6 ms·

Down-Vote Leads To A Vicious Circle Of Negative Feedback

26 points by ecesena 12y ago

ecesena 12y ago
Original paper: How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429 http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429
minimaxir 12y ago
> What’s needed now, of course, is a test of this idea. There are certainly social networks that allow up voting but not down voting (Medium being one of them). The prototypical example of this type of system is Facebook. And there's a reason that people continually clamor for a Dislike button: not all content is good, in terms of either quality and sentiment, and allowing only upvotes reinforces a hive mind mentality, which is a bad thing in the long run. (Fun Facebook Fact: Reporting a Facebook post actually decreases the number of Likes by 1.)
- RodericDay 12y ago
  "allowing only upvotes reinforces a hive mind mentality" And allowing downvotes fixes this? The best forum I take part in doesn't have upvotes. Chronology and individual filters only.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    Forums usually have strict content moderation for that reason. That does not scale at all (Dunbar's number), so very few startups would attempt it. Upvotes are a quality filter, and downvotes are a quality filter for the quality filter.
    - andreasvc 12y ago
      No, downvotes makes the incentive to conform stronger because it makes people risk averse, so it increases the potential for hivemind. A quality filter for the quality filter would be some kind of arbitration, which people currently do in an ad hoc fashion and often prematurely by complaining about the downvotes in an edit.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  People clamor for a dislike button on Facebook because it is an emotion they would like to express with a button. Whether it would lead to better comment threads is a completely different matter, and if Reddit is any indication it does not protect against hivemind, and in here as well it occurs frequently that comments are downvoted merely for containing arguments that people happen to disagree with.
  - bane 12y ago
    I think with FB, people don't necessarily want a button that's just a counter to the "like" button. They want a "dislike" button, but on its own axis. So n-likes and m-dislikes don't add up to n - m = score but n + m = score. In other words, when somebody posts that their dog just passed away or whatever, I want to hit "dislike", not to pull down the like score but as a separate emotional indicator.
    - Turing_Machine 12y ago
      Exactly. When some one announces that they have cancer, the last thing you want to do is click "like". Slashdot has several options, not just "like" and "dislike".
    - andreasvc 12y ago
      There's already an infinity of emotions which you can express with the comment box. I don't think another flavor without a different mechanism adds anything to the dynamics of commenting, which is what this article is discussing.
- cliveowen 12y ago
  It actually makes sense that Facebook doesn't provide a dislike button, for two reasons. First of all on Facebook you're interacting with friends mostly and disliking a friend's post cannot lead to anything good and generate resentment. Secondly, being downvoted or dislike creates a bad feeling and people would either reduce or entirely stop posting or simply avoid Facebook altogether to not be met with disagreement.
  - salvadors 12y ago
    > disliking a friend's post cannot lead to anything good and generate resentment Dislike != downvote. Dislike can also be "I don't like this thing that happened to you" / sympathy.
gojomo 12y ago
Not confident of their methodology, but it's clear to me that the 'sting' of downvotes introduces problems along with whatever other moderation benefits they might provide. The problem gets worse when simple disagreement gets overloaded into the same downvoting that's meant to control destructive behavior. That sends the message that disagreement is punishable. Further, with the fading/de-ranking/hiding that's applied to low-scoring posts on HN and similar sites, it even sends the message that unpopular views should be censored. My theory – which I've not yet convinced a social site to try – is that two separate axes of voting could help. The first is whether a post is valuable or destructive; the second is whether the reader agrees or disagrees. In that way, the natural tendency to want to express an opinion with a single click, or 'win' a poll of popularity, can be captured and channeled into the agree/disagree measure, without the morale- and behavior-spoiling implications that come with the visibility-penalty/muzzling of "that's destructive" downvotes.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  > it's clear to me that the 'sting' of downvotes [...] Do we need to sugarcoat this? Being rejected for a job stings, having your paper rejected from peer review stings, etc. But in all such cases quality is maintained because of those rejections, and there's no way around it. It may be a factor that downvoting happens in public, but a moderation system where every comment needs to be reviewed by some peer review committee would be way too expensive and too slow for a forum. Your idea of a two dimensional voting system reminds of Slashdot's more elaborate system. Some people say it works quite well, IIRC. Ultimately, I don't think one should hope to find a technical solution to a social problem.
  - gojomo 12y ago
    Here, the technical limits (one-axis voting) is creating a social problem. Disagreement is a normal, healthy, necessary, wonderful thing. But, disagreements are being channeled into the only outlet available: one-dimensional downvotes. And that outlet also includes censure: down-ranking and fading. So a healthy thing – good-faith disagreement – is being laden with the bad-feelings and retaliatory behavior that comes with punishment. A social problem caused by a technical choice may indeed have a technical fix.
