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Forum upvotes and downvotes have no correlation with quality, though. As implemented on Twitter and Reddit and HN, they are simply engagement features. In othe

Forum upvotes and downvotes have no correlation with quality, though. As implemented on Twitter and Reddit and HN, they are simply engagement features. In other words, the point of voting is not to surface quality content, it is to make site visitors feel like they’re doing something, and therefore be more likely to return. Karma scores, too, are not about rewarding quality but simply about creating artificial incentives for return visits. Quality in forums comes mostly from careful human moderation. HN is carefully moderated by dang and others. Likewise, the highest-quality subreddits are those that have strict rules and active moderators that enforce them.

goldenkey 5y ago
Some of the worst reddits are also the ones with active moderators -- these moderators get under the table money to promote specific content while suppressing the rest.
mrec 5y ago
Agreed. I think the whole market analogy breaks down right out of the gate: > Each of these communities has an upvote mechanism, which can be interpreted as an indication that the user believes the website is undervalued. They are willing to bid up the price by spending their upvote on it. It's wholly misleading to talk about "spending" an upvote. Upvotes, unlike money, are not a limited resource. Most of the other problems (bots, spamming, optimizing for low-effort clickbait etc) flow from that.
- bartread 5y ago
  I don't think ranking based on upvotes, downvotes, or other forms of engagement is necessarily terrible, but it's certainly nothing to do with "market value", and misleading to suggest that it is. If you want to create a way of ranking websites and call it "SocialRank", or "EngagementRank", that's fine, although see below. However, users would have to be aware of the severe limitations. You've already highlighted some of the problems with social content: it's often spammy, low effort, clickbait, poorly written, misleading, or outright false. The quality of the search engine and ranking algorithm is going to be judged by the quality of the results it returns, which I'd imagine will be pretty trashy in this case.
- pembrook 5y ago
  I think you're throwing out an entire idea out based on a small semantic quibble. Ok, so upvotes on HN and Reddit are unlimited, and therefore not valuable. Why not limit accounts to X upvotes per day or week? Or only allow upvoting as many times as you've been upvoted yourself? Suddenly upvotes are now scarce. These aren't impossible problems to solve. HN has implemented tons of "dark" features you don't even realize are here to prevent spamming, and is largely successful at it. For example, if you post to "New" and send a link to your friends telling them to upvote it, those upvotes will not be counted. Similarly, there is also a wait limit on how soon after visiting HN your upvotes will be counted, without you knowing it. There's a ton of these unwritten tricks like this behind the scenes, and as you can see from the quality level here, they work! I think ideally the search engine of the future has a combination of user feedback (with HN-style dark patterns behind the scenes to protect integrity), plus some level of human curation. I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug.
  - mrec 5y ago
    OK, but you're moving the goalposts here. You're not just talking about a new search rank algorithm any more, you're talking about building a new social-web ecosystem to enforce the kind of voting rules needed to make that algorithm work, and somehow getting mass adoption of that new ecosystem. > I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug. You're attacking a much broader proposition here than anything I wrote.
    - pembrook 5y ago
      I wouldn't say there's goalposts here or winners and losers, we're all throwing out ideas. Issue pops up, humans suggest fix. New issue pops up, new fix needed. This is how all stuff evolves. I guess I'm more broadly reacting to the sentiment in most comments I'm seeing (which is itself a trope in the dynamics of how upvote-based communities work). Based off all the recent "Google results now suck" posts that went viral, it seems there's broad sentiment that Google is now a cesspool of SEO'd-to-death affiliate marketing. But it also seems there's broad sentiment to shut down and discourage new possibilities before they even get attempted, regardless of potential merit. It seems like an irrational dichotomy.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  > Upvotes, unlike money, are not a limited resource. On some (non-Reddit-derived) sites, they are, although usually you still get a daily allowance and not a persistent budget. There’s also the SO approach where upvotes are infinite but downvotes are limited, that could also work.
tooltower 5y ago
If voting didn't exist on HN, don't you think the mods would have had to spend more time curating submissions? The total number of submissions is presumably much larger than the number of reports they receive or the number of suspicious incidents they need to investigate.
darkerside 5y ago
Do you really believe that there is no correlation between upvotes and good content? How do you think people decide which submissions to upvote?
- saalweachter 5y ago
  I'm not sure that's the right question. Is there a correlation between upvotes and truth or utility? Sure, upvotes might be fine for recognizing good content or popular opinions. [best resorts in mediterranean], sure, upvotes are as good a signal as anything. Do you think it would be a good signal for queries like [why is there war in ukraine] or [how did covid start]?
  - darkerside 5y ago
    I'm sorry, were you expecting to find solid answers to those questions by searching on Google?

