chosen to not see their posts, so there’s no social risk in clicking it. I use it liberally and it works. I check Facebook maybe a couple times a month and almost never see anything I don’t want to see any more.
  • DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    How does Facebook's engine score similarity between posts, exactly?
    • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      Obviously we don’t see the inner workings of algorithms, from Facebook’s feed to HN’s upvote/downvote/flag/decay system. However, my sense is that by clicking the button I see fewer posts from the person who posted it, which is often quite effective at shaping my feed the way I want it anyway. Facebook does also seem to do some basic classification of hot topics (politics in particular) such that hiding a few politics posts results in fewer politics posts even from other people, too. Likes are upvotes, so it’s also important to hit the like button on content you want to see more of, and to not hit the like button on content you don’t want to see. I know it sounds obvious, but I know people who refuse to press Like buttons because they object to the concept of Likes. Using likes and the “hide post” features to curate a feed doesn’t take much more effort than upvotes and downvotes and it’s very effective at shaping my feed, in my experience. I think too many tech people simply ignore those features and can’t understand why their feed is only showing them content that other people are engaging with (often arguments).
    • smolder 5y ago
      Part of this is their capability of processing image posts and giving it a text description. For example Facebook will look at a jpeg of an old man with some text on it and use image recognition to actually determine a description of "photo of old man saying 'top text bottom text'". I've seen these descriptions appear in the page and they're pretty impressive accuracy-wise. Beyond that, comparing posts for similarity is likely mundane stuff like who wrote it, associated words, the type of people that engage, and how.
• WillDaSilva 5y ago
  > The expression to feed into an anonymous algorithm that we don’t just not like something — that we actually dislike it. The author seems to assume that this sort of interaction would lead to these algorithms recommending similar content less, but these algorithms tend to prioritize engagement, not enjoyment. Downvotes are a form of engagement, so don't be surprised if these algorithms use your downvote patterns to learn what to show you to make you angry, upset, and engaged.
  • peakaboo 5y ago
    Reddit had downvotes which means every thread is full of people agreeing with eachother. Creates an echo chamber. People don't want to get downvoted so they eventually stop posting. It's great for creating perception bubbles. Everyone agrees!
    • drstewart 5y ago
      Yeah, my experience has been that any downvote system will turn an audience that's divided 51-49 to one that's partitioned 51-0 in very short order. If anything, I've come to the conclusion that downvoting should be completely removed from most online platforms.
      • irjustin 5y ago
        What's happening in Hnews then? Is it bad?
        • drstewart 5y ago
          HN is a rare exception to this effect due to its more focused niche (though the bubble effect is definitely there to some degree). I'm more referencing larger platforms, particularly reddit.
          • spywaregorilla 5y ago
            A subreddit tends to be more focused than HN. I'd chalk it up to user maturity, not that HN is without great fault on this either.
• kerblang 5y ago
  I'd like to propose an "informative" button and a "political" button so that I could ask to see things that are useful & intelligent but have nothing to do with politics.
  • potatoman22 5y ago
    Reminds me of steam reviews
  • whitexn--g28h 5y ago
    I don’t think that the right and the left agree on what’s informative and what’s political.
• oconnor663 5y ago
  Downvotes on something like reddit are very different from downvotes on something like Facebook. Imagine being a teenager and getting downvoted by your own friends. These are complicated tradeoffs of course, but that's an important part of the story.
  • TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
    Negative feedback from your peer group is normal, and provides conformity pressures, which is important when forming and maintaining a community bound together by a common culture.
    • selfhoster11 5y ago
      It's also a way to apply peer pressure.
      • TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
        Yes. Peer pressure is a natural part of tribal or communal affiliation. A culture is a set of norms, customs, and beliefs common to a group. Maintenance and propagation of that culture requires a complex combination of positive and negative social feedback in order to keep those beliefs persisting, part of which is peer pressure. Extreme peer pressure can be bad, just as any social extreme is bad. But it isn't universally bad if used sparingly and for a reason.
    • sfink 5y ago
      In my opinion, that mechanism didn't survive the transition to online. Or rather, it survived all too well; it grew fangs and learned how to breathe fire. In an in-person peer group, there are a lot more subtle gradations in disapproval. "Dude, that's not cool!" is very different from looking at someone askance. Overt signals require everyone else present to take a position on something. Subtle ones don't. Being downvoted on a Facebook peer group of teens is an overt signal. Everyone is going to take sides. It's not that it doesn't happen in person, it's just that online it makes everything into a Big Deal. That produces bland communities with fear-based conformity. To do better, you'd need something that can support richer communication, allowing for more nuance. One possibility that comes to mind is emojis -- a group can (and does) form its own vocabulary based on emoji-only responses that may only have meaning within a group. But they can serve the purpose. If I were a teen, or more active in social forums, I might know if that's already happening.
• crazy_horse 5y ago
  I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid, and it's worse when multiple people decide they want to play that game and then the site software decides you get less rights than everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would I participate in that? It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power. If downvotes don't matter, if I should ignore them, then they should not exist. I'm tired of sites that build in pathological behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The world is not binary.
  • spinax 5y ago
    It's especially bad on a site like HN - an account only gets a downvote capability if they've received what is it, 400 upvotes? - so you're assured that every downvote you receive is someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote (or are a serial link poster getting link karma upvotes). There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.
    • bitexploder 5y ago
      HN has a certain discussion parameters and moderation system on purpose. The goal on HN isn’t to allow open ended discussions on all topics. I for one appreciate that we can talk computers and technology here and that the moderators keep the average level of the discussion high. If I want politics and other garbage I’ll go somewhere else. I have never experienced any issues here. Been here a looong time. Don’t be edgy and contribute positively to discussions with curiosity and you will do fine.
