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I've argued that Likes are evil and should be banned. I've tried in some places to remove them from my life. Via ublock-origin I have them blocked from HN beacu

I've argued that Likes are evil and should be banned. I've tried in some places to remove them from my life. Via ublock-origin I have them blocked from HN beacuse I feel the rush of elation everytime I see I've posted somethign that gets even a few up votes and I can feel it addicting me to wanting to seek out more of that. I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer scores. I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like button is large percentage of the cause of all the various problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking behavior of all the various social medias

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Fine, here's your upvo- oh, wait... More seriously, I can see how these are useful in situations where there is just too much content to sort through (hacker news, reddit, slashdot... google ?). Of course you can also have randomly displayed results, but then this goes against the goal of elevating the quality of the results, at which point you need to pick winners and losers somehow. (Obviously, the traditional way to do it : human editors, has its own issues...)
- viridian 4y ago
  After using the internet and nested thread style sites for way, way too long, I've finally comes to the conclusion that we had it right the first time with mailing lists, e-bulletin boards, forums, and imageboards: chronological, oldest to newest is the best way to read these threads. Not only does it disincentivize the bad behavior we are talking about, but it also has the unique effect of giving you an intuitive meta perspective on a thread, and you get to see how older threads affected newer ones, as they happen. It feels way more organic, even if you aware that all the other commenters are trapped in the algorithm box.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Oh yeah, I prefer forums too, they work great... until too much people want to comment on the same topic. Then they quickly become unusable for in-depth conversation, in a similar way that chats become for any conversation (except emote spam). But now I realize that there is also option of a purely chronological tree view (WordPress comments, some mailing lists...) that can go very far in mitigating this - I wonder why it's not more common ? (I might still be better if it defaulted to random roots, at least on your first visit, to avoid the incentives for people posting as quick as possible...)

BlueTemplar 4y ago

Fine, here's your upvo- oh, wait... More seriously, I can see how these are useful in situations where there is just too much content to sort through (hacker news, reddit, slashdot... google ?). Of course you can also have randomly displayed results, but then this goes against the goal of elevating the quality of the results, at which point you need to pick winners and losers somehow. (Obviously, the traditional way to do it : human editors, has its own issues...)

viridian 4y ago
After using the internet and nested thread style sites for way, way too long, I've finally comes to the conclusion that we had it right the first time with mailing lists, e-bulletin boards, forums, and imageboards: chronological, oldest to newest is the best way to read these threads. Not only does it disincentivize the bad behavior we are talking about, but it also has the unique effect of giving you an intuitive meta perspective on a thread, and you get to see how older threads affected newer ones, as they happen. It feels way more organic, even if you aware that all the other commenters are trapped in the algorithm box.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Oh yeah, I prefer forums too, they work great... until too much people want to comment on the same topic. Then they quickly become unusable for in-depth conversation, in a similar way that chats become for any conversation (except emote spam). But now I realize that there is also option of a purely chronological tree view (WordPress comments, some mailing lists...) that can go very far in mitigating this - I wonder why it's not more common ? (I might still be better if it defaulted to random roots, at least on your first visit, to avoid the incentives for people posting as quick as possible...)