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I don't see how downvotes can be effectively implemented online without extensive action from community moderators/admins. In particular, you need people with p

I don't see how downvotes can be effectively implemented online without extensive action from community moderators/admins. In particular, you need people with platform-wide scope and permissions to prevent communities from brigading and such. As a small-community moderator on reddit, we get blamed all the time for "downvotes from our community" by new users which is something we neither have insight into nor control over. I don't see how this goes well. At least Reddit has managed to build a [propaganda death star](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...) with their new features associated with blocking accounts. Will people be able to downvote tweets from official accounts for heads of state? What will Twitter do about downvote bot groups?

loceng 5y ago
That added dopamine hit for downvotes and intensify the bubbles for users is only way they can compete better with Facebook's engagement.
josefresco 5y ago
> In particular, you need people with platform-wide scope and permissions to prevent communities from brigading and such. Do they also have teams that identify "brigading" in order to boost a tweet? What does Twitter do about upvote bots?
- llbeansandrice 5y ago
  I'm not sure, and I suppose it largely depends on what the results are for different actions. On Reddit, posts and comments that get upvoted get more views and engagement because the entire site is more or less stack-ranked on /r/all, /r/popular, and any given user's home feed. Downvoted posts and comments get sent straight to the bottom, and really don't get seen or engaged with. Hearts, retweets, replies, etc. on Twitter I presume have a slightly similar result but I suspect it's not the same as "reaching #1 on /r/all" on reddit. The way Twitter works is fundamentally different. So whether Twitter really needs to care about people "getting ratio'd" or buying likes is different than the concern on Reddit. What happens to mass-downvoted tweets will determine how important it is to make sure all downvotes are "real" or "in good faith" or whatever.
Hermel 5y ago
What's wrong with brigading? That's also a form of engagement.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  Based on my experience bringing this up in person and online to various Reddit mods (which usually get pretty upset about the question) the main problem with brigading is that the side that victimizes itself as getting brigaded doesn't enjoy the experience. They operate under the theory that most people on online communities just want to discover other people with whom they would get along, and do it in a safe manner kinda isolated from people with whom they would not get along. The problem is when your online community decides political propaganda or marketing stuff is ok because you agree to participate in a "cultural battle", so you will need to make splitting decisions like who's the brigands and who's being brigaded.
- llbeansandrice 5y ago
  It can easily ruin a community. If you start a group centered around, idk, using VSCode. Nice plug-ins to have. The roadmap of the software. Answering questions and helping folks use the software well, etc. But your community gets raided by the IntelliJ community so that the only discussions are about how VSCode is awful, everyone should use IntelliJ. Why even discuss the roadmap of this stupid not-even-an-IDE? Use IntelliJ. Anywhere the VSCode community tries to go, it just gets followed by IntelliJ zealots.
throwaway22032 5y ago
I don't see how this solves anything. If you ban downvoting, you just get upvoting of troll content instead. In my experience, essentially every political subreddit is full of complete and utter nonsense for this reason. There's some great stuff on the site if you're into woodworking or robotics or whatever, but the country/city/political subreddits are like "Hypernormalization" in website form. It gets even worse because eventually those subreddits get captured by moderators that stoke the flames even further. I'd be surprised if most of it wasn't state actor troll farm stuff.
easton 5y ago
There was a browser extension a couple years ago that marked every user that had commented on controversial subreddits, so that people no longer had to read comments and instead could just ignore/report them[0]. Attaching such a list to something that can use the blocking API is the superlaser on the propaganda death star. Nobody can disagree with you anymore. I believe it is time to use such a list to block everyone on my account that has ever posted in r/emacs, because they cannot see the error of their ways by not choosing ed(1). 0: In many cases I saw that people would also comment under said user stating something to the effect of "This person has commented on r/emacs, they are stupid, it doesn't matter that they're talking about their thoughts on the Disney+ catalog." Which had the secondary effect of people jumping to conclusions about OP without even opting in to download the extension.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Your examples (emacs and ed) are intentionally silly, but as I recall the actual targets of those extensions were significantly less lighthearted: many were explicitly racist or reactionary communities with histories of brigading/raiding other subreddits. Put another way: we shouldn't confuse a civics problem with a platform problem. These extensions (again, as I remember them), were primarily created to eliminate a platform problem that Reddit themselves refused to address. Edit: my personal anecdote with this is NYC's subreddit: accounts with histories that indicate no connection to NYC love to comment on every crime-blotter article with the same tired comments about the city. It's incredibly convenient and improves the quality of the discussion to be able to filter them.
  - easton 5y ago
    Yes, you're correct, they were mostly racist or far-right subreddits. But that didn't ever make much sense to me, because even if the person was evil elsewhere, a comment that didn't have that sort of content shouldn't be moderated IMO. Brigading should be detectable regardless of what subreddits a user is a part of, given it usually coincides with bizarre usage patterns (downvoting everything in new as soon as it appears or something). I get moderation is hard, but this makes it too easy. What if someone was evil but then saw the error of their ways? Should they be forced to make a new account? Or what if they were trying to start debates (as unlikely as that is) in said evil subreddit?
uwuemu 5y ago
> Will people be able to downvote tweets from official accounts for heads of state? What's your point here, exactly? That they should, or should not be able to do that? Because this already happens, except it's even worse than letting people do it, because Twitter does it by itself. With zero oversight by anyone (not that other big tech platforms don't do the same). Twitter already rank boosts content it likes and content it doesn't like gets downranked, shadow banned or just permabanned. It already filters trends and search and autocomplete. So we have a situation where a big tech company does what it wants and does it so much that it literally skews elections (all of this is common sense, but there are also many peer reviewed studies about this, some authors of which have testified before congress and some of which are represent bases for many US & EU investigations into the big tech monopolies/cartels). So given all this, is it really a problem to let people downvote stuff... or is it actually about not letting the people you don't like have a vote? Youtube dislikes were completely fine 99.999999% of the time and lasted for like a decade without issues. Until someone like you, sadly in a position of power, decided that (speculation starts) Biden got too many dislikes on his ramblings and it was a bad look for Google (speculation ends). Some people just HATE democracy because democracy means even dumb people, rednecks, racists, sexists and all kinds of "irresponsible" people get to vote. Ironically, most of the time (in recent history at least), these people who hate democracy call themselves democrats or liberals. In reality, they're anything but that. Actual liberals recognize that everyone deserves a to have a voice in a democracy. Even the bad voices are valuable, because they allow the marketplace of ideas actually do its magic.