• iamadog1029 5y ago
  I don't find that voting systems are a positive evolution, generally. It's a non-committal way to interface for people that don't contribute any tangible content to a discussion. I remember when Facepunch Studios integrated it, which was simulating SA. It was years ago and I was a youth, but I remember, in myself at least, attempting to cater to voters. I don't suspect I fall far from the average interaction in that capacity. And I think that breeds disingenuous user interaction. And FP was a bog-standard BBS forum, the only thing that decided the content stream was moderation and new posts/threads; using votes to promote or demote content streams - targeting, [at least] has been pretty widely discussed as a hazard and that's all I see it as. So between those two features, targeting and disingenuous posting (itself a form of targeting), I think that voting systems at large are a real detractor in general conversation. And if we consider malefactors and echo formation... I just don't see a whole lot in the way of good other than streamlining and automating moderation, which is appropriate in some circumstances, in general conversation I think it just compromises the whole thing. Of course, it's all dependent on the design of the website. If you're there simply to generate reams of data for marketing teams to sop up, that's something you can do with this sort of system. But if you're designing for legitimate vulnerability and honest to god expression 4chan is probably the best model in a sort of ironic twist. It's user-streamlined, no account, setup or email, the page is barebones, you don't need to post anything whatever and there's no history to haunt you. And maybe you could argue you can't trust anything on 4chan, but you could argue the same anywhere, and in fact I'd assume that the quantity of Facebook and Reddit are far more rife with artifice than 4chan. But FB and R aren't actually designed for absolute expression, they're designed to generate marketing feedback.
• likeafox 5y ago
  > Reddit moderators who run subreddits are given the choice to allow the function. When it’s enabled, it’s used as a filter to sort out divisive posts from the rest but also leads to problems like abuse based on opinions and introducing a feeling of negativity into the communities. Just want to clarify this: reddit inc. doesn't really offer communities a way to "disable" downvoting. The subreddits referenced at the link in this article are using the custom CSS to hide the downvote button. Notably this does not impact users who are browsing 1) via the mobile app, a substantial to majority percentage of traffic based on the community in question 2) with custom CSS disabled [which can be done via a global reddit setting or via popular extensions like RES 3) via the reddit desktop redesign ['r3']. In the desktop redesign, some communities try to continue hiding downvotes by using the customization tools to set the button to a transparent png - but this is blatantly ineffective - the downvote hitbox remains accessible and feedback is offered to the user on a successful click when they see the score change. I have some experience with this, having helped researcher Nate Matias test the impact of downvote behavior in a community I'm involved with. You can see the summary of the resulting paper Do Downvote Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior? here https://citizensandtech.org/2018/01/do-downvote-buttons-cause-unruly-online-behavior/ https://citizensandtech.org/2018/01/do-downvote-buttons-caus...
  • fuzzylightbulb 5y ago
    > You can see the summary of the resulting paper Do Downvote Buttons Cause Unruly Online Behavior? here https://citizensandtech.org/2018/01/do-downvote-buttons-caus https://citizensandtech.org/2018/01/do-downvote-buttons-caus... I didn't click your link, but based on Betteridge's law of headlines I am going to just assume the answer is "no".
    • kubb 5y ago
      Has anyone yet written an article headlined “is the Betteridge law of headlines a reliable way to asses article contents”?
      • mumblemumble 5y ago
• pdimitar 5y ago
  Down-votes are, plain and simple, mob rule. There's ample historical evidence that the fact that many people believe in something absolutely does not make it correct. I'd even venture to go to the other extreme: if many people believe something to be correct there's IMO 50% chance of it being severely and hilariously wrong. Watch a few National Geographic documentaries on monkeys and how their tribes are constantly at war with each other. It's eye-opening. They fling poop at whomever they don't like, not only in the other tribe, but inside their own as well. Like @crazy_horse said, I have zero problems being wrong or engaging in a discussion from which I might emerge with my mind changed. But I don't like turning myself into target practice for poop flinging masters.
• ramoz 5y ago
  side note /s: Spotify would know me a whole lot better too & we can deemphasize glorified "we know you best models"
• jkingsbery 5y ago
  I think it's worth distinguishing between "I disagree with this comment" and "This comment is not well written: it is superficial, makes extraordinary claims without backup, or is illogical." My one problem with downvotes is it's hard to know which is meant.
• amadeuspagel 5y ago
  One problem with downvotes, at least the way they are implemented in reddit and HN, is that they cancel out upvotes. You are not able to see how many upvotes a post got, only how many upvotes minus downvotes.
  • em-bee 5y ago
    very much this. i would really like to see the actual number of up and downvotes on a post.
  • TchoBeer 5y ago
    This always bothered me in some subconscious part of my brain, thanks for putting it into words. Reddit even lets you sort by controversial posts, so they clearly store both upvotes and downvotes, why do they have to display them as one number?
• ulucs 5y ago
  A person with extremely mainstream views suggests that the mainstream should be able to bury opinions that do not align with theirs. Oh my, how surprising.
• yoran 5y ago
  I think Americans don't give enough attention to the bi-party system as an important cause for the current political divide, and increasingly, civil divide. My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling. I've never seen such disdain or hatred towards people on the other side of the political spectrum as in the US. I'm from continental Europe and that divide there is much less present. And I think it's because we have so many different parties, that the "us vs them" feeling isn't so powerful. Sure, social media and the completely politicized media landscape exacerbate the issue. But I think the root cause is the two-party political system.
  • mindcrime 5y ago
    But I think the root cause is the two-party political system. I get what you're saying, but I don't completely agree. Firstly because, to the extent that we can say we have a "two party system" that itself is an effect with a deeper cause. And if you buy the theory behind Duverger's Law[1], the fundamental cause is the mechanism we use for elections, with "first past the post" voting in single-member districts. My second quibble concerns more of the definition of "two party system". Clearly we do not have a "two party system" in the most literal sense, as there are plenty of other political parties in the US, and several of them routinely have candidates elected to office (the Libertarian and Green parties come to mind) albeit mostly at lower levels. So yes, we have a system where two parties are dominant, but they are not exclusive and I think that difference matters. Why? Because I believe talking about us having a "two party system" creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop further enforcing the Duverger's Law effect and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
    • yoran 5y ago
      OK, the US doesn't strictly have a two-party system. But in practice it is, at least at the federal level (which dominates the political discussions). Sure, in theory a Libertarian or Green candidate could become president in 2024. But that will never happen, because the media landscape is strongly colored by either the Democrat or Republican party . So they have no incentive to let anyone but from their own party come to power. I get your point that denoting it a "two-party system" only makes it worse. But I don't know how to bring it up without mentioning it :-)
• username3 5y ago
  Society needs downvotes with context. Show me downvotes by left leaning and right leaning users. Left and right downvoting each other is noise. Show me when an echo chamber disagrees with itself.