Codhisattva 12y ago
This makes me wonder about the negative feedback inherent in code reviews.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  What is the negative feedback inherent in code reviews?
- greenyoda 12y ago
  There can be both negative feedback and positive feedback in code reviews. And if you've written buggy or unmaintainable code, wouldn't you want someone to tell you about it so you could learn to write better code in the future? I sometimes wish I'd had someone to review my code when I was starting out as a programmer.
bane 12y ago
HN used to have this problem in a big way years ago, where somebody would say something challenging to the group think and everybody would just dump all over the comment and "downvote the comment to oblivion". I think at some point pg put a cap on negative comment scores at -5 or something, so the point that this "this is an unpopular comment" got across, but didn't drain a user's karma by -100 or whatever. I've also found that groups of downvotes can happen at different times during a comment's lifecycle. There's no clear pattern, but I've had comments get a bunch of downvotes early on right after the post, then a few hours later end up in clearly positive territory. I think the limit on downvotes saved the comment, it probably would have ended up in double or triple digit downvote territory during the period of time when people were piling on, but the hard limit prevented an irretrievable negative downward spiral. I also find myself far less concerned about people piling on downvotes, because it might change and end back up in positive territory (and if it doesn't my karma isn't annihilated because I happened to be a bad mood at the moment I posted something). I also think that not showing scores has helped a lot with breaking negative cycles (as well as breaking overly positive cycles). It infuriated lots of old users when it was instituted, but I've observed that it appears that echo chamber style group think has broken here and that "famous names" don't just get to the top of a comment tree for posting an offhand comment like they did when scores were being shown. Almost immediately, the mix of people at the top of the comments for a topic started to become more interesting and varied.
jacobolus 12y ago
The methodology here is quite simplistic, and suspect. The way they “objectively” decided on “quality” of posts, by which to judge the ‘before’ picture of a poster was via some machine learning analysis of the keywords in the post in question, implicitly assuming that their keyword analysis was a better judgment of quality than the explicit voting on the site. This seems like a very poor assumption to me. It’s quite plausible (to me) that the posts’ keywords in the negatively-voted posts looked okay to their algorithm while the content still turned out to be trolling or bullshit (hence the downvotes). It would be quite reasonable to assume that posts full of trolling or bullshit were by posters who were inclined to future trolling/bullshit posts. I’d be very interested to see what results they’d get if they ran the clock in reverse. I.e. pulled some posts of similar “quality” based on their metric but different voted scores, and then looked at the several posts before that, from those posters.
Cowicide 12y ago
As most everyone here knows... With a enough downvotes at HN, one's posts can be invisible to some depending upon their settings. Also, without enough upvotes one cannot downvote others. So, if one has enough sock accounts with upvotes, one can use those powerful accounts to downvote others they don't agree with into oblivion. People who don't use sockpuppets are at the mercy of those who do. This situation creates a lot of incentive to create accounts where one censors their opinions, attaches to the "groupthink" in threads with sockpuppet accounts and troll for upvotes so one can can acquire many empowered accounts with the power to exact revenge and censorship on others. Instead of working to censor for rudeness, it works to get others to align with groupthink in hopes that one can get into a positive upvote territory and eventually be able to downvote others and defend themselves from attacks by upvoting themselves with socks. I wonder how many sockpuppet accounts are commenting and competing here on HN to simply be able to acquire power against one another? How many comments are simply disengenous trolling for upvotes? It would be really enlightening if HN decided to stop making downvotes and upvotes anonymous where we could all see the patterns and make the connections between grassroots downvotes/upvotes and systematic downvotes/upvotes from multiple sockpuppets. I'd love to see that.
xname 12y ago
Check my experiment attracted loser downvoter(s): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761389

26 points by ecesena 12y ago

Original paper: How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429 http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429

minimaxir 12y ago

> What’s needed now, of course, is a test of this idea. There are certainly social networks that allow up voting but not down voting (Medium being one of them). The prototypical example of this type of system is Facebook. And there's a reason that people continually clamor for a Dislike button: not all content is good, in terms of either quality and sentiment, and allowing only upvotes reinforces a hive mind mentality, which is a bad thing in the long run. (Fun Facebook Fact: Reporting a Facebook post actually decreases the number of Likes by 1.)

