Downvoting works okay in places like Hacker News that are basically a single community with good moderation and some common values. It doesn't work in large-scale systems where many distinct communities have little in common beyond using the same social network. The average for a controversial post isn't going to tell you much.

Perhaps some form of negative feedback would be helpful; an intelligent system could use it to avoid sharing posts into communities where they're not wanted. But the system could probably figure this out from people not upvoting or resharing things.

I like the idea of reinforcing some separation, but I also fear it may be too late. A lot of people seem to derive joy from attacking the community of others, to the point where that's the focal point of some whole communities. Trying to stop this internecine fighting really is an attack on such communities...

It seems to me that the in-group echo chamber becomes not a discussion, but a means for all to signal their right-thinking loyal membership of the group. Just over the last couple of days I've seen some awful stuff along these lines on Facebook, regarding the new opening on the Supreme Court. Someone will share a meme that was posted by one of their in-group pages. This turns into a bunch of "me too" replies, but each of them needs to share a comment that includes a non-clever pun based on misspelling an opponent's name, and many of which declare how evil the other side is and deserves whatever they get. (notice I'm not taking sides: I think this applies equally across the board)

The problem here is that from a few cheers that get the ball rolling, any semblance of discussion evaporates. It's like when the neighbor's dog barks in the middle of the night, so your own dog replies, and then another gets into the act, and pretty soon the cacophony has everyone awake - but nobody's any better off from knowing that there are a bunch of dogs in the neighborhood.

I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think that the problem is outsiders being disruptive - it's insiders clambering to signal their tribal membership.

EDIT: missed the "not" in first sentence. BIG difference!

One example of this is how resharing a post on Google+ starts a new comment thread underneath it. This allows posts to cross communities while somewhat discouraging them from mixing it up in the comments. (You can click on the original if you want to.)

The web does this too: a web page can be discussed in any number of forums, independently of each other, without conflict, by sharing the URL. Comments directly on the web page don't work that way, which is why they're so often worse.

If people are deliberately trying to fight, things get even more difficult. Banning people from your feed can sometimes work, but is vulnerable to sock-puppetry and doesn't scale to large groups.

Take for example, a forum on ISIS. Yes, I've just triggered Godwin's law. I'm sorry about that.

Now, the idea is that there should be no challenge to ISIS on some parts of the Internet because they have the same right as anyone else.

However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant.

I support the criticism of any prejudiced and intolerant group in any forum (even the ones that Political Correctness blindly defends). If the goal of a group is truly noble, I will often support it.

  > However, this fails Karl Popper's criteria, don't tolerate the intolerant.

  | they are not prepared to meet us on the level
  | of rational argument, but begin by denouncing
  | all argument; they may forbid their followers
  | to listen to rational argument, because it is
  | deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments
  | by the use of their fists or pistols.

This article (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first...) expresses much the same thing, but takes a couple of pages to do it. Having a word ("intolerant" has been diluted, but maybe we can forge a new one) for people who silence arguments instead of answering them seems seems like it would greatly simplify almost all discourse.

Which is what I hear exclusively regarding Christian activists. They disregard any non-Christians whom have families, or of other value systems.

We had mobs before. They hung black people and wore funny hats. Now they don't care what color you are, wear guy fawkes masks, and make you lose your job and residence. Economic murder, rather than real murder.

What do you get if you mix the tolerance of a religious inquisition with any side of contemporary politics? You get out of control holiness spirals as each author tries to outdo the previous at being just a little more holy, a little better of a true believer in the real story. Its a perverse game of "telephone".

I propose VLM's law, that any large enough communications system that's not anonymous will devolve into holier than thou signalling warfare. Or rephrased you get three people together, one will slander another to show off to the third how much holier he is. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Jesus, physics, or emacs vs vi, same behavior.

Some of it is a culture of assuming the worst. Because if you've seen what passes for journalism, usually what we see IS the worst.

