9 ms·

How the “Down-Vote” Leads to a Vicious Circle of Negative Feedback

72 points by denismars 12y ago

blackoil 12y ago
Zuckerberg seems to know something, dislike is most requested and ignored feature on Facebook.
Portan 12y ago
I'm a math teacher and I saw a weird hivemind effect recently. A student was showing a proof, but I felt one of the steps seemed wrong (I wasn't sure). So I asked everyone else if it was right. They responded with a chorus of "yes" "of course" and a little laughing. Eventually the proof ended up showing something that was not true. So I went back to that step and again asked for confirmation. Again most of them agreed. I wrote the formula to be sure: log(A+B) = log(A) * log(B). Eventually one student with a different text book had looked it up and found it's wrong after all. How had most of the others been so confident that it was right? Surely they hadn't actually learnt it wrong. They must have been making their decision on some other factor, perhaps the fact that all their vocal classmates agreed. At least they weren't giving negative feedback to the one who made the original mistake though. So I guess he won't continue to make worse mistakes as this article suggests.
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  Well, it looks almost right. I can see someone just learning about logarithms being confused about where the + and * go.
- anindyabd 12y ago
  The students were conforming. As this paper [1] explains, people -- especially young people -- will often answer incorrectly in order to gain social acceptance: "...the group answered incorrectly on purpose; it appears that when we are unsure of how to perform a task or how to behave, we may take comfort in agreeing with a large number of other people." [1] http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed
- rndn 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
anigbrowl 12y ago
Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more So empty vessels really do make the most noise. That points to an obvious strategy for improving the quality of comments on any social network site. Clearly, providing negative feedback to “bad” users does not appear to be a good way of preventing undesired behaviour. I'm not seeing such a strategy from the paper's findings. It suggests several ways to limit bad behavior, but since positive feedback doesn't seem to improve quality of comments or posting frequency, I'm getting the strong impression that the overall tone of an online community is set early on in its life, and while it can easily degrade over time there is not a whole lot you can do to improve it. So how can unwanted behaviour be stopped? “Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behaviour and provide no feedback at all,” say Cheng and co. This is pretty difficult to implement, though, since it only takes two people to start a flamewar. All I can think of is very proactive moderator pruning, which would a) become a full-time job and b) creates problems of its own as people start howling about censorship.
joncp 12y ago
I've seen this in the "social network" of code reviews where I work. A "downvote", i.e. a negative comment, often has the opposite effect of the one intended by the reviewer. The code author will dig in their heels and over time contribute lower quality code. Alas, I don't have the luxury of simply ignoring lurking bugs.
mattmanser 12y ago
I wonder if they looked at if you automatically hide replies to 0 or less score comments. Combine the downvote with the ignore.
tokenadult 12y ago
From the article: "Cheng and co began by compiling a dataset of the comments associated with news articles on four online communities: CNN.com, a general news site; Breitbart.com, a political new site; IGN.com, a computer gaming news site; and Allkpop.com, a Korean entertainment site. The data includes 1.2 million threads with 42 million comments and 114 million votes from 1.8 million different users." I would respectfully suggest that the comments from news readers on news sites may not be a dataset that generalizes to discussion and news aggregation sites like Hacker News, especially because Hacker News starts us out with a set of user guidelines[1] particularly geared to encouraging sustained user participation in thoughtful discussion. There is also a welcome message for new users here[2] (I forget how it is implemented, as I am such an old user that I think I joined HN before it was implemented) that packages the rules in a slightly different format. In other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- caf 12y ago
  And I don't keep an enemies list. One thing that probably helps here is that HN doesn't use avatars and visually de-emphasises the username - if I don't specifically look for it I usually have no idea who I'm replying to.
  - hollerith 12y ago
stormbrew 12y ago
I think the reason this behaviour disagrees with traditional ideas about negative reinforcement and punishment is because those theories were built on hierarchical relationships (someone's in charge and doles out conditioning action). If the person receiving the punishment accepts the right of the person doling it out to do so, even if they resent it, they will accept its validity more readily. Also, if they feel unjustly punished, they will focus their ire on the authority rather than the community as a whole. This kind of thing can easily be seen in forums where there is a hard line between moderators and moderated. When people feel attacked by their whole community (which is what a slew of negative votes feels like), it seems like they'd be far more likely to lash out at that community as a whole, and that means throwing out increasingly antisocial posts and attacking people with downvotes themselves.
aaron-lebo 12y ago