loceng 5y ago

That added dopamine hit for downvotes and intensify the bubbles for users is only way they can compete better with Facebook's engagement.

josefresco 5y ago

> In particular, you need people with platform-wide scope and permissions to prevent communities from brigading and such. Do they also have teams that identify "brigading" in order to boost a tweet? What does Twitter do about upvote bots?

llbeansandrice 5y ago
I'm not sure, and I suppose it largely depends on what the results are for different actions. On Reddit, posts and comments that get upvoted get more views and engagement because the entire site is more or less stack-ranked on /r/all, /r/popular, and any given user's home feed. Downvoted posts and comments get sent straight to the bottom, and really don't get seen or engaged with. Hearts, retweets, replies, etc. on Twitter I presume have a slightly similar result but I suspect it's not the same as "reaching #1 on /r/all" on reddit. The way Twitter works is fundamentally different. So whether Twitter really needs to care about people "getting ratio'd" or buying likes is different than the concern on Reddit. What happens to mass-downvoted tweets will determine how important it is to make sure all downvotes are "real" or "in good faith" or whatever.

Hermel 5y ago

What's wrong with brigading? That's also a form of engagement.

pvarangot 5y ago
Based on my experience bringing this up in person and online to various Reddit mods (which usually get pretty upset about the question) the main problem with brigading is that the side that victimizes itself as getting brigaded doesn't enjoy the experience. They operate under the theory that most people on online communities just want to discover other people with whom they would get along, and do it in a safe manner kinda isolated from people with whom they would not get along. The problem is when your online community decides political propaganda or marketing stuff is ok because you agree to participate in a "cultural battle", so you will need to make splitting decisions like who's the brigands and who's being brigaded.
llbeansandrice 5y ago
It can easily ruin a community. If you start a group centered around, idk, using VSCode. Nice plug-ins to have. The roadmap of the software. Answering questions and helping folks use the software well, etc. But your community gets raided by the IntelliJ community so that the only discussions are about how VSCode is awful, everyone should use IntelliJ. Why even discuss the roadmap of this stupid not-even-an-IDE? Use IntelliJ. Anywhere the VSCode community tries to go, it just gets followed by IntelliJ zealots.