If you'd like the actual truth on a non-holiness spiral format, the reason why "family values" are described by Christian activists as coincidentally being Christian (well, as they see it, anyway) values is the same propaganda meme as the only opposition to traditional scientific evolution is the binary choice of Evangelical Christian biblical creationism. The same intentional thought process leads to it as a propaganda movement. The point is NOT to debate the issue with 3rd parties, but to assert primate dominance as the leaders of the Christians because they are the ones setting policy. The point isn't that Islam family values are not Christian or only families have values or whatever nonsense when internal doctrine is applied to outsiders who aren't supposed to be part of the conversation anyway, but to very publicly beat chest and tell competitors inside the in-group of Christians to "bring it on" because we are the leaders of the Christians so we decide whats a Christian family value... unless you'd like to argue and try to become top dog of the Christians yourself? Its sort of a misunderstood out of context quote used by outsiders almost as a slur when its really none of their (direct) business who is in charge of the Christian leadership. In a different age the Christians would be slandering each other over translations or various twisted out of context biblical readings, and back then it ALSO had nothing to do with outsiders and they can quite safely butt out and ignore the internal grindings inside the group. Unless you're personally involved in the dominance fight for Christian leadership I can assure you the whole topic is nothing personal, at least not intentionally, and was never meant for your ears.

I'm willing to be wrong on this point if someone cares to enlighten me. I find it sad to conclude that power struggles are inevitable. It's better than violence, but still distasteful.

Dog whistles generally sound like platitudes to one group (family values, social justice, "let's have an honest conversation about race") and mean something entirely different to a particular demographic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

I was using this very analogy to explain the advent of CCG "formats" (MTG, Hearthstone) a few days ago and it seems like the same analogy could be used here. There is a point where a discussion/dicussion room contains too much data to be manageable and the only way to fix that is to break it up into chunks.

We see it on Reddit, too, with subreddits becoming "too big" and naturally breaking up into smaller subreddits.

I suspect there's a universal truth hidden in there somewhere.

Just out of curiosity, how much of that data is available via HN's public API (or other large enough forum)? I'd like to see someone run some analysis on it to see if up/down votes do tend to cluster like this.

If you're a hunter or animal rights activist, it would be much better for you to be reminded that there are people out there that disagree with you.

But sometimes the hunters will talk about the politics of hunting: one will say, "those activists are wrong to complain about animals suffering, because <reasons here>", and then another will say "yes, it's so obvious they're wrong, because <reasons> are so obviously right", and the echo chamber is ringing - this is the situation where people ideally would be brought into contact with the opposing view.

Can an online community promote the first type of conversation while challenging the other? How would we set about that?

I love that image and it makes a clear picture for me. Playing on a PvP server of WoW before any expansions there was no formal PvP game. What spontaneously happened though was the raiding and taking over of the other factions town. Making a mess and disrupting otherwise normal play until everyone got tired and went to sleep.

It feels so much more intense (real?) in the social media world though.

Plus, people on WoW would be paying a subscription, people are much more risk averse when they pay. Social media is free, and there's little to lose for most people.

Maybe the issue is that we don't have enough forums for people who want to have that debate? A "hunting versus animal rights" forum, for example. You'd need really good moderators, though. Lots of people wouldn't be interested in participating, but sometimes there might be interesting posts to reshare.

I've found that people who claim to know the other side's motivations are projecting for the most part. I catch myself doing it too. Being more aware of bias does not make one less susceptible to it, unfortunately. If anything, it tends to bring overconfidence regarding it :/

The solution is laughably simple in theory, but it seems to keep getting ignored: Don't use a simple sum of votes. Instead use some method - any method really - to weight the votes of users depending how much their past voting behaviour correlates with your own.

I've been writing about this over six years ago, for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095500

[1] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/12/07/socratic-fishing-in-lak... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/trying-to-fly-with-broken-w...

I don't want to count the votes of anyone my friend considers an idiot.

I don't want to count the vote of anyone whose tagged as a #foo by anyone tagged as a #bar by such and such a group.

Alternatively you want their vote to count double.

Instead of a single score you have as many scores as you have users and its impossible to interfere much in others affairs.

I think that this could be a very important improvement.

Consider 1} Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."

Only somewhat whimsical with more than a bit of truth to it...implying that if you post something without much merit someone will be along shortly to set you straight...

Unchecked commentary allows a "conversation" to run headlong...speculation...rumors...gossip...

We all have different preferences for entertainment I guess...I prefer thoughtful sources...