RodericDay 12y ago
"allowing only upvotes reinforces a hive mind mentality" And allowing downvotes fixes this? The best forum I take part in doesn't have upvotes. Chronology and individual filters only.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Forums usually have strict content moderation for that reason. That does not scale at all (Dunbar's number), so very few startups would attempt it. Upvotes are a quality filter, and downvotes are a quality filter for the quality filter.
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    No, downvotes makes the incentive to conform stronger because it makes people risk averse, so it increases the potential for hivemind. A quality filter for the quality filter would be some kind of arbitration, which people currently do in an ad hoc fashion and often prematurely by complaining about the downvotes in an edit.
andreasvc 12y ago
People clamor for a dislike button on Facebook because it is an emotion they would like to express with a button. Whether it would lead to better comment threads is a completely different matter, and if Reddit is any indication it does not protect against hivemind, and in here as well it occurs frequently that comments are downvoted merely for containing arguments that people happen to disagree with.
- bane 12y ago
  I think with FB, people don't necessarily want a button that's just a counter to the "like" button. They want a "dislike" button, but on its own axis. So n-likes and m-dislikes don't add up to n - m = score but n + m = score. In other words, when somebody posts that their dog just passed away or whatever, I want to hit "dislike", not to pull down the like score but as a separate emotional indicator.
  - Turing_Machine 12y ago
    Exactly. When some one announces that they have cancer, the last thing you want to do is click "like". Slashdot has several options, not just "like" and "dislike".
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    There's already an infinity of emotions which you can express with the comment box. I don't think another flavor without a different mechanism adds anything to the dynamics of commenting, which is what this article is discussing.
cliveowen 12y ago
It actually makes sense that Facebook doesn't provide a dislike button, for two reasons. First of all on Facebook you're interacting with friends mostly and disliking a friend's post cannot lead to anything good and generate resentment. Secondly, being downvoted or dislike creates a bad feeling and people would either reduce or entirely stop posting or simply avoid Facebook altogether to not be met with disagreement.
- salvadors 12y ago
  > disliking a friend's post cannot lead to anything good and generate resentment Dislike != downvote. Dislike can also be "I don't like this thing that happened to you" / sympathy.

gojomo 12y ago

Not confident of their methodology, but it's clear to me that the 'sting' of downvotes introduces problems along with whatever other moderation benefits they might provide. The problem gets worse when simple disagreement gets overloaded into the same downvoting that's meant to control destructive behavior. That sends the message that disagreement is punishable. Further, with the fading/de-ranking/hiding that's applied to low-scoring posts on HN and similar sites, it even sends the message that unpopular views should be censored. My theory – which I've not yet convinced a social site to try – is that two separate axes of voting could help. The first is whether a post is valuable or destructive; the second is whether the reader agrees or disagrees. In that way, the natural tendency to want to express an opinion with a single click, or 'win' a poll of popularity, can be captured and channeled into the agree/disagree measure, without the morale- and behavior-spoiling implications that come with the visibility-penalty/muzzling of "that's destructive" downvotes.

andreasvc 12y ago
> it's clear to me that the 'sting' of downvotes [...] Do we need to sugarcoat this? Being rejected for a job stings, having your paper rejected from peer review stings, etc. But in all such cases quality is maintained because of those rejections, and there's no way around it. It may be a factor that downvoting happens in public, but a moderation system where every comment needs to be reviewed by some peer review committee would be way too expensive and too slow for a forum. Your idea of a two dimensional voting system reminds of Slashdot's more elaborate system. Some people say it works quite well, IIRC. Ultimately, I don't think one should hope to find a technical solution to a social problem.
- gojomo 12y ago
  Here, the technical limits (one-axis voting) is creating a social problem. Disagreement is a normal, healthy, necessary, wonderful thing. But, disagreements are being channeled into the only outlet available: one-dimensional downvotes. And that outlet also includes censure: down-ranking and fading. So a healthy thing – good-faith disagreement – is being laden with the bad-feelings and retaliatory behavior that comes with punishment. A social problem caused by a technical choice may indeed have a technical fix.