> Curiously, authors that receive no feedback, are more likely to leave the community entirely. Ding ding ding. I think, aside from the issues with downvoting, upvoting by nature slowly creates hivemind, circle jerk communities that quickly start to lack any real critical thinking. Go check out just about any subreddit and it becomes very apparent what illogical silly ideas dominate. If you are logical but uncontroversial you'll get ignored which is just as bad as the controversial opinions which get downvoted to hell. You start to wonder if the confirmation bias we are all building towards is more dangerous than just being uninformed. There's lots of research on voting behavior in political science, I'm slightly surprised more hasn't been down with it.
- balls187 12y ago
  Why go to a different site? You can see the "hivemind, circle jerk communities" phenomenon right here. I'm not trying to be cynical but HN certainly displays the same criticism you levy on reddit (as does apparently any community that allows voting).
  - aaron-lebo 12y ago
    Absolutely. But if I had said that I wouldn't be getting sweet Internet points right now. I joke. Reddit is the best example, I think because of how subreddits usually follow a very specific cycle of creation to focus on a specific topic, then the upvoting dynamic creates a strong hivemind, then the dissenters leave and create their own even more narrowly focused community (see /r/politics to /r/conservative), and then it starts over. It's destructive. HN is a little better because there are actually some limits on democracy if you will (thresholds, flagging, etc), which goes back to the heart of my mention of political science. Different political philosophers have been discussing the dangers of overly simple voting scheme since Plato or earlier.
    - rancur 12y ago
      what it comes down to is people here don't present easily dismissible notions for my above average intelligence to ignore; those on reddit do. Not having a downvote is valuable. Limiting max score is valuable. but people still abuse overrated/troll/flamebait on Slashdot. the core of the problem is that truly intelligent people have moved on to greater aspirations than internet posting. Also, the dumb people on forums these days are a lot dumber than they were 15 years ago when I was getting started. And no, that's not just my perception in hindsight. The noise has gotten bad enough that I just don't participate in them. People don't see clearly like they used to, so it's not worth pointing.
shittyanalogy 12y ago
I think the concept of being able to see your "points" at all is non-constructive for communication. Why should it matter to you if other people up or down vote your comments and submissions? So through a knee-jerk feedback mechanism you can best mold your future communication to fit with what will get you the most points? If the purpose of commenting and submitting is not to amass the most "points" possible then they shouldn't be displayed.
- adiabatty 12y ago
  > Why should it matter to you if other people up or down vote your comments and submissions? If I'm not getting any votes or other feedback, I take this as evidence that I'm shouting into the void and wasting my time.
- aaron-lebo 12y ago
  On that topic, I wonder how difficult it would be to make a bot which used machine learning to scan through comments to pick up phrases or words which were highly voted, then have it put together comments based on those. I'm sure you could be very successful.
  - detaro 12y ago
    I can't find it right now, but there was a link a few months back that did some kind of text analysis for the most-"popular" HN users or so. Anybody else a clue what I'm thinking about?
    - thret 12y ago
      Yes, the one that also rated their posts by emotion and other criteria? I can't find it either but you are not crazy, it did exist.
- Gurkenmaster 12y ago
  "Points" of any kind are detrimental to internet communities. This codinghorror post explains it nicely: http://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental-2/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental-...
RunningWild 12y ago
Just remove voting altogether and let the strength of the argument/statement prevail rather than allow a mechanism that rewards groupthink.
- stormbrew 12y ago
  Unfortunately, that just leads to 5 pages of "FIRST!!!" before you get real content.
  - TillE 12y ago
    Forums with good moderation solve those problems. A nice example is rpg.net. Traditional linear forums are still the best format for in-depth discussion, IMO. Threads actually stick around for more than a day or two. Just compare gamedev.net to /r/gamedev.
    - mwfunk 12y ago
      It felt like there was an inflection point around '96 or '97 when Usenet really dried up and web-based forums became the most common way to discuss things on the Internet. I blamed it on Slashdot at the time but I think it was inevitable as more and more people got on the Internet. I really feel like we lost something though. Newsreaders provided a much better way to engage in the kinds of conversations that people have on place like HN or even Reddit. To this day I don't know of any web forums that offer the conveniences of newsreaders like tin or slrn. I miss killfiles (and plonking!) and really, really, really well-maintained FAQs on just about anything. I'm not sure how much of my Usenet nostalgia is just remembering the good stuff. It may not have been as great as I remember, but it sure seemed like it at the time. I learned so much from it, from so many people in so many different newsgroups. Maybe that's what places like HN are to larval hackers today.
    - stormbrew 12y ago
      Well, discussion forums incite somewhat different types of posts than news sites (which are the primary case for peer-vote moderation for whatever reason). And top-down moderation is also quite different. So yeah, I agree those don't have that specific problem.
minimaxir 12y ago
This was posted last year. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857
legohead 12y ago
