7 ms·

But with downvotes, we ensure that only popular opinions get visibility, defeating the entire purpose of sharing ideas within a community.

by hashkb 5y ago

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.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    No we don't, and no they don't. If you engage with ideas you don't like and debate them in good faith, and the promoters of said ideas keep just pumping them out (perhaps even using botnets or whatever) while ignoring all your good-faith attempts to refute them, then you are wasting your time. At some point you have to cut your losses; you stay open to persuasion by people who consistently exploit your willingness to listen, you're being played. Downvotes do serve the excellent purpose of saying 'I disagree with this and am not willing to waste further time on it.' Downvotes can also be abused. But an easy way to get around that is to make the system fully transparent and then do cluster analysis. If a downvoter or group thereof only ever puts out negative votes or habitually downvotes everything fromeone they don't like, that will show up after a while and people can weight away those negative opinions. Absent transparency, then the incentives to game the system go way up, and system operators usually wildly overestimate their own ability to guard against that.
    - Pxtl 5y ago
      I'd love to see a site like Reddit or HN experiment with using relationship graphs to research this. Start with some fixed points of "this person is a credible source of information" vs "this person is a neo-nazi conspiracy theorist" and examine the networks of people who support them and oppose them, and use that to establish credibility-scoring system-wide and weigh people's votes based on that. I mean, it would be super-biased but at this point I'm all about systems that are biased in favor of scientific consensus and human rights. Yes, you could reverse the "credibility" of those paragon users and make a system where the people surrounding the neo-nazi conspiracy theorists are the ones who hold all the power but we already get sites like that without any moderation or voting at all so that would be redundant anyways.
      - anigbrowl 5y ago
        I'm very into that (because I spend a great deal of time studying neo-nazi conspiracy theorists and similar people). I think platform operators to some extent have to eschew moral judgements and let things play out, eg if a variety of distinct and persistent clusters emerge naturally, and 98% of people in a community make nazis' lives miserable for being in the 'nazi cluster' then it doesn't need any additional help from the platform operator. Of course the nazis will whine 'so much for the tolerant left' but honestly, who cares. The key is that if enough people in a community tag individuals participants in a particular negative way, those individuals can either accept it (and then be habitually ignored) or change their ways. This isn't always a moralistic dichotomy. For example I post a lot of environmental stories to HN, which are not-interesting to some readers who prefer to focus on pure technology. I'm OK with them ignoring such posts or even downvoting them/flagging if I make too many in a row. Likewise there are many technical topics of wide interest on HN which I find deathly boring, but which I am happy to ignore. Researchers at Stanford have come up with some results on clustering and conflict in online spaces, which you might find interesting: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/ https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
        raxxorrax 5y ago
        > because I spend a great deal of time studying neo-nazi conspiracy theorists and similar people Really sorry to hear that. I hope it is a hobby and not your job. I remember when Nazis where a joke on the internet. That they are not quite that anymore is not completely their own making as there are some people obsessed with them and even start to mirror them. Or others that want to build a profile about standing against the obvious. Suddenly there is a significant group that denies civil liberties like free speech or freedom of association. Free speech in interesting here, because it seem to trigger those that fear that Nazis are overtaking the internet. To me this is very indicative of reactionary behavior towards a vastly overestimated threat.
anigbrowl 5y ago
Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith. There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes). Unless you are taking the negative possibilities into account, an all-beneficial 'marketplace' of ideas' does not and will not work. Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad, then you either improve your product or start losing money. But if you could go a small market with a big sound system and a team of marketing people to loudly insist that your products are the best you would quickly wreck the whole market.
- acituan 5y ago
  > Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith. It is more than an idea being ahead of time or stupid. People need to take a lot of cognitive shortcuts in their model of the world to be able to compute it, which is evidently imperfect. But getting poked holes in one's model is nonetheless painful. Being told you might be wrong, and the realizing you were wrong is painful and scary. Most people do not use up/down votes, blocks, bans this heavy-handedly because of the expected truthiness of the ideas in question; they primarily do it based on the idea's conformity to their sense of identity and to protect themselves from the anxiety of having been wrong. And this is not their fault. Polarization is ultimately a failure in integration and having a complex model of the world. But it is work, and it is painful. The more that work is postponed, the more the drift between our models and the reality, making it even more painful to catch up. The tools of discourse we have been given give us the perfect mechanisms for facilitating this avoidance, because they feed on engagement and not the truth. It is like saying "I'll keep telling you sweet lies as long as you don't leave me, doesn't matter how much that hurts you on the long run". > Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad Or they could be diverting you from mere hard truths. When it comes to ideas, "comfort" is the wrong metric to optimize for.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
aeturnum 5y ago
An idea I've been interested in trying is requiring people to downvote for a reason: "unproductive," "inaccurate," "off-topic." The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"
- romwell 5y ago
  Hahahahahaha. This is exactly what reddit told its users to do (only downvote due to one of these reasons) - and exactly nobody does it. People will figure out to downvote for whatever "reason" that maximizes the impact of the downvote real fast; groups of people will make sure to weaponize it too even without coordination. E.g.: "the comment I hate doesn't have enough 'inaccurate' downvotes to sink into the abyss, so I'll do my job and add one". The only reason why things are downvoted is "I don't like what I feel when I read it", which most of the time is "I disagree with what this says" or "I hate people who say things like that" (the latter more commonly). You want people to dislike things for the "right" reasons — but the only way to do this is to filter the people, not the content. (I've been a mod of a decently-sized subreddit, and a user since 2008)
  - aeturnum 5y ago
    > This is exactly what reddit told its users to do I'm not on reddit much these days but when I opened it just now I was able to downvote without choosing a reason? So I do not think it is using the system I described. The ability of each user to chose what downvote categories they want to respect would be an important part of making the system harder to "game" (to the degree that one is "gaming" a voting system by voting).
    - romwell 5y ago
      Reddit says to only downvote if a comment does not contribute to the discussion, not if you disagree. So downvoting is an implicit choice of only "good" reasons. Putting a drop-down list with "good" reasons is as good as displaying a pop-up: "Are you sure you are downvoting for <good reasons>?" - which will be promptly ignored. Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote. The only thing you can do with categories is display the distribution / most prevailing category alongside the score (like Slashdot has been doing for decades). In all of this, you seem to want to control why people downvote. Instead, examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that. It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it? Unless you add categories like "I think the author of this comment is a moron and I hate them", people will shoehorn your categories for this use case. And if you do that, I'm not convinced the result will be necessarily positive.
asdff 5y ago
You got downvoted for this which I find ironic. Imo, sharing an opinion also shouldn't equate downvote. Adding a comment that contributes nothing to a discussion on the other hand, maybe something like "I agree with that." with nothing more added of substance, should equate a downvote since that sort of post doesn't further discussion, the thread ends there.
JohnBooty 5y ago
Yeah. "Upvote only communities" are more prone to brigading by hyper-motivated cliques or sub-groups. "Upvote+downvote communities" are more resistant to the above, but also more prone to hivemind. It's not clear to me that one is better than the other. It is clear to me that both have significant flaws. Ideally what you really want to promote would be well-reasoned/well-sourced posts from a variety of viewpoints. In practice I simply don't think this can be achieved solely by community voting. It is simply too easy to click an upvote or downvote button for random community members that don't have the incentive to take a more thoughtful approach. Every successful community I've seen has had some level of strong moderator involvement, including HN. (The HN mods kill a lot of low-value posts. Because they do their job well, and they do it with a low profile, many folks are unaware of how much moderation they do...)