  • anigbrowl 5y ago
    Yes. Downvotes are vectors and amendable to cluster analysis. I've been proposing this on HN for a long long time but the answer has always been 'data explosion, arc is meant to be small and fast and this will break it.'
    • manx 5y ago
      I'm researching different voting algorithms for HN. If you're interested, please contact me (email in profile).
• notriddle 5y ago
  Has this person even used Reddit? Or StackOverflow? Or even GitHub? I’ve used social platforms with downvote buttons; saying that they make you feel bad and should be removed is like saying that cigarettes should be removed because they smell bad. But to be specific, instead of just using metaphors: * A downvote carries less information than an upvote does. If a feature request gets a lot of upvotes, the voters are saying you should ship it. If it gets a lot of downvotes, does it mean that the voters don’t think it solves a real problem (so you should just drop it)? Or does it mean that they think the solution is bad (so it should be tweaked)? A post usually justifies itself, so the meaning of upvotes is obvious, while it rarely has one, single, obvious counter argument, so a downvote could mean any number of things. * Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really think strengthening the filter bubble would help? * Downvotes get used for bullying. Their application for this is obvious, relatively low-effort, and if it influences a sorting algo, can have long-lasting effects on someone’s social reach. There are definitely groups with vote bots on Reddit and HN. * On platforms with anonymous voting, it creates paranoia. You have people telling you your content is bad, but you don’t know who and you don’t know why. People say that they only downvote content that doesn’t add anything to the discussion at all, but what you see seems different, where informative but unorthodox comments get downvoted seemingly because the voters disagree. Who’s doing that? Reddit won’t tell you, so you’re forced to guess, and that’s really damaging to a community, because people get accused of abusing the downvote button with no way of ever proving it right or wrong. * On platforms with public voting, someone can lash out at you for downvoting them. It’s very easy to take it personally (see point 1 on how downvoting is low-information).
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    >"Downvotes get used for bullying." Absolutely. This is especially noticeable on the state/city/town subreddits where political partisans consistently dogpile on posts that go against their message.
  • Pxtl 5y ago
    > * Ranking, in general, creates filter bubbles. Do you really think strengthening the filter bubble would help? Discerning between truth and misinformation is also a "filter bubble". Any community-driven system that discerns between "this is what we like" and "this is what we hate" is also being used to discern between "this is what is true" and "this is what is false". Online communities with healthy cultures and downvotes quickly destroy misinformation. In those circumstances, the filter bubble is a good thing. People pushing misinformation should be pushed either to stop posting misinfo or leave. The challenge is that the people who are doing the most work on this subject - like Facebook and Twitter - have chosen to make it invisible. We don't know how Twitter and Facebook rank their posts and replies. But they obviously have invisible powers as leadership to identify which voices on their systems are "good" and which aren't, and give those "good" voices outsized power in communication. But to me it seems obvious that something that takes Reddit's simple up/down interface but combines it with the kind of credibility ranking that Twitter does (where people who've been established as harmful don't actually have as much visibility or influence in the system) would be ideal. Give the leadership tools to establish a preference for fact, and you also give them tools to establish a preference for their particular worldview. You can't separate those. If you want a discussion system that supports fact over misinfo, you need to have a discussion system that enforces a community bias and creates a filter bubble, and then give the leadership the tools to control that filter bubble and bias, in the hopes that the leadership prefers truth over misinfo. Otherwise the community will organically create its own filter bubble on whatever biases it develops. And if you have no filtering at all, you get 4chan, where abuse and misinformation run rampant.
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is. I vote very rarely here, and when I do, it's almost exclusively as a vague nod of acknowledgement to someone who responded to me but to whom I have nothing else to say. It's weird to me when I get a large burst of 100+ positive votes on a comment. I think in general voting is pretty good as implemented on HN, but I would insist that voting rights be taken away for any thread you're participating in. Reddit seems worse at this. It feels strongly like if you're in a 1:1 debate with someone they will downvote each response you make and that feels... stupid. Generally I think votes work reasonably well as a credibility system. Not the mean or total votes, because they're skewed by a small number of hugely upvoted content, but the median as inferred from a quick one page view of their posts. Honestly having a little tracker that shows the running median net vote count of a users last 25 posts would be a nice forcing mechanism I think to not be a little shit. I don't mind saying controversial things and getting downvoted. Sometimes, particularly on reddit, you might just need to accept that you're dealing with a particularly moronic group of individuals (for me, especially, on gaming subreddits). I would assume 99% of people have a running median of 1-5 at any given point. But you do encounter people who are constantly hitting their head against -5's. That is useful information. These people are either pretty consistently trolls, weirdly mono-topic obsessed ranters, or, and I'll happily tank downvotes here, aggressively conservative posters grumbling about how their first principals rights justify acting in a selfish manner to the detriment of others or how free markets solve everything and definitely don't have massive negative externalities for everything. People decry "Echo chamber!" but in reality most people consistently grinding their face along the bottom of negative downvotes don't actually have anything valuable to add to most conversations, and are just angry people. There is an enormous spectrum of opinions welcome on this site.
  • underseacables 5y ago
    > I'm surprised voting is as popular as it is. Voting is power and people love one thing more than power, and that’s greater power. Imagine if there were no up or down votes, and how people might respond to having no ability to silently express their opinions.
    • 5y ago
• IshKebab 5y ago
  I feel like the solution is to allow downvotes, but not to allow the total score to go below 1.
