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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 fr

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.
    - aeturnum 5y ago
      > Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote. If each other user can choose what downvote categories they want reflected on their site, this dynamic doesn't work the way you are describing. > examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that. It seems to me like forcing people to label why they are downvoting would be very helpful to examining why people downvote. > It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it? I think it worked really well? Like, I wouldn't mind a penis emoji, but it turns out we've got an informal penis emoji and it works great? What do you feel did not work well about it? It seems like you are thinking that I am thinking that this system would...prevent bad downvotes or make people think twice or...I dunno, be better? I was not thinking that. The idea is more about forcing people to contextualize their downvotes in a way that can be observed and reacted to by the community at large. It would be a way of talking about why people downvote without making a particular person defend themselves. It would, hopefully, add another layer to the communal sense of why people are engaging in the way they are.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I don't think that the suggestion was to tell people what to do, but to replace the downvote button with multiple buttons that represent different reasons one would downvote. One of the buttons could be "this is wrong and stupid." If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes. If I'm reading it correctly, this suggestion would just add more signal to downvotes (even if irt karma they were all the same.)
  - romwell 5y ago
    I didn't get the impression that the parent comment meant the same, but I fully agree with what you are saying. >If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes. My point essentially.
nemo44x 5y ago
No idea if they still do but Slashdot used this back in the day. You were given karma points occasionally to pass out and you'd have to select what you were rewarding/punishing.
- smellf 5y ago
  They still do, and the quality of discourse on Slashdot is about as bad as it has ever been.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    No, it was pretty good in the late 90s, very early 00s. Then it got competition from digg and reddit, and lost readership. Only the trolls perservered, and here's the key, without quality conversation, dedicated readers couldn't earn enough meta-karma to moderate. The 'never delete a comment' policy remained for about a decade wherein every story was quickly brigaded by racist, sexist and homophobic slurs, but mostly the n word; with only a handful of diehard commenters remaining. To this day, I prefer Slashdot's summaries over headline-only aggregators, and I wish other sites would adopt features like the mod-with-reason and karma caps per comment. But they designed the system to limit the power of moderators, and those limits didn't scale with the imbalance between trolls and good-faith posters
    - romwell 5y ago
      It sounds like you both agree that mod-with-reason alone didn't save Slashdot's level of discourse :)
    - spiralx 5y ago
      After stopping reading /. every day sometime around 2010 or so I've started browsing it again about once a week or so. There's less discussion than there used to be but it's no better or worse than it used to be - there's certainly far, far less of the pointless noise that took after before I left. Considering the amount of fuckery people engaged on during the site's heyday its moderation system handled things amazingly well. If you read at a threshold of +1 you'd barely see all the garbage posted there.

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.
  - aeturnum 5y ago
    > Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote. If each other user can choose what downvote categories they want reflected on their site, this dynamic doesn't work the way you are describing. > examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that. It seems to me like forcing people to label why they are downvoting would be very helpful to examining why people downvote. > It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it? I think it worked really well? Like, I wouldn't mind a penis emoji, but it turns out we've got an informal penis emoji and it works great? What do you feel did not work well about it? It seems like you are thinking that I am thinking that this system would...prevent bad downvotes or make people think twice or...I dunno, be better? I was not thinking that. The idea is more about forcing people to contextualize their downvotes in a way that can be observed and reacted to by the community at large. It would be a way of talking about why people downvote without making a particular person defend themselves. It would, hopefully, add another layer to the communal sense of why people are engaging in the way they are.
pessimizer 5y ago
I don't think that the suggestion was to tell people what to do, but to replace the downvote button with multiple buttons that represent different reasons one would downvote. One of the buttons could be "this is wrong and stupid." If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes. If I'm reading it correctly, this suggestion would just add more signal to downvotes (even if irt karma they were all the same.)
- romwell 5y ago
  I didn't get the impression that the parent comment meant the same, but I fully agree with what you are saying. >If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes. My point essentially.

nemo44x 5y ago

No idea if they still do but Slashdot used this back in the day. You were given karma points occasionally to pass out and you'd have to select what you were rewarding/punishing.

smellf 5y ago
They still do, and the quality of discourse on Slashdot is about as bad as it has ever been.
- klyrs 5y ago
  No, it was pretty good in the late 90s, very early 00s. Then it got competition from digg and reddit, and lost readership. Only the trolls perservered, and here's the key, without quality conversation, dedicated readers couldn't earn enough meta-karma to moderate. The 'never delete a comment' policy remained for about a decade wherein every story was quickly brigaded by racist, sexist and homophobic slurs, but mostly the n word; with only a handful of diehard commenters remaining. To this day, I prefer Slashdot's summaries over headline-only aggregators, and I wish other sites would adopt features like the mod-with-reason and karma caps per comment. But they designed the system to limit the power of moderators, and those limits didn't scale with the imbalance between trolls and good-faith posters
  - romwell 5y ago
    It sounds like you both agree that mod-with-reason alone didn't save Slashdot's level of discourse :)
  - spiralx 5y ago
    After stopping reading /. every day sometime around 2010 or so I've started browsing it again about once a week or so. There's less discussion than there used to be but it's no better or worse than it used to be - there's certainly far, far less of the pointless noise that took after before I left. Considering the amount of fuckery people engaged on during the site's heyday its moderation system handled things amazingly well. If you read at a threshold of +1 you'd barely see all the garbage posted there.