I work for a gaming website that lets people vote on the games and comment. It's mostly a younger audience (under 18) but there's still a good amount of all ages. Anyway, we released a game one day and some of the first comments were really negative, even though the game was objectively a pretty darn good game. Knowing the game was good I was awaiting the nice comments to show up, but they didn't. It was just a flurry of negativity. I talked to some other employees and they agreed the game was good and something felt off. We all jumped into the comments, gave good reviews of the game and started discussions with all the negative reviewers. Then the positive reviews started showing up, and the games rating did a complete turn around to overwhelmingly positive. I feel like if we hadn't intervened, the game would have continued to have negative reviews and end up with a bad rating. There's a kind of hive mind mentality going on, and the first public comments have some sort of psychological effect on the rest of the players.
- eterm 12y ago
  “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”
- rmxt 12y ago
  Just a thought: understandably, with a younger audience, I imagine that most of your users are not going to be conscious or care about conflicts of interest. I am curious though, did you and your fellow reviewers disclose your roles in your reviews? I don't think that your case is particularly malicious or anything, but it makes me wonder how easily similar tactics could be used in larger websites or about more serious topics. Thinking along these lines, it feels very "real" how quickly things like payola came about in past media formats, and how what was old is new once again.
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  As much as the other comments here might disagree, HN is subject to the same situation. Early comments dictate the tone and focus of the conversation. For example, its trivial to highjack any thread about security with a well written comment about the connection (however fleeting) to the NSA/snowden leaks.
abdias 12y ago
If only voting represented quality and usefulness. Unfortunately, it's most of the time emotional. Throw in conformity and political correctness, and you have a powerful tool serving both.
- elihu 12y ago
  Slashdot's metamoderation system is a pretty good approach to preventing users from mis-using their upvotes and downvotes. (Unfortunately, Slashdot's comment moderation system is flawed in other ways, so the benefits of metamod are hard to evaluate objectively. Also, metamod probably won't help for any site where trolling is the dominant culture, which describes most "comment sections" you'll find on the Internet.)
fragsworth 12y ago
> “We find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioural changes that are detrimental to the community,” I really hope the sites that have downvotes don't take this to heart. There are massive benefits that the authors completely overlooked. It allows the community to rapidly bury garbage content, and because of this, the pool of potentially good content (with few upvotes) is much smaller and less daunting for the users to sift through, which allows more good content to rise to the top.
codezero 12y ago
Although downvotes don't help provide feedback to the users, allowing them can provide an immense amount of feedback for the operators of the community. You need a certain amount of positive feedback relative to negative feedback, and if you monitor that ratio, you can have a good pulse on the quality of your community. If you are not maintaining a high ratio of positive to negative feedback, you can take action to increase positive feedback in meaningful ways. You can also use provided negative feedback to tailor interactions. Someone downvotes a particular thread? Don't notify them of any future discussion on that thread if you otherwise would have, etc... See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio In my opinion this ratio applies equally as well in social networks and online communities.
ocfx 12y ago
http://zedshaw.com/archive/a-few-interesting-ratings-system-observations/ http://zedshaw.com/archive/a-few-interesting-ratings-system-...
samatman 12y ago
It is as strange to read Burrhus Skinner as it would be to read John Tolkien. B.F. Skinner has always been so stylized.
wbillingsley 12y ago
Online arguments tend to be long, degenerate, and quickly form opposing camps that will war in other threads too. I think that's (informally) very well known. And a down-vote is a potentially significant indicator that an argument is taking place. But I think the authors are a little naive if they think the site-owners are not aware (and in some cases, counting on) this. For many sites, it seems to be the arguments and battles that drive activity. As if to the site-owner, a (moderate) ding-dong battle is "increased engagement, even from the people who disliked the content" rather than something they necessarily want to stamp out.
paulhauggis 12y ago
Voting is basically used as a form of censorship in almost every community on the Internet, including HN. If you go against the grain, you will be removed and ignored. I guess it's a mirror of real life: people generally only want to be around people that think like they do.
Houshalter 12y ago
I don't buy it. They just found a correlation that users with a downvoted comment happened to also make other bad comments (what a surprise.) They didn't actually downvote or upvote comments on randomly picked users and see what effect it had, which would have been way easier than the machine learning approach they used.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
This was fascinating. One of the interesting challenges with feedback that I have observed is that often separating feedback on the comment/post/idea vs feedback on the author is hard to distinguish. I have this thought that instead of 'up' or 'down' a less directed 'agree or disagree' might be less painful on the poster.