But with downvotes, we ensure that only popular opinions get visibility, defeating the entire purpose of sharing ideas within a community.

by 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.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  No we don't, and no they don't. If you engage with ideas you don't like and debate them in good faith, and the promoters of said ideas keep just pumping them out (perhaps even using botnets or whatever) while ignoring all your good-faith attempts to refute them, then you are wasting your time. At some point you have to cut your losses; you stay open to persuasion by people who consistently exploit your willingness to listen, you're being played. Downvotes do serve the excellent purpose of saying 'I disagree with this and am not willing to waste further time on it.' Downvotes can also be abused. But an easy way to get around that is to make the system fully transparent and then do cluster analysis. If a downvoter or group thereof only ever puts out negative votes or habitually downvotes everything fromeone they don't like, that will show up after a while and people can weight away those negative opinions. Absent transparency, then the incentives to game the system go way up, and system operators usually wildly overestimate their own ability to guard against that.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    I'd love to see a site like Reddit or HN experiment with using relationship graphs to research this. Start with some fixed points of "this person is a credible source of information" vs "this person is a neo-nazi conspiracy theorist" and examine the networks of people who support them and oppose them, and use that to establish credibility-scoring system-wide and weigh people's votes based on that. I mean, it would be super-biased but at this point I'm all about systems that are biased in favor of scientific consensus and human rights. Yes, you could reverse the "credibility" of those paragon users and make a system where the people surrounding the neo-nazi conspiracy theorists are the ones who hold all the power but we already get sites like that without any moderation or voting at all so that would be redundant anyways.
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      I'm very into that (because I spend a great deal of time studying neo-nazi conspiracy theorists and similar people). I think platform operators to some extent have to eschew moral judgements and let things play out, eg if a variety of distinct and persistent clusters emerge naturally, and 98% of people in a community make nazis' lives miserable for being in the 'nazi cluster' then it doesn't need any additional help from the platform operator. Of course the nazis will whine 'so much for the tolerant left' but honestly, who cares. The key is that if enough people in a community tag individuals participants in a particular negative way, those individuals can either accept it (and then be habitually ignored) or change their ways. This isn't always a moralistic dichotomy. For example I post a lot of environmental stories to HN, which are not-interesting to some readers who prefer to focus on pure technology. I'm OK with them ignoring such posts or even downvoting them/flagging if I make too many in a row. Likewise there are many technical topics of wide interest on HN which I find deathly boring, but which I am happy to ignore. Researchers at Stanford have come up with some results on clustering and conflict in online spaces, which you might find interesting: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/ https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
      - raxxorrax 5y ago
        > because I spend a great deal of time studying neo-nazi conspiracy theorists and similar people Really sorry to hear that. I hope it is a hobby and not your job. I remember when Nazis where a joke on the internet. That they are not quite that anymore is not completely their own making as there are some people obsessed with them and even start to mirror them. Or others that want to build a profile about standing against the obvious. Suddenly there is a significant group that denies civil liberties like free speech or freedom of association. Free speech in interesting here, because it seem to trigger those that fear that Nazis are overtaking the internet. To me this is very indicative of reactionary behavior towards a vastly overestimated threat.