goldenkey 5y ago

Some of the worst reddits are also the ones with active moderators -- these moderators get under the table money to promote specific content while suppressing the rest.

mrec 5y ago

Agreed. I think the whole market analogy breaks down right out of the gate: > Each of these communities has an upvote mechanism, which can be interpreted as an indication that the user believes the website is undervalued. They are willing to bid up the price by spending their upvote on it. It's wholly misleading to talk about "spending" an upvote. Upvotes, unlike money, are not a limited resource. Most of the other problems (bots, spamming, optimizing for low-effort clickbait etc) flow from that.

bartread 5y ago
I don't think ranking based on upvotes, downvotes, or other forms of engagement is necessarily terrible, but it's certainly nothing to do with "market value", and misleading to suggest that it is. If you want to create a way of ranking websites and call it "SocialRank", or "EngagementRank", that's fine, although see below. However, users would have to be aware of the severe limitations. You've already highlighted some of the problems with social content: it's often spammy, low effort, clickbait, poorly written, misleading, or outright false. The quality of the search engine and ranking algorithm is going to be judged by the quality of the results it returns, which I'd imagine will be pretty trashy in this case.
pembrook 5y ago
I think you're throwing out an entire idea out based on a small semantic quibble. Ok, so upvotes on HN and Reddit are unlimited, and therefore not valuable. Why not limit accounts to X upvotes per day or week? Or only allow upvoting as many times as you've been upvoted yourself? Suddenly upvotes are now scarce. These aren't impossible problems to solve. HN has implemented tons of "dark" features you don't even realize are here to prevent spamming, and is largely successful at it. For example, if you post to "New" and send a link to your friends telling them to upvote it, those upvotes will not be counted. Similarly, there is also a wait limit on how soon after visiting HN your upvotes will be counted, without you knowing it. There's a ton of these unwritten tricks like this behind the scenes, and as you can see from the quality level here, they work! I think ideally the search engine of the future has a combination of user feedback (with HN-style dark patterns behind the scenes to protect integrity), plus some level of human curation. I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug.
- mrec 5y ago
  OK, but you're moving the goalposts here. You're not just talking about a new search rank algorithm any more, you're talking about building a new social-web ecosystem to enforce the kind of voting rules needed to make that algorithm work, and somehow getting mass adoption of that new ecosystem. > I'm amazed at how people can simultaneously think Google results are garbage, and yet, also think any attempt to try to solve the problem is futile and worthless. Cynicism is one hell of a drug. You're attacking a much broader proposition here than anything I wrote.
  - pembrook 5y ago
    I wouldn't say there's goalposts here or winners and losers, we're all throwing out ideas. Issue pops up, humans suggest fix. New issue pops up, new fix needed. This is how all stuff evolves. I guess I'm more broadly reacting to the sentiment in most comments I'm seeing (which is itself a trope in the dynamics of how upvote-based communities work). Based off all the recent "Google results now suck" posts that went viral, it seems there's broad sentiment that Google is now a cesspool of SEO'd-to-death affiliate marketing. But it also seems there's broad sentiment to shut down and discourage new possibilities before they even get attempted, regardless of potential merit. It seems like an irrational dichotomy.
mananaysiempre 5y ago
> Upvotes, unlike money, are not a limited resource. On some (non-Reddit-derived) sites, they are, although usually you still get a daily allowance and not a persistent budget. There’s also the SO approach where upvotes are infinite but downvotes are limited, that could also work.

tooltower 5y ago

If voting didn't exist on HN, don't you think the mods would have had to spend more time curating submissions? The total number of submissions is presumably much larger than the number of reports they receive or the number of suspicious incidents they need to investigate.

darkerside 5y ago

Do you really believe that there is no correlation between upvotes and good content? How do you think people decide which submissions to upvote?

saalweachter 5y ago
I'm not sure that's the right question. Is there a correlation between upvotes and truth or utility? Sure, upvotes might be fine for recognizing good content or popular opinions. [best resorts in mediterranean], sure, upvotes are as good a signal as anything. Do you think it would be a good signal for queries like [why is there war in ukraine] or [how did covid start]?
- darkerside 5y ago
  I'm sorry, were you expecting to find solid answers to those questions by searching on Google?