72 points by denismars 12y ago

Zuckerberg seems to know something, dislike is most requested and ignored feature on Facebook.

I'm a math teacher and I saw a weird hivemind effect recently. A student was showing a proof, but I felt one of the steps seemed wrong (I wasn't sure). So I asked everyone else if it was right. They responded with a chorus of "yes" "of course" and a little laughing. Eventually the proof ended up showing something that was not true. So I went back to that step and again asked for confirmation. Again most of them agreed. I wrote the formula to be sure: log(A+B) = log(A) * log(B). Eventually one student with a different text book had looked it up and found it's wrong after all. How had most of the others been so confident that it was right? Surely they hadn't actually learnt it wrong. They must have been making their decision on some other factor, perhaps the fact that all their vocal classmates agreed. At least they weren't giving negative feedback to the one who made the original mistake though. So I guess he won't continue to make worse mistakes as this article suggests.

ScottBurson 12y ago
Well, it looks almost right. I can see someone just learning about logarithms being confused about where the + and * go.
anindyabd 12y ago
The students were conforming. As this paper [1] explains, people -- especially young people -- will often answer incorrectly in order to gain social acceptance: "...the group answered incorrectly on purpose; it appears that when we are unsure of how to perform a task or how to behave, we may take comfort in agreeing with a large number of other people." [1] http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed
rndn 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

anigbrowl 12y ago

Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more So empty vessels really do make the most noise. That points to an obvious strategy for improving the quality of comments on any social network site. Clearly, providing negative feedback to “bad” users does not appear to be a good way of preventing undesired behaviour. I'm not seeing such a strategy from the paper's findings. It suggests several ways to limit bad behavior, but since positive feedback doesn't seem to improve quality of comments or posting frequency, I'm getting the strong impression that the overall tone of an online community is set early on in its life, and while it can easily degrade over time there is not a whole lot you can do to improve it. So how can unwanted behaviour be stopped? “Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behaviour and provide no feedback at all,” say Cheng and co. This is pretty difficult to implement, though, since it only takes two people to start a flamewar. All I can think of is very proactive moderator pruning, which would a) become a full-time job and b) creates problems of its own as people start howling about censorship.