anigbrowl 5y ago

Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith. There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes). Unless you are taking the negative possibilities into account, an all-beneficial 'marketplace' of ideas' does not and will not work. Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad, then you either improve your product or start losing money. But if you could go a small market with a big sound system and a team of marketing people to loudly insist that your products are the best you would quickly wreck the whole market.

acituan 5y ago
> Unpopular ideas may be ahead of their time, but they may equally be just stupid or deliberately proposed in bad faith. It is more than an idea being ahead of time or stupid. People need to take a lot of cognitive shortcuts in their model of the world to be able to compute it, which is evidently imperfect. But getting poked holes in one's model is nonetheless painful. Being told you might be wrong, and the realizing you were wrong is painful and scary. Most people do not use up/down votes, blocks, bans this heavy-handedly because of the expected truthiness of the ideas in question; they primarily do it based on the idea's conformity to their sense of identity and to protect themselves from the anxiety of having been wrong. And this is not their fault. Polarization is ultimately a failure in integration and having a complex model of the world. But it is work, and it is painful. The more that work is postponed, the more the drift between our models and the reality, making it even more painful to catch up. The tools of discourse we have been given give us the perfect mechanisms for facilitating this avoidance, because they feed on engagement and not the truth. It is like saying "I'll keep telling you sweet lies as long as you don't leave me, doesn't matter how much that hurts you on the long run". > Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad Or they could be diverting you from mere hard truths. When it comes to ideas, "comfort" is the wrong metric to optimize for.
joe_the_user 5y ago

aeturnum 5y ago

An idea I've been interested in trying is requiring people to downvote for a reason: "unproductive," "inaccurate," "off-topic." The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"

romwell 5y ago
Hahahahahaha. This is exactly what reddit told its users to do (only downvote due to one of these reasons) - and exactly nobody does it. People will figure out to downvote for whatever "reason" that maximizes the impact of the downvote real fast; groups of people will make sure to weaponize it too even without coordination. E.g.: "the comment I hate doesn't have enough 'inaccurate' downvotes to sink into the abyss, so I'll do my job and add one". The only reason why things are downvoted is "I don't like what I feel when I read it", which most of the time is "I disagree with what this says" or "I hate people who say things like that" (the latter more commonly). You want people to dislike things for the "right" reasons — but the only way to do this is to filter the people, not the content. (I've been a mod of a decently-sized subreddit, and a user since 2008)
- aeturnum 5y ago
  > This is exactly what reddit told its users to do I'm not on reddit much these days but when I opened it just now I was able to downvote without choosing a reason? So I do not think it is using the system I described. The ability of each user to chose what downvote categories they want to respect would be an important part of making the system harder to "game" (to the degree that one is "gaming" a voting system by voting).
  - romwell 5y ago
    Reddit says to only downvote if a comment does not contribute to the discussion, not if you disagree. So downvoting is an implicit choice of only "good" reasons. Putting a drop-down list with "good" reasons is as good as displaying a pop-up: "Are you sure you are downvoting for <good reasons>?" - which will be promptly ignored. Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote. The only thing you can do with categories is display the distribution / most prevailing category alongside the score (like Slashdot has been doing for decades). In all of this, you seem to want to control why people downvote. Instead, examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that. It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it? Unless you add categories like "I think the author of this comment is a moron and I hate them", people will shoehorn your categories for this use case. And if you do that, I'm not convinced the result will be necessarily positive.

asdff 5y ago

You got downvoted for this which I find ironic. Imo, sharing an opinion also shouldn't equate downvote. Adding a comment that contributes nothing to a discussion on the other hand, maybe something like "I agree with that." with nothing more added of substance, should equate a downvote since that sort of post doesn't further discussion, the thread ends there.

JohnBooty 5y ago

Yeah. "Upvote only communities" are more prone to brigading by hyper-motivated cliques or sub-groups. "Upvote+downvote communities" are more resistant to the above, but also more prone to hivemind. It's not clear to me that one is better than the other. It is clear to me that both have significant flaws. Ideally what you really want to promote would be well-reasoned/well-sourced posts from a variety of viewpoints. In practice I simply don't think this can be achieved solely by community voting. It is simply too easy to click an upvote or downvote button for random community members that don't have the incentive to take a more thoughtful approach. Every successful community I've seen has had some level of strong moderator involvement, including HN. (The HN mods kill a lot of low-value posts. Because they do their job well, and they do it with a low profile, many folks are unaware of how much moderation they do...)