5 ms·
One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is si
by bnralt 3y ago
One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. This becomes even more prevalent when you add gatekeepers. Most people don’t have time to be volunteer editors or moderators. Or to park themselves in the new submissions section deciding what should make it to the front page and what should drop off.
So of course anti-social nutcases dominate these spaces. That’s how these spaces are structured.
- wavemode 3y agoEven assuming equal levels of internet usage, there is also the related problem that unpaid internet moderation naturally selects for narcissists. (And, really, it's the only way the system can work, since the only real currency of the internet is to make someone feel important within a community. It's the only reason sites like Wikipedia and SE can get thousands of hours of free labor from thousands of people.)
- cabalamat 3y ago> Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.
- lamontcg 3y agoThat probably incentivizes selling accounts to bot farms, usually in social media you give more weight to people who have stuck around longer rather than the accounts that have less activity and might be fake.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI think slashdot did something like that, but limited the amount of total votes you have per day. But that site's a little before my time. Would be nice if you could set the weights on voting yourself, along with other aspects of site moderation/ranking.