joncp 12y ago

I've seen this in the "social network" of code reviews where I work. A "downvote", i.e. a negative comment, often has the opposite effect of the one intended by the reviewer. The code author will dig in their heels and over time contribute lower quality code. Alas, I don't have the luxury of simply ignoring lurking bugs.

mattmanser 12y ago

I wonder if they looked at if you automatically hide replies to 0 or less score comments. Combine the downvote with the ignore.

tokenadult 12y ago

From the article: "Cheng and co began by compiling a dataset of the comments associated with news articles on four online communities: CNN.com, a general news site; Breitbart.com, a political new site; IGN.com, a computer gaming news site; and Allkpop.com, a Korean entertainment site. The data includes 1.2 million threads with 42 million comments and 114 million votes from 1.8 million different users." I would respectfully suggest that the comments from news readers on news sites may not be a dataset that generalizes to discussion and news aggregation sites like Hacker News, especially because Hacker News starts us out with a set of user guidelines[1] particularly geared to encouraging sustained user participation in thoughtful discussion. There is also a welcome message for new users here[2] (I forget how it is implemented, as I am such an old user that I think I joined HN before it was implemented) that packages the rules in a slightly different format. In other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

caf 12y ago
And I don't keep an enemies list. One thing that probably helps here is that HN doesn't use avatars and visually de-emphasises the username - if I don't specifically look for it I usually have no idea who I'm replying to.
- hollerith 12y ago

stormbrew 12y ago

I think the reason this behaviour disagrees with traditional ideas about negative reinforcement and punishment is because those theories were built on hierarchical relationships (someone's in charge and doles out conditioning action). If the person receiving the punishment accepts the right of the person doling it out to do so, even if they resent it, they will accept its validity more readily. Also, if they feel unjustly punished, they will focus their ire on the authority rather than the community as a whole. This kind of thing can easily be seen in forums where there is a hard line between moderators and moderated. When people feel attacked by their whole community (which is what a slew of negative votes feels like), it seems like they'd be far more likely to lash out at that community as a whole, and that means throwing out increasingly antisocial posts and attacking people with downvotes themselves.

aaron-lebo 12y ago

> Curiously, authors that receive no feedback, are more likely to leave the community entirely. Ding ding ding. I think, aside from the issues with downvoting, upvoting by nature slowly creates hivemind, circle jerk communities that quickly start to lack any real critical thinking. Go check out just about any subreddit and it becomes very apparent what illogical silly ideas dominate. If you are logical but uncontroversial you'll get ignored which is just as bad as the controversial opinions which get downvoted to hell. You start to wonder if the confirmation bias we are all building towards is more dangerous than just being uninformed. There's lots of research on voting behavior in political science, I'm slightly surprised more hasn't been down with it.

balls187 12y ago
Why go to a different site? You can see the "hivemind, circle jerk communities" phenomenon right here. I'm not trying to be cynical but HN certainly displays the same criticism you levy on reddit (as does apparently any community that allows voting).
- aaron-lebo 12y ago
  Absolutely. But if I had said that I wouldn't be getting sweet Internet points right now. I joke. Reddit is the best example, I think because of how subreddits usually follow a very specific cycle of creation to focus on a specific topic, then the upvoting dynamic creates a strong hivemind, then the dissenters leave and create their own even more narrowly focused community (see /r/politics to /r/conservative), and then it starts over. It's destructive. HN is a little better because there are actually some limits on democracy if you will (thresholds, flagging, etc), which goes back to the heart of my mention of political science. Different political philosophers have been discussing the dangers of overly simple voting scheme since Plato or earlier.
  - rancur 12y ago
    what it comes down to is people here don't present easily dismissible notions for my above average intelligence to ignore; those on reddit do. Not having a downvote is valuable. Limiting max score is valuable. but people still abuse overrated/troll/flamebait on Slashdot. the core of the problem is that truly intelligent people have moved on to greater aspirations than internet posting. Also, the dumb people on forums these days are a lot dumber than they were 15 years ago when I was getting started. And no, that's not just my perception in hindsight. The noise has gotten bad enough that I just don't participate in them. People don't see clearly like they used to, so it's not worth pointing.