1} https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

People are overly concerned with being 'correct' all the time. Sometimes I'll talk out of my ass and pick a side on a topic I know little about because usually thr person who knows more will either confirm or correct my assumptions.

It's a surprisingly useful tool to learn in-depth knowledge from others on just about any topic. You just have to be careful not to over use it as blind skepticism has a tendency to piss people off.

I'm pretty sure there is not an easy answer to this problem.

And for sure, it happens. And sometimes discourse suffers for it: good arguments get buried instead of being heard.

Then again, there are much worse things than getting your argument buried on the Internet. And Twitter has some of best examples of this... People being harassed, doxed, threatened, driven out of their jobs, their homes, their communities... All over <= 140 characters that some brigade didn't like and couldn't just downvote.

In a system mostly optimized for pithy one-liners, I'd argue it's a pretty serious defect that a bad joke can so easily escape the bounds of its intended audience and any semblance of context and cost you your reputation. But it appears that's what we've ended up with...

Twitter's userbase has a fine tradition of building social conventions to paper over the deficiencies of the system. In this case, they've reinvented the pillory to replace the hated censor.

Things upvoted by people who vote similar things to oneself are ranked higher for oneself, and things downvoted by people who vote more similarly to oneself are ranked lower for oneself.

This might be computationally expensive, but approximations to it would be cheaper I think, and still give some good results.

For this to work, the UX would need to indicate that a single "vote" means "this is a well-formed or interesting comment" as opposed to the "I agree" upvote or the ambiguous "like."

Overall I think this more closely resembles real-world networks. We are more likely to listen to those we trust, and we are often connected with new friends through trusted parties. We may occasionally interact with those outside our networks, but usually only in passing.

To see why, let's focus on what the problem actually is: we're social animals who crave authentic connection with others, not just to hear but to be heard. We can't just be passive consumers of news but wish to comment on it and be heard and replied to and have meaningful discussion. The problem is that a voting bloc systematically muffles some peoples' speech, ostracising them from the community due to their disagreement -- but then the community becomes an echochamber and fails to satisfy our needs for diversity.

One solution to this has been randomization -- think Omegle etc. -- which works but encourages a different sort of inauthenticity due to anonymity. Another has been the Reddit/LiveJournal model: make it easy to spawn new communities when old ones die out. It's a lot less clear why, say, LiveJournal has mostly died, but probably it was a little too egotistical and people therefore as they grew up got bored with just sharing their own viewpoints without some sort of cohesive blogging narrative, and it just died.

Somewhere there's some room for a solution which batches together communities of 50 people more-or-less randomly with some form of self-selection, and encourages them to talk about some sort of topic-of-the-day that would be relevant to all of their interests. In the meantime our solution is to join a social network and have fun until our community gets too large and we cannot get the attention we crave, at which point we'll swap to another and repeat the process again.

FWIW, this is coming very soon to FB in the form of "reactions" rather than a simple "dislike" feature.

http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/27/facebook-reactions-launch...

I'm concerned that all reactions might be treated as good reactions. That is, that there is no way to politely disapprove. Does anyone have any more details on this?

I suspect facebook and company will come up with a solution to the problem of how do you indicate that you saw something without commenting when it's not socially acceptable to 'like' it. For example a funeral announcement, you don't want to 'like' it but you want to say 'thank you' or something yet you might not want to comment.

A real dislike or hate button would simply result in a lower signal/noise ratio. Maybe new types of bullying where lot's of people 'hate' on somebody.

Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date.

Scalable agreement systems where large numbers of users agree X is good, then X is not spam.

> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment.

Reddit clearly functions in such a manner [as does HN]. Twitter / Facebook hide this but fundamentally its the same concept and it is largely ineffective for what your goal is [publicizing useful discussion, including disagreements].

We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.

Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the various algorithms.

Up/Down [ Agreement; no real filtering mechanic ]

Tag -> Reason [ Other filtering / reactions ]

Flag -> spam filter signal

However, I think a real universal solution is unfortunately just non-obvious and likely not anything we've tried so far.

This bothers me too. I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable. Why? Was it because they violated some rule, or was it because they were unpopular opinion? I have no way to know. This is the largest problem with HN I can see.