throwaway22032 5y ago

I don't see how this solves anything. If you ban downvoting, you just get upvoting of troll content instead. In my experience, essentially every political subreddit is full of complete and utter nonsense for this reason. There's some great stuff on the site if you're into woodworking or robotics or whatever, but the country/city/political subreddits are like "Hypernormalization" in website form. It gets even worse because eventually those subreddits get captured by moderators that stoke the flames even further. I'd be surprised if most of it wasn't state actor troll farm stuff.

easton 5y ago

There was a browser extension a couple years ago that marked every user that had commented on controversial subreddits, so that people no longer had to read comments and instead could just ignore/report them[0]. Attaching such a list to something that can use the blocking API is the superlaser on the propaganda death star. Nobody can disagree with you anymore. I believe it is time to use such a list to block everyone on my account that has ever posted in r/emacs, because they cannot see the error of their ways by not choosing ed(1). 0: In many cases I saw that people would also comment under said user stating something to the effect of "This person has commented on r/emacs, they are stupid, it doesn't matter that they're talking about their thoughts on the Disney+ catalog." Which had the secondary effect of people jumping to conclusions about OP without even opting in to download the extension.

woodruffw 5y ago
Your examples (emacs and ed) are intentionally silly, but as I recall the actual targets of those extensions were significantly less lighthearted: many were explicitly racist or reactionary communities with histories of brigading/raiding other subreddits. Put another way: we shouldn't confuse a civics problem with a platform problem. These extensions (again, as I remember them), were primarily created to eliminate a platform problem that Reddit themselves refused to address. Edit: my personal anecdote with this is NYC's subreddit: accounts with histories that indicate no connection to NYC love to comment on every crime-blotter article with the same tired comments about the city. It's incredibly convenient and improves the quality of the discussion to be able to filter them.
- easton 5y ago
  Yes, you're correct, they were mostly racist or far-right subreddits. But that didn't ever make much sense to me, because even if the person was evil elsewhere, a comment that didn't have that sort of content shouldn't be moderated IMO. Brigading should be detectable regardless of what subreddits a user is a part of, given it usually coincides with bizarre usage patterns (downvoting everything in new as soon as it appears or something). I get moderation is hard, but this makes it too easy. What if someone was evil but then saw the error of their ways? Should they be forced to make a new account? Or what if they were trying to start debates (as unlikely as that is) in said evil subreddit?

uwuemu 5y ago

> Will people be able to downvote tweets from official accounts for heads of state? What's your point here, exactly? That they should, or should not be able to do that? Because this already happens, except it's even worse than letting people do it, because Twitter does it by itself. With zero oversight by anyone (not that other big tech platforms don't do the same). Twitter already rank boosts content it likes and content it doesn't like gets downranked, shadow banned or just permabanned. It already filters trends and search and autocomplete. So we have a situation where a big tech company does what it wants and does it so much that it literally skews elections (all of this is common sense, but there are also many peer reviewed studies about this, some authors of which have testified before congress and some of which are represent bases for many US & EU investigations into the big tech monopolies/cartels). So given all this, is it really a problem to let people downvote stuff... or is it actually about not letting the people you don't like have a vote? Youtube dislikes were completely fine 99.999999% of the time and lasted for like a decade without issues. Until someone like you, sadly in a position of power, decided that (speculation starts) Biden got too many dislikes on his ramblings and it was a bad look for Google (speculation ends). Some people just HATE democracy because democracy means even dumb people, rednecks, racists, sexists and all kinds of "irresponsible" people get to vote. Ironically, most of the time (in recent history at least), these people who hate democracy call themselves democrats or liberals. In reality, they're anything but that. Actual liberals recognize that everyone deserves a to have a voice in a democracy. Even the bad voices are valuable, because they allow the marketplace of ideas actually do its magic.