• laurex 5y ago
  I'm curious why downvoting feels painful or frustrating. Perhaps I'm majorly naive. When I post a comment in HN, I sometimes feel a twinge of nervousness, since I'm not attempting any level of anonymity and I'm aware that some people have strong opinions, sometimes become personal, and cancel culture is a thing, but at the end of the day, if I'm downvoted, it's only a comment on the internet, not something about which I feel personally judged. People are entitled to their opinions, I'm not attached to them agreeing. Sometimes, after I write something, I think, 'I could have phrased that more effectively' and sometimes I even change my mind based on someone else's more informed points. This is why I engage in discussion, not to be right, but to explore things I'm interested in and to learn. I appreciate downvoting in an environment like HN, where usually it seems to be wielded in service of better conversation, but I also have seen it used to push down voices that might be simply passionate. There is a certain hegemony that may be enforced by downvotes. ("Why is THIS on HN?" is a clue). Still, there's an amazing level of thoughtful moderation, and I prefer to notice the culture from a slightly sociological perspective rather than thinking it needs to change by fiat, and make my small contributions from a slightly different perspective. I don't comment on things that feel emotional to me, and sometimes things make me frustrated. I think downvoting is actually a good tool- however, I hope someone will educate me here.
  • laurex 5y ago
    Note: I love that this comment was downvoted - very meta - but I would have appreciated hearing more about the thinking behind it :)
• jokoon 5y ago
  I've been arguing that websites should only allow users to downvote.
  • TchoBeer 5y ago
    I wonder if only allowing downvotes would lead to the same result as only allowing upvotes.
    • manx 5y ago
      With a different ranking formula it's actually quite promising. I created a simple simulation and some plots: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring
      • jokoon 5y ago
        I don't understand this simulation, did you have real users who could only downvote?
        • manx 5y ago
          No real users. It's a simplified simulation of a frontpage and how random users interact with it. Have a look at the code: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring/blob/master/scoring-simulation.scala#L104 https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring/blob/master/scor... I started to write another simulation with the goal to be more realistic, i.e. backed by real statistics from HN, like "how many votes arrive on each rank of the frontpage", or "what is the distribution of submission arrival".
• kevwil 5y ago
  101% disagree. In my opinion, social media and comment sections are already a fire-hose of negativity without consequences. We don't need to enable passive-aggressive hate any further.
• intrasight 5y ago
  What's the context of this "bring back". I only engage in public discussions on Reddit and HN and both have downvotes. And I'm not going to read the article just to try to figure out what platform he's referring to. Is there a platform that had downvotes and then subsequently the feature was removed?
• mindcrime 5y ago
  Vis-à-vis HN and the discussion of down-voting here specifically: There are definitely times when the down-voting is pathetically petty and inane. One of the most glaring examples I've noticed is this: any time somebody makes a post asking for book recommendations in any form (eg, "What's a book that influenced you?" or "What books do you recommend for $REASON?", or however they choose to phrase it), no matter what the rest of the content of your response is, IF you include anything by Ayn Rand you will get down-voted. That's it... just mentioning an Ayn Rand book like The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged will provoke some people to downvote you. You could scarcely get more petty and ridiculous if you tried. It's not like I'm even talking about overtly political threads, or a comment that specifically endorses Rand or her philosophy / ideology / etc. That I could (almost) understand the occasional downvote at least, just because her stuff is moderately controversial in some circles. But to think that merely having the audacity to include a certain author's books on a list is reason to downvote a comment? And it wouldn't matter if it were Rand or anybody, the fundamental point is the same. It's one thing to dislike an author, but "C'mon, man..." as they say.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    > IF you include anything by Ayn Rand you will get down-voted. [...] I could (almost) understand the occasional downvote at least, just because her stuff is moderately controversial in some circles. To explain why your post was (as you so correctly predicted) downvoted: Her stuff isn't "moderately controversial in some circles"; it is utter bullshit through and through, and a surefire indicator that the proponent is either stupid, misled, motivated by hateful politics, or two or more thereof. Any downvotes are utterly well-deserved and a valuable life lesson that should be taken to heart.
• robertwt7 5y ago
  Downvote is unwelcoming for newcomer, create possibility for toxic environment, and useless See downvotes in stackoverflow and reddit. Why not flag instead? I’ve seen many people being afraid to get downvoted that they finally back off from posting question
  • anigbrowl 5y ago
    Downvoting is like saying people disliked what you posted. Flagging is like saying you shouldn't even have posted it (because it's spam or severely violates the guidelines). There's even less transparency around flagging and vouching and it's just as easily abused.
• bencollier49 5y ago
  Ohhhh, gods it's another rebranded Medium page. Couldn't read it, paywalled. Flagged.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Macha 5y ago
  I find linking the rise in partisanship to social media doesn't appear to be supported by the shared graphs, which indicate whatever caused the state change happened in the 90s, which is before social media took off?
  • isabelc 5y ago
    I think the rise of 24-hour news networks are partly to blame.
• nathanaldensr 5y ago
  "Society" needs neither downvoting nor upvoting; it's a false dichotomy. What we need is to eliminate social media entirely. People need to get out in the real world and talk to others; that way, each person has to expend real energy to state their opinions one way or the other. It's easy to hate someone remotely over the internet and even easier to click a vote button, no matter what way the thumb is pointing. What's much harder is participating in physical society.
• michaelmarion 5y ago
  Can we bring back the time when there was no social media instead? I feel like that's what society desperately needs.
  • anigbrowl 5y ago
    I have a better idea, why not just un-invent violence and scarcity? Then social media will be wonderful because bad things will no longer exist in the world. Social media is not the cause of toxicity. It's a mirror for it, albeit a collection of various distorted mirrors that many people aggressively manipulate. People were shitty to each other on usenet and bulletin boards, people were shitty to each other via broadcast media, people were shitty to each other via newspapers, and people have been shitty to each other in person. People have tribal tendencies and some tribes are more aggressive than others. Sometimes you have to choose between different tribal affiliations because conflict is happening whether or not you want it to. We are living in one such period and the internet (like many previous iterations of communication technology) is having an accelerative effect.
• underseacables 5y ago
  It is amazing how much we have accelerated the shift towards a society where no one‘s feelings is allowed to be hurt.
• est 5y ago
  Just a thought experiment, what if we can vote against one political candidate. Does this bring better or worse democracy?