You mean they were so faded that the text merged with the background? Highlighting it with the mouse usually works for me in this case.

Often it's a waste of time to highlight those posts with my mouse, because they're usually downmodded for good reasons. But I still feel compelled to look, and I doubt I'm alone in that respect.

To fix this, I'd limit the text contrast to two levels -- normal and obviously-but-not-illegibly faded. In other words, don't make it look like you're trying to hide something from me. If a post is so bad that it deserves to be rendered at near-zero contrast, then it's bad enough to delete altogether... and only blatant spam falls into that category IMO.

If I'm in a mood to be charitable and particularly open-minded, I can choose to squint closely or highlight with mouse, and read a greyed-out comment.

However, once that reading is done, the fact that it's greyed out means I don't feel the need to respond to it, correct it, etc. I know that it's being hidden, that people will give it less credence and attention. Plus, I just don't have to look at it once it's no longer highlighted.

In effect, greying out text is a gentle reminder to "don't feed the trolls"

100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.

Yes.

> It is insidious and ironically has exactly the oposite effect (look:most of europe extreme right rise in popularity)

Let me add a little detail here for non-Europeans. "Far right" in some western European countries has come to mean about Obama-ish politics (health insurance for all instead of government-pays-everything-for-everybody like those contries have today.)

As emp_zealoth points out this constant framing of anything that isn't way left and politically correct as "brown" and "extreme right" is now starting to backlash.

People starts to question mainstream media and conservative/right wing media/pro Israel groups/conservative political parties seems to see a surge in readers/participation.

Not as far as I see. Far right in Europe today means hostility to immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities, with varying degree of disguise. Far right stands for isolationism and nationwide NIMBY policies.

Far right universally has secessionist sentiment from EU, no exceptions, as this is required to implement their policy. EU legislation founded in humanitarian values stands in the way.

If anything, Trump would be much more at home with Euro far right than Obama.

America, by contrast, has got its shit so not in one sock that despite vast increases in productivity, the vast bulk of the excess wealth has gone to the 1%, with the remaining classes not much better off than they were 30 or 40 years ago. And how healthy you can expect to be is positively correlated with how rich you are.

So when people say that America is a two party system: a right-wing corporatist party and a far-right-wing corporatist party, they're not blowing smoke. They're reckoning from a different origin than you. Apparently, relative to your political origin, sane policies are considered "way left and politically correct".

What I don't like is the constant framing going on from the currently politically correct ones on the left. I do not think it would be better the other way around, just state my wish for a bit of sane discussion.

"democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the rest" I guess.

Speaking of framing, that's a nice job you've done right there.

Everyone in politics reframes things, and constantly, too. It's a fundamental part of politics. People even get hired to reframe things as a profession ("PR Consultants" or "Spin Doctors"), and all varieties of politics hire them.

Ars Technica's comment system scores agrees and disagrees separately, and reports them separately. The extra axis of information seems useful.

We really need to move beyond the idea that just because an idea is contentious, it must be downvoted due to the "PC police", and not just due to "unpopular".

And seriously, blaming the rise of the right in Europe as being due to downvote/mark-unpopular mechanisms? That has to be the most banal political statement I've heard all year.

In any case, "the right to be heard" is not the same as "the right to be uncriticised".

Banal political statement? What about western media trying to cover up the whole Kologne debacle (at least for few days) It's just an obvious recent example And it's just a tiny symptom

I'd say that even though upvotes and downvotes are somewhat helpful it is the mentality that differentiates HN from other communities most significantly. We can't outsmart human stupidity with technology.

Sure, we have loads of people who want to game HN to push their own agendas but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view.

There is nothing wrong wrong with, say, fighting for animal rights. But the moment you consider yourself an animal rights activist you're very likely to give up common sense and the ability to value any input that doesn't conform with your peers' opinion. Basically you become a one-dimensional character.

Pleas note I used the word "likely." I am not ruling out that there are open-minded animal rights activists!

No. Try posting anything here that opposes the groupthink. You'll get the downvote hammer used against you very quickly.

I agree that there's some "groupthink" going on here, but it's not nearly as bad as any other sites I've used.