shittyanalogy 12y ago

I think the concept of being able to see your "points" at all is non-constructive for communication. Why should it matter to you if other people up or down vote your comments and submissions? So through a knee-jerk feedback mechanism you can best mold your future communication to fit with what will get you the most points? If the purpose of commenting and submitting is not to amass the most "points" possible then they shouldn't be displayed.

adiabatty 12y ago
> Why should it matter to you if other people up or down vote your comments and submissions? If I'm not getting any votes or other feedback, I take this as evidence that I'm shouting into the void and wasting my time.
aaron-lebo 12y ago
On that topic, I wonder how difficult it would be to make a bot which used machine learning to scan through comments to pick up phrases or words which were highly voted, then have it put together comments based on those. I'm sure you could be very successful.
- detaro 12y ago
  I can't find it right now, but there was a link a few months back that did some kind of text analysis for the most-"popular" HN users or so. Anybody else a clue what I'm thinking about?
  - thret 12y ago
    Yes, the one that also rated their posts by emotion and other criteria? I can't find it either but you are not crazy, it did exist.
Gurkenmaster 12y ago
"Points" of any kind are detrimental to internet communities. This codinghorror post explains it nicely: http://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental-2/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental-...

RunningWild 12y ago

Just remove voting altogether and let the strength of the argument/statement prevail rather than allow a mechanism that rewards groupthink.

stormbrew 12y ago
Unfortunately, that just leads to 5 pages of "FIRST!!!" before you get real content.
- TillE 12y ago
  Forums with good moderation solve those problems. A nice example is rpg.net. Traditional linear forums are still the best format for in-depth discussion, IMO. Threads actually stick around for more than a day or two. Just compare gamedev.net to /r/gamedev.
  - mwfunk 12y ago
    It felt like there was an inflection point around '96 or '97 when Usenet really dried up and web-based forums became the most common way to discuss things on the Internet. I blamed it on Slashdot at the time but I think it was inevitable as more and more people got on the Internet. I really feel like we lost something though. Newsreaders provided a much better way to engage in the kinds of conversations that people have on place like HN or even Reddit. To this day I don't know of any web forums that offer the conveniences of newsreaders like tin or slrn. I miss killfiles (and plonking!) and really, really, really well-maintained FAQs on just about anything. I'm not sure how much of my Usenet nostalgia is just remembering the good stuff. It may not have been as great as I remember, but it sure seemed like it at the time. I learned so much from it, from so many people in so many different newsgroups. Maybe that's what places like HN are to larval hackers today.
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    Well, discussion forums incite somewhat different types of posts than news sites (which are the primary case for peer-vote moderation for whatever reason). And top-down moderation is also quite different. So yeah, I agree those don't have that specific problem.

minimaxir 12y ago

This was posted last year. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857

legohead 12y ago

I work for a gaming website that lets people vote on the games and comment. It's mostly a younger audience (under 18) but there's still a good amount of all ages. Anyway, we released a game one day and some of the first comments were really negative, even though the game was objectively a pretty darn good game. Knowing the game was good I was awaiting the nice comments to show up, but they didn't. It was just a flurry of negativity. I talked to some other employees and they agreed the game was good and something felt off. We all jumped into the comments, gave good reviews of the game and started discussions with all the negative reviewers. Then the positive reviews started showing up, and the games rating did a complete turn around to overwhelmingly positive. I feel like if we hadn't intervened, the game would have continued to have negative reviews and end up with a bad rating. There's a kind of hive mind mentality going on, and the first public comments have some sort of psychological effect on the rest of the players.