  • joelthelion 5y ago
    Even better: rate each candidate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • shagie 5y ago
    You have candidates A, and B and a fringes candidate Ca, Da, and Eb. The "a" and "b" are broadly supportive of A and B, but their own party (think green tends to align with liberal and church goers tend to align with conservative). Now, a supporter of the A party ideals is faced with "minus vote" B or Eb. And likewise, a supporter of the B party ideals is faced with "minus vote A, Ca, or Da". And so, instead of getting a relatively moderate A or B, you're much more likely to get an extremist in one of the minor parties. Consider the "I'm not 100% in favor of B, but I really don't want Ca, or Da to get elected - how do I vote?" You get into the comparison of voting systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system... ... and a minus vote system would likely fail a number of the tests. To that end, it would likely result in a worse democracy. For https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_California#Results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... - consider would the Peace and Freedom party or American Independent Party have won? Are either of their views more representative of California than those of the Democratic Party? No... I don't think that such a voting system would work.
• JulianMorrison 5y ago
  The Facebook thing shows the absurdity of trying to tie people's hands - in practice the "haha" reaction has become the downvote, only now it's spiteful mockery. Gee, that was an improvement. There are interventions you can make on the interface to improve civility of discourse, but they're more complicated than just trying to crudely stifle anger.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  I've noticed a difference between downvoting and non-downvoting discussions systems. In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion. Note that this isn't "the truth" or "the consensus of the community" but of the people engaged on the subject. For example, if you see an otherwise-liberal community discussing gun-rights, the gun owners within that community will flood in and are highly motivated on the subject, and so the consensus will reflect their interest in the subject. But either way, consensus. Without the downvotes, the top post is often misinformation or just trash. Because a small, motivated group pushes it up, and the rest of the participants can only argue against it but not drive it back down... this creates the "engagement-based content" that aggregators crave. The problem, of course, is that bots and sockpuppets are treated the same as established community members and can skew the "consensus". Realistically, the leadership of an online community needs to be able to identify who are credible voices on a subject and give them the power to steer the conversation. Yes, it's not egalitarian, but these systems never have been.
  • hashkb 5y ago
    But with downvotes, we ensure that only popular opinions get visibility, defeating the entire purpose of sharing ideas within a community.
    • Pxtl 5y ago
      When the unpopular opinions are things like "COVID is just the flu" and "climate change is fake", both of which have a substantial contingent that will support them, those ideas getting downvoted into oblivion is not a bad outcome.
      • hashkb 5y ago
        Sure. But it's a double edged sword. "You should wear your mask" is getting downvoted (edit: I'm using the term loosely here, I hope it tracks) across the country and responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. We need to engage with ideas we don't like, and be open to persuasion. Downvotes preclude that.
• gnicholas 5y ago
  > “If we just gave people a very simple, frictionless way to say, ‘I disagree with this,’ you would probably reduce a massive amount of the sort of negative swaller that exists inside of social media.” — Ashton Kutcher Is "swaller" a word? I've never heard it and don't see it in my dictionary.
• godshatter 5y ago
  I greatly dislike downvoting. Fundamentally, in my opinion, it's an act of censorship. Especially on sites that ultimately hide that information after a certain threshold, as HN does. It's no different in my mind than turning your nose up at someone or trying to talk over someone in a real-life conversation (assuming those still happen). I would much rather upvote the good comments, so that they rise to the top. I probably spend half my upvotes on this forum and others to undo what I consider to be unfair downvotes. If there is a comment I don't like and it bothers me, then it's better for me to reply to it rather than just signal my disapproval at it. The only time I would downvote personally is for something like spam, and I rarely even do that. I just think it's better all around to be positive instead of negative.
• Causality1 5y ago
  Downvotes aren't going to fix anything until algorithms stop segregating us into individual groups of uniform opinion. How can you downvote what you never even see in the first place?
• lonelyasacloud 5y ago
  Sure being on the wrong end of a downvoting is not pleasant - particularly when it's unexpected or undeserved. But it's not "sticks and stones", and without it, how can anyone tell if they're wasting their time preaching to the choir?
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  My mental model of downvote systems is that systems without them allow more diverse thoughts. Imagine a topic where everyone feels compelled to vote, skewed about 51% to 49%. Without downvotes, your top comments are going to be a mix of both sides. Opinions are about 50-50 and comments will look like that. It will feel frustrating, like in the article, because you see about half of these posts from those evil Others, and have no way to disagree aside from commenting. With downvotes, the 51% side’s score becomes 51-49=+2, and the 49% side’s score becomes 49-51=-2; below a never-read comment at zero! All the top comments are from the (slim) majority, making it feel like a strong consensus, when it isn’t. It will feel better to that 51%. Who knows what the 49% will do. Leave? Of course it’s never exactly as straightforward as that, but that’s the tendency. I like systems without downvotes because what you’re likely to see more proportionally reflects the diversity of opinions of the others on the site.
  • manx 5y ago
    A bit more information for your mental model: Afaik, reddit has a pretty stable upvote vs downvote ratio, like 7:1. (Sorry, no source, but I remember the reddit founder saying it in an interview). And in your calculations you assumed that every post receives the same number of votes. Also that is not true, because of ranking. Higher ranking posts get more views, more votes, more views and so on. In this case the upvote-downvote difference is different for two posts with different popularity, but same upvote:downvote ratio.
• seph-reed 5y ago
  Upvotes and downvotes are both old tech. "Applause" reactions/flags seem promising.
  • anigbrowl 5y ago
    'yay' vs 'boo' is just a different label for the same thing, no?
    • seph-reed 5y ago
      Nah. A flag is more than a "boo," much in the same way laws are (hopefully/sometimes) different from mob justice. It says: this is bad for x reason. And a single yay is very little investment of time, but applause can be made to take time. If someone wants to spend a 20s clicking "yay," that says quite a bit more. If combined with "reactions" you get a bit more nuance.
• sebringj 5y ago
  In my experience of HN and StackOverflow, at first, I did not like people downvoting my naive or thoughtless comments. Throughout the years, my reputation on StackOverflow grew and a little bit on HN since the bar is so much higher seems... but in any case, this has been a learning journey in being a more thoughtful and respectful contributor and without those downvotes, I wouldn't have had the self reflection to be better, as trivial as that may sound.