Codhisattva 12y ago

This makes me wonder about the negative feedback inherent in code reviews.

andreasvc 12y ago
What is the negative feedback inherent in code reviews?
greenyoda 12y ago
There can be both negative feedback and positive feedback in code reviews. And if you've written buggy or unmaintainable code, wouldn't you want someone to tell you about it so you could learn to write better code in the future? I sometimes wish I'd had someone to review my code when I was starting out as a programmer.

bane 12y ago

HN used to have this problem in a big way years ago, where somebody would say something challenging to the group think and everybody would just dump all over the comment and "downvote the comment to oblivion". I think at some point pg put a cap on negative comment scores at -5 or something, so the point that this "this is an unpopular comment" got across, but didn't drain a user's karma by -100 or whatever. I've also found that groups of downvotes can happen at different times during a comment's lifecycle. There's no clear pattern, but I've had comments get a bunch of downvotes early on right after the post, then a few hours later end up in clearly positive territory. I think the limit on downvotes saved the comment, it probably would have ended up in double or triple digit downvote territory during the period of time when people were piling on, but the hard limit prevented an irretrievable negative downward spiral. I also find myself far less concerned about people piling on downvotes, because it might change and end back up in positive territory (and if it doesn't my karma isn't annihilated because I happened to be a bad mood at the moment I posted something). I also think that not showing scores has helped a lot with breaking negative cycles (as well as breaking overly positive cycles). It infuriated lots of old users when it was instituted, but I've observed that it appears that echo chamber style group think has broken here and that "famous names" don't just get to the top of a comment tree for posting an offhand comment like they did when scores were being shown. Almost immediately, the mix of people at the top of the comments for a topic started to become more interesting and varied.

jacobolus 12y ago

The methodology here is quite simplistic, and suspect. The way they “objectively” decided on “quality” of posts, by which to judge the ‘before’ picture of a poster was via some machine learning analysis of the keywords in the post in question, implicitly assuming that their keyword analysis was a better judgment of quality than the explicit voting on the site. This seems like a very poor assumption to me. It’s quite plausible (to me) that the posts’ keywords in the negatively-voted posts looked okay to their algorithm while the content still turned out to be trolling or bullshit (hence the downvotes). It would be quite reasonable to assume that posts full of trolling or bullshit were by posters who were inclined to future trolling/bullshit posts. I’d be very interested to see what results they’d get if they ran the clock in reverse. I.e. pulled some posts of similar “quality” based on their metric but different voted scores, and then looked at the several posts before that, from those posters.

Cowicide 12y ago

As most everyone here knows... With a enough downvotes at HN, one's posts can be invisible to some depending upon their settings. Also, without enough upvotes one cannot downvote others. So, if one has enough sock accounts with upvotes, one can use those powerful accounts to downvote others they don't agree with into oblivion. People who don't use sockpuppets are at the mercy of those who do. This situation creates a lot of incentive to create accounts where one censors their opinions, attaches to the "groupthink" in threads with sockpuppet accounts and troll for upvotes so one can can acquire many empowered accounts with the power to exact revenge and censorship on others. Instead of working to censor for rudeness, it works to get others to align with groupthink in hopes that one can get into a positive upvote territory and eventually be able to downvote others and defend themselves from attacks by upvoting themselves with socks. I wonder how many sockpuppet accounts are commenting and competing here on HN to simply be able to acquire power against one another? How many comments are simply disengenous trolling for upvotes? It would be really enlightening if HN decided to stop making downvotes and upvotes anonymous where we could all see the patterns and make the connections between grassroots downvotes/upvotes and systematic downvotes/upvotes from multiple sockpuppets. I'd love to see that.

xname 12y ago

Check my experiment attracted loser downvoter(s): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761389