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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 sho

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.
- notriddle 5y ago
  That’s not wrong, but you want actual proof if you’re going to block something because it’s false. That looks more like mod mail than like downvoting.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    Then you've got moderators drowning in the bullshit asymmetry principle. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-asymmetry-principle/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a... "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
deleted 5y ago
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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.

notriddle 5y ago
That’s not wrong, but you want actual proof if you’re going to block something because it’s false. That looks more like mod mail than like downvoting.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Then you've got moderators drowning in the bullshit asymmetry principle. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-asymmetry-principle/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a... "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

deleted 5y ago

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