  • _game_of_life 5y ago
    This is my experience as well! I usually reflect on my unpopular comments and realize I could have been more considerate or worded things less rashly... Or my viewpoint is just unpopular. I find it genuinely difficult to relate to the other comments on here equating downvotes to oppression or even violence. If anything, my hope would be that Hacker News becomes MORE strictly moderated via downvotes, and maybe even starts banning some non-tech oriented politics. Now shower me with downvotes, 500+ karma daddies, to show the little ones it is okay.
    • sebringj 5y ago
      thoughtful and respectful :)
• chairmanwow1 5y ago
  I think opining on the internet should be rethought. I think that instead of the relatively opaque up/down, it should be a 2D grid of agree/disagree and good/bad argument. Allowing you to still commend users that you disagree with by noting they make solid logical arguments.
  • anigbrowl 5y ago
    Just look at the patterns of voting by user. If we interact regularly but only pay attention to the content of each others' comments, and sometimes agree and sometimes disagree, then there will be little correlation between our accounts. But if I have a personal dislike o you and make a thing out of downvoting every comment of yours that I see, that will become obvious very quickly.
• AlbertCory 5y ago
  This is a silly article. Add downvotes, don't add them -- it doesn't address the polarization issue he identifies. Many things can be and used to be individual choices and not societal issues open to debate (and mutual hatred). If you refuse to accept that, then everyone who doesn't make your choices becomes your enemy. I'm not lamenting the bygone days, since they sucked in numerous ways. But they did contains a kernel of truth, in that shrinking the size of public discourse is the only way to keep it civil.
• BoardsOfCanada 5y ago
  Perhaps there should be two different things to vote on: One for "agree/disagree with points made" and one for "constructive contribution to the discussion".
• maybe_pablo 5y ago
  I would like to see justified downvoting implemented instead. For example users should be able to counter-argument (as in a different reply mode) a post/comment, in that case If the counter-argument gets more upvotes than the parent post/comment then the parent comment should start greying out like it does here. Of course this doesn't even try to fix sybil attacks but I still would prefer it.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  It's my theory that we need voting systems that go in more than one dimension. Correctness, Humor, Politeness and other dimensions are somewhat orthogonal to each other, and trying to cram all of that into up/down just doesn't work.
• lazyjones 5y ago
  Downvotes are irrelevant, society needs to get off FB (today it marked a post of mine containing only a link to the CDC's website with no further text or emoticons as "misinformation") and possibly off all pure textual discussion media, since they mostly encourage spontaneous, irresponsible reactions instead of discourse. Even Tiktok's video responses are better than FB and Twitter...
• rendall 5y ago
  Can I read it without signing up?
  • anigbrowl 5y ago
    Just use an incognito window
    • rendall 5y ago
      Of course! Thanks
• scotty79 5y ago
  Killfiles too. If someone says something really bad you just put him there and he disappears from the site for you regardless of what he says or what threads he'll trigger next.
• 0x_rs 5y ago
  There ought to be better ways, if any is needed at all. Downvoting should never be free and unlimited (having requirements is fine, but only involves a bit more time and effort to the would-be disturbance), most of the time it turns into bashing opposition of the consensus, which is turns out to be wrong too often to permit it. Self-reinforcing mere beliefs without evidence or proofs doesn't make it any more valid, but hinders discussion completely. Not too long ago there was some drama about a fork and some harrasment allegations, and see how it turned out (still zero evidence about anything at all), yet anyone doubting was downvoted away. Also, I'd argue the ability to give "thumbs down" itself already is a child-cuddling system. I don't understand the need of such things at times, chronological sorting of parent replies may not be the most time-efficient for readers, but it's the most natural.
• tasty_freeze 5y ago
  I think it should be required that when a person downvotes a post or comment, they should need to supply a comment as to why. That would have multiple benefits. One, it is maddening to make a comment in earnest and get downvoted but no feedback why it was downvoted. Two, it would reduce the number of people who downvote a comment simply because they disagree as they would have to expose their own opinion and risk their own downvotes. I have no problems with people disagreeing with me and it can be enlightening if I learn something from the exchange. With a naked downvote I learn nothing.
  • Hitton 5y ago
    Although I agree that downvoting alone is not very constructive, if the comment is obviously spam/troll or especially when someone else already pointed out what is wrong with it, I don't see a problem.
    • LightG 5y ago
      Isn't that what flagging is for?
      • Groxx 5y ago
        It can be useful to have a range of signals. Flagging is a rather hard-line "this is not appropriate" mark that many are unwilling to make on borderline things, e.g. when only somewhat misleading or partially incorrect. Plus it requires clicking into the individual message, so you are required to see the contents twice, and can't do it quickly. That friction alone slows down using it on any softer or higher volume cases.
  • greggman3 5y ago
    downvoting to disagree is totally acceptable on HN I complained once and dang corrected me.
    • effingwewt 5y ago
      It's how I use it in reverse. I see my number tank and know people on HN don't agree. What I would like is the ability to hide my score. If I notice the drop I may check a comment to see what the disagreement was, but I stopped after several times of seeing nothing just the downvotes. Anyway, I don't need my number on every page I visit on HN, and would prefer the ability to hide it. I'd also love the ability to mute users. Some people post on here way too often for my tastes and always with the same rhetoric. I'm sure others feel the same. But, it is what it is. Nothing will ever be perfect, and the forced civility reminds me to be more civil IRL and I appreciate that. And it's probably good to see things I don't agree with, echo chambers are bad.
• deegles 5y ago
  I don't want to downvote articles or posts, I want to downvote people. Especially across multiple platforms. If I downvote a person's blog post, I want their Reddit comments to be less prioritized. I want them to show up less in my Google results. I want that to flow over into the results of people who have upvoted me, creating a web of influence over good vs bad content. I know, tons of pitfalls and shortcomings to an approach like this, but please try to think of an improvement to it rather than shooting it down immediately :) Of course, 100% accountability rapidly becomes a Black Mirror episode, but I think right now we're at the opposite end of the accountability spectrum.
