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Ask HN: Does allowing downvoting encourage groupthink?

• metadat 4y ago
  Yes, your observation is accurate. The average intelligence of HN users with downvote capabilities isn't as high as one would hope. Going against the grain gets downvoted regardless of whether you're right or not. All discussion forums (digital and flesh-bound) are susceptible to the echo chamber effect.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  Before I deleted my reddit account I was convinced that downvoting had more of an effect on what frontpaged on a subreddit than upvoting not in that the algorithms gave more weight to them but a few downvotes would cause an article to disappear quickly and not get more upvotes. If you posted anything along the lines of "maybe Java has some good points" or "I am at least partially into programming for the money" you would get always get downvoted into oblivion on proggit for instance.
• KeyXiote 4y ago
  This might be contextuaally informative to the topic, "Construal Level Theory in Organizational Research" [1]:https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032516-113115 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-0... There are other studies particularly focused on different social media sites, but a lot boils down to social/psychological impacts. Hope it is insightful.
• musicale 4y ago
  It's a widespread phenomenon, though I don't know whether it's widely observed. My observation is that "downvote to oblivion" (e.g. hidden or grey) seems to facilitate and incentivize upvote/downvote wars/brigading where one side tries to erase its opposition rather than letting it just sink on its own. In practice downvoting seems to mostly be a "dislike" button. Personally I'd prefer an upvote-only system or at least downvotes that are organized by specific category such as spam, trolling, or flamebait. I'm not even sure that off-topic posts outside of those categories should be downvoted - I would expect other posts to rise above them organically in most cases. A final reason why I like upvotes rather than downvotes is that it seems to emphasize the positive rather than the negative, and people might feel better getting few upvotes vs. lots of downvotes. I've made many carefully thought out posts here and elsewhere that get downvoted immediately; it left me feeling puzzled and demoralized. I try to avoid downvoting, yet I too feel the temptation whenever the button is there.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    without downvotes comments putting comments into the gray and dead, bad/wrong advice/information look totally legitimate and become part of the conversation. it's quite unfortunate that differing opinions get caught up in this but the site doesn't need a treatise on every article as to why we didn't actually make it to the moon, or that Bill Gates put microchips in the vaccine. You can turn on "show dead" in your profile to see what kind of dreck gets filtered out. You can also vouch for a comment if it's unfairly been downvoted.
    • version_five 4y ago
      > bad/wrong advice/information look totally legitimate and become part of the conversation Ironically, I don't think that's correct. HN is good because the signal-to-noise is very high, and comments that violate guidelines or otherwise don't meet community standards get downvoted. While contrarian opinions may get caught up in that, the goal is not to suppress "misinformation" which is mostly only a pretend political problem anyway. On forums like this, even the strawman of "the average person isn't smart enough to be allowed to think for themselves" which is used to justify censoring bigger platforms doesn't apply. People can easily make up their own minds. Downvoting is about community standards, not misinformation policing.
      • autoexec 4y ago
        Downvoting helps maintain community standards and also makes it so that people don't have to waste as much time policing/correcting misinformation. Obviously if someone is just plain wrong about something they should be corrected and not downvoted for it, but when someone posts misinformation it's nice that it can be downvoted out of sight fast enough that it's gone before many people are exposed to it and before a bunch of people have spent their time posting facts/corrections or providing critical context for the benefit of others. We'll likely just have to agree to disagree on misinformation being a "pretend" problem, and it's understandable if your perspective means you don't consider the downvote's utility in fighting against misinformation important, but I'm glad for it.
• andirk 4y ago
  HN downvotes are often when: - someone speaks positively about crypto - someone speaks not positively about the American Dem party - someone mentions the above reasons for downvotes (as seen here soon) Those are both very petty and, among a group of likeminded intelligent people, is pretty sad.
  • musicale 4y ago
    > likeminded Well, yes. And it does look like you are currently being downvoted.
  • yarg 4y ago
    > someone mentions the above reasons for downvotes (as seen here soon) To be fair, you are trolling for downvotes (snarky comments go grey very quickly - as well you knew before you posted). On the politics side, as long as you're acting in good faith, and thinking about what you're posting, I doubt that you'll get downvoted (ignoring that politics is generally off topic for the site). Regarding cryptocurrency, nothing good has come of it. There are many uses for a distributed ledger - some very useful. None of them need proof-of-work and a DAG would be more useful than a LinkedList for the purposes of decentralisating.
    • andirk 4y ago
      I am serious about my 2 mentions of downvotes which in turn will cause the 3rd. Kinda snarky but fully true. I have lightly replied to MSDNC comments w/ negative yet factually true statements related to the MSDNC and gotten downvoted. I keep it minimal but politics are a huge part of daily life and technology. Plenty of crypto is scammy but I believe in a form of currency not backed by bombing brown people and guarding Arab oil investments for profit. Pipe dream? Maybe.
• version_five 4y ago
  HN is a like a benevolent authoritarian country, say Singapore (I'm sure the analogy is flawed but that's not material). There is a tradeoff between order and giving equal consideration to all opinions. It sometimes rubs one the wrong way, but it leads to an overall quality that doesn't really exist in any bigger forums, and is only really possible because of the relative alignment of most users' views. It works for small, non-platform community forum, because you can just go somewhere else if you don't like it.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    Where would you go? I don't know of any forums like this one.
    • froglets 4y ago
      There was an intj forum that was kind of like an off topic HN, but it went private years ago.
  • sieabahlpark 4y ago
• ohiovr 4y ago
  I don't downvote. If I don't agree I'll say something and accept the punishment.
• superchroma 4y ago
  Humans, by design, cultivate orthodoxy across cultural lines which usually correlates with emotional investment on the parts of individuals. Put simply, when people can't agree to disagree, they squabble, often viciously. Downvoting facilitates the formation of islands of like-minded thinkers quickly on websites that allow people to connect to each other (any site with groups/friends). For something like Reddit, which is literally a collection of islands like this, the tool is a good fit for building cohesion. Without downvoting, people will still resort to being unpleasant to each other to create homogeny; they find like-minded thinkers, group together as friends and are unpleasant as a group to people not in the group (how you can have definite cultural groups on twitter).
• big_red 4y ago
  yes absolutely. if you look at the crypto communities censoring dissenters was key to their fraud