eterm 12y ago
“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”
rmxt 12y ago
Just a thought: understandably, with a younger audience, I imagine that most of your users are not going to be conscious or care about conflicts of interest. I am curious though, did you and your fellow reviewers disclose your roles in your reviews? I don't think that your case is particularly malicious or anything, but it makes me wonder how easily similar tactics could be used in larger websites or about more serious topics. Thinking along these lines, it feels very "real" how quickly things like payola came about in past media formats, and how what was old is new once again.
hayksaakian 12y ago
As much as the other comments here might disagree, HN is subject to the same situation. Early comments dictate the tone and focus of the conversation. For example, its trivial to highjack any thread about security with a well written comment about the connection (however fleeting) to the NSA/snowden leaks.

abdias 12y ago

If only voting represented quality and usefulness. Unfortunately, it's most of the time emotional. Throw in conformity and political correctness, and you have a powerful tool serving both.

elihu 12y ago
Slashdot's metamoderation system is a pretty good approach to preventing users from mis-using their upvotes and downvotes. (Unfortunately, Slashdot's comment moderation system is flawed in other ways, so the benefits of metamod are hard to evaluate objectively. Also, metamod probably won't help for any site where trolling is the dominant culture, which describes most "comment sections" you'll find on the Internet.)

fragsworth 12y ago

> “We find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioural changes that are detrimental to the community,” I really hope the sites that have downvotes don't take this to heart. There are massive benefits that the authors completely overlooked. It allows the community to rapidly bury garbage content, and because of this, the pool of potentially good content (with few upvotes) is much smaller and less daunting for the users to sift through, which allows more good content to rise to the top.

codezero 12y ago

Although downvotes don't help provide feedback to the users, allowing them can provide an immense amount of feedback for the operators of the community. You need a certain amount of positive feedback relative to negative feedback, and if you monitor that ratio, you can have a good pulse on the quality of your community. If you are not maintaining a high ratio of positive to negative feedback, you can take action to increase positive feedback in meaningful ways. You can also use provided negative feedback to tailor interactions. Someone downvotes a particular thread? Don't notify them of any future discussion on that thread if you otherwise would have, etc... See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio In my opinion this ratio applies equally as well in social networks and online communities.

ocfx 12y ago

http://zedshaw.com/archive/a-few-interesting-ratings-system-observations/ http://zedshaw.com/archive/a-few-interesting-ratings-system-...

samatman 12y ago

It is as strange to read Burrhus Skinner as it would be to read John Tolkien. B.F. Skinner has always been so stylized.

wbillingsley 12y ago

Online arguments tend to be long, degenerate, and quickly form opposing camps that will war in other threads too. I think that's (informally) very well known. And a down-vote is a potentially significant indicator that an argument is taking place. But I think the authors are a little naive if they think the site-owners are not aware (and in some cases, counting on) this. For many sites, it seems to be the arguments and battles that drive activity. As if to the site-owner, a (moderate) ding-dong battle is "increased engagement, even from the people who disliked the content" rather than something they necessarily want to stamp out.

paulhauggis 12y ago

Voting is basically used as a form of censorship in almost every community on the Internet, including HN. If you go against the grain, you will be removed and ignored. I guess it's a mirror of real life: people generally only want to be around people that think like they do.

Houshalter 12y ago

I don't buy it. They just found a correlation that users with a downvoted comment happened to also make other bad comments (what a surprise.) They didn't actually downvote or upvote comments on randomly picked users and see what effect it had, which would have been way easier than the machine learning approach they used.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

This was fascinating. One of the interesting challenges with feedback that I have observed is that often separating feedback on the comment/post/idea vs feedback on the author is hard to distinguish. I have this thought that instead of 'up' or 'down' a less directed 'agree or disagree' might be less painful on the poster.