  • temp0826 5y ago
    So like...codify cancel culture?
    • deegles 5y ago
      More like Web of Trust with reputation scores.
    • anigbrowl 5y ago
      I think the GP is asking for better filtering to see less of what s/he dislikes in the first place, rather than seeking to limit what I see.
• motohagiography 5y ago
  While I don't think they are useful, I have come to relish downvotes because if I have provoked a snide response at least it is sincere, where a downvote means I have threatened the integrity of a narrative - and that's when you know it's quality writing. Downvotes are a substitute for discourse. If want something better, post it. It's like someone wanted to design a product for a braying, superstitious mob and created an electronic thumbs down button. I'm all for giving voice to the voiceless, but downvotes aren't speech or a voice, they are a manipulation tool that encourage and reward the absolute worst quality of thought and reasoning. On HN they are somewhat and relatively judicious by convention, but it is not an exaggeration to say there is a cadre of even educated people who believe their intellectual role is not to establish truth or find consensus, but to direct "narrative," which means specifically to lie and decieve for power. Downvotes are not discourse, they are the exclusive tool of this so-called narrative control. I tolerate downvotes because they draw engagement, even if it is of an inferior kind, and ideally they will be converted from boos to discourse, perhaps even a snide remark.
  • anigbrowl 5y ago
    a downvote means I have threatened the integrity of a narrative - and that's when you know it's quality writing. Neither your premise nor your conclusion are valid. A downvote could simply mean you stated a counterfactual or alleged a fallacy. Nor can any automatic inference of quality be drawn. By your logic, someone who just posts the equivalent of fart noises and is habitually downvoted for doing so is a genius. Frankly, your comment's harping on shaping narrative seems like a case of projection.
    • motohagiography 5y ago
      But a downvote wouldn't correct that, whereas a comment improves the discouse because it captures the best they can do. What's left in relief is something closer to truth.
      • anigbrowl 5y ago
        Dumb
• billytetrud 5y ago
  Why did this article feel the need to put the political divide chart up there? You can clearly see the divide started long before the internet was a factor. The political divide has been caused by first past the post voting (which causes the 2 party system) and gerrymandering (which drastically exacerbates political radicalism).
• greggman3 5y ago
  I don't have a solution but my thinking at the moment is either (a) get rid of the downvote or (b) keep it to rank order of comments but don't show it to users including the commentor. That also means not showing it in aggregate. I wrote an extension to hide points for myself https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-points-exorcism/dpijcanaophgcblkpililldhmgomkjlo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-points-exorcism...
• EGreg 5y ago
  It's ironic that we can't downvote this article on Hacker News. Only upvote it.
• effingwewt 5y ago
  I have never, not once been able to downvote on HN and zi couldn't care less. If something is egregious there's always the flagging option. I don't see how anyone needs downvotes
• 08-15 5y ago
  What's really missing is a "meh" button, meaning "this was a waste of time". I'd have clicked it.
• eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Get rid of paywalls and we’ll talk.
• rpz 5y ago
  Society doesn't need a downvote or an upvote. I'd be happier with the removal of both buttons.
  • anigbrowl 5y ago
    First reply! How are you gonna deal with the spam that we know to appear and clutter up time-ordered systems? What's to stop me (or m tribal group) wrecking a good discussion by flooding it with 50 nonsense posts to take over the front page? Votes are absolutely imperfect and are not working as hoped. But they gained currency because sometimes any ranking system is better than none at all.
• sfink 5y ago
  Perhaps the model simply isn't rich enough. Right now, we model posts as either belonging to the good bucket or the bad bucket, and do various things (upvoting, downvoting, AI, ...) to guess the "right" bucket. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that a system based on polarization results in polarization? Which is not to say that just adding complexity is the right fix. Sure, you can add dislike + disagree + ijusthateyourguts buttons, or force votes to be justified (funny/incorrect/disagree/...), or whatever. But it's not obvious what's worth the overhead (UX-wise), and if it ends up boiling down to just finding more nuanced reasons to toss things into one bucket or another (or even a single score), I'm not sure if we're any further ahead. Perhaps clustering is a better model than polarized buckets? As in, this comment belongs to the set of things that left-leaning people seem to support. This other comment belongs to the conspiracy theory #1 cluster. (The system would likely not know or care what the clusters mean.) If you choose to engage with the idiots who love cluster A, you can do so, and if you want their noise out of your feed then you can do that too. You'd still need to decide what input signals will enable this -- you could do it with just upvotes and correlating users' activity across a site, but you would need to evaluate that in terms of what best supports the model (clusters instead of buckets). And clusters aren't the end-all be-all either. A racist, misogynistic comment that also says something that group X strongly agrees with isn't going to be fully described by being in the "jerk comment" cluster. But we have to deal with a low-dimensional approximation in order for any mechanism to be worthwhile.
  • rspeele 5y ago
    Perhaps I misunderstand your idea, but this clustering sounds like exactly the thing to drive polarization. Put me in my comfortable bubble where I only see content and comments from like-minded people, and I'll be increasingly unable to understand where people outside the bubble are coming from. The only thing I see about those people is ragebait about how awful and stupid they're being this week, written by other people I agree with. Even if I start on the edge of a cluster or in the overlap between two clusters, the feed will likely drive me towards one or the other. That's how I feel with YouTube's aggressive recommendation system -- I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. It's a radicalization pipeline where I touch some innocent surface-level stuff and YouTube goes, "hmm, well, of the people who liked that, our most highly-engaged users who click through videos all day long REALLY like THIS" and wants me to become that person.
• zz865 5y ago
  I quite like how the Daily Mail does separate upvote and downvote counts.
• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I think you should only have a set amount of upvotes and downvotes per day. Or have a mod point structure similar to Slashdot. That way it prevents commenting to just get karma, and it allows for people to properly respond in a way that they'd like to without having fear of a downvote brigade. The people who can moderate then at that point will mod appropriately if it is even worthwhile of attention. So, is a troll even worth your time to give mod points over? Or someone who just isn't thinking right but can have a legitimate discussion? That way it deters someone from just being really scummy and downvoting all your posts, thus bringing your karma down even though what they were mad at had nothing to do with those other posts. Also, voting for karma to be locked after x amount of days/months.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  Facebook is worth $1 trillion. Twitter also very successful. I think they know what they are doing and do not need the advice of some random writer. Down-votes suck. They feel much worse on an absolute basis than the pleasure of up-votes. I am all in favor of removing them from all sites.
  • bberenberg 5y ago
    Tiktok has skip which is an algorithmic downvote without being a social one.
  • bouke 5y ago
    Society != profit. What benefits such trillion dollar companies isn’t aligned with what benefits society. Society doesn’t benefit from promotion of fake news, or other spreading of misinformation just to keep the people a minute longer on their platform to shove ads in their face.
  • neogodless 5y ago
    > I think they know what they are doing and do not need the advice of some random writer. If you ignore the article's hypothesis that "things are getting worse" and that social media is contributing to it, then... yeah, companies making money from social media are doing just fine. Is society doing fine? Does it matter?
  • nitwit005 5y ago
    Facebook has been rather open about moderation struggles, and they shifted their strategy as recently as two weeks ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57836319 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57836319 . It's hard to see that as "they know what they're doing". You have to be careful of assuming successful companies are making the right choice in individual decisions. Success has a way of hiding failure. People tend to overlook all of Facebook's failed products and features, because their overall income is so large, but bad decisions must have happened.
• bitwize 5y ago
  Downvotes tend to get taken away when things the bigcos want you to see and like -- like trailers for shitty movies with major Hollywood backing -- get ratio'd all to hell.
• beebeepka 5y ago
  I don't like upvotes but I strongly dislike downvotes. Having karma is even worse because it forces people into creating throwaways or accepting the anonymous wrath of the hive mind. Who up or downvoted you, and why, you will never know. What I find most suspicious is that moderation often travels in packs. Most interesting. As if people have multiple accounts. Crazy, I know Just take a look at Slashdot. It's been the same 100 guys simultaneously writing and moderating using multiple accounts for literally decades. It's almost dead now for some reason. Maybe people with good karma should start at 5 while the dirty 0 peasants have their posting privileged revoked. That'll fix everything. Silencing everyone we disagree with is the answer!
• fleddr 5y ago
  I fully agree with the statement, although the solution may be difficult. In general, there has to be a way to give negative feedback. Without any correction feedback loop at all, the worst of the worst is thriving. Negative feedback is not just for consensus, also as a quality filter. I'll start with the example of Medium, the blogging platform. The idea of this platform is to encourage long form high quality writing. But that's not what's happening. Every topic is hijacked by people gaming the system, producing endless streams of lazy articles that lack any original thought, any sources, nuance, any quality. There's no way at all to give negative feedback other than blocking each individual author or writing a critical comment. Both don't solve the problem. I consider it an existential problem for the platform as only crap comes to the surface. Why would I possibly pay for this garbage? There has to be a way to clean the garbage. So here, the idea of negative feedback is to serve as a quality filter. On Twitter, it's a different use case. It's to reduce harm. Twitter is an outrage platform. Saying dumb, extreme, unhinged things will maximize engagement. The goal of negative feedback here would not be to censor anything, instead to tell the algorithm to dampen the "spread" factor. Show the post with lots of negative feedback less prominently in timelines, which will reduce the amount of retweets, new followers, etc. Somebody consistently extreme should not be rewarded for it. Arguably, on Twitter it's going to be difficult. The way things work currently is their business model. Further, there's the mob mentality likely to abuse any such mechanism. I'll end with an example where negative feedback is implemented extremely well. It's the dutch site tweakers.net. They have a pretty sophisticated comment system. You vote on individual comments roughly like this: -1: troll, offensive 0: off-topic, irrelevant +1: on-topic (this is the default level) +2: informative (enriches the topic) +3: excellent (well researched essential addition) So you give a quality vote, not an opinion/agreement vote. Some people still opinion vote, say a comment like this: "Microsoft sucks" And then give it a +3, instead of the -1 or 0 it should get. Do this a few times and they take away your voting rights entirely. You get one chance to get it back by begging, and if you promise to better your ways. Screw it up again and it's gone forever. A fairly involved system, which will obviously not work everywhere, but it's really good.
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I would be fine with downvoting on stuff like news, interest groups, etc. I absolutely don't want to see it on personal feeds though. I don't need that drama in my social media feed, but if you could downvote the trolls and spammers on facebook (so the posts would be hidden if negative, or filterable), that would be awesome.
• SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Downvotes seem to work fine in small niche communities without much politics and whose focus is truth-seeking about their topic. But not so much in larger politically charged communities. In the former, the community members tend to use downvotes as they should, to hide spam and trash comments, while remaining open to new or unpopular ideas that are well-reasoned and presented. But in the latter, downvotes are too often abused to suppress ideas the majority disagree with, even if well-reasoned or presented. In that context, I find a better combination is having a "flag" button instead of downvote. Flag makes it clearer that the purpose is to flag spam, misinformation, or troll speech, rather than merely things you disagree with.
• kderbyma 5y ago
  we need to free associate and disassociate from groups. we focus so much on the former and pay not attention to the latter. we delude ourselves into believinf we can all get along.....we can but away from each other....
• HallowDance 5y ago
  An opposing opinion: https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-harmful.html https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-... The TL;DR: "Any voting system where most posts mostly receive upvotes, but also allows downvotes, has a huge problem: No matter how you do the math, downvotes count more than upvotes do."
• nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  I am all for downvotes, but just like here you shouldn't be able to downvote anyone who comments your comment. This will just lead people to instantly downvote anyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. Secondly all downvotes should be acompanied by a reason for the vote and those should be publicly visible both on the comment/topic and generally in the profile of the user. This way it would be apparent if someone is just downvoting based on ideology and should be ignored.
• manx 5y ago
  I agree that we need negative feedback in our voting systems. But it doesn't have to be downvotes. You can use the number of views as a negative force. I created some simulations and plots: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring