I think up and down voting could actually help the discourse on twitter if it's implemented correctly.

Currently every way to interact with a tweet drives its engagement score: likes, retweets and replies all result in more visibility for a tweet. So if you think a tweet is unproductive or wrong, you can express that in a reply, but even that is resulting in more visibility for the original tweet. This incentivizes bad behavior, because even if someone does is get a lot of people upset or outraged, this is going to result in more attention and prominence on the platform.

But if you have a button which is essentially saying: "twitter, please de-rank this", it allows a way to respond to comments which are not worthy of engaging with but you don't want them to stand uncontested.

Also with up/down votes, it's much healthier if the numbers are hidden. Otherwise the incentive becomes to win the game rather than to have a discussion.

I too think negative signaling is valuable, but I doubt Twitter will ever correctly implement that. This is evident from the state of "report tweet" menu. Reporting can be thought as a strong negative signal that happens to be also ToS violation, but its implementation is far from working; not just political figures, but I've seen even direct death threats against minorities with numerous reports ignored multiple times. Twitter seems to have no incentive to fix reporting and I don't think downvotes will be different.

This is far from guaranteed: "The company also said it’s not currently using this vote information to rank the replies at this time"

Mute works fine.

Mute is fine if you personally don't want to hear from someone. Downvote is to prevent an outsized influence of bad actors on the platform as a whole.

> Twitter is already very groupthink

Just like all social platforms including this one. Here on HN if you have a controversial opinion the site literally fades your comment away until it disappears.

And it is bad. The concept of hiding what you don't agree to is really bad for discussions. I wish the fading was only due to flagging not votes.

Fading a comment helps to signal that it has already been downvoted enough. This is to avoid going -100 because no one can see how far you're down already.

HN has a downvote system as well. What you describe happens when a comment gets downvoted enough times, which makes it another good example of downvotes amplifying groupthink.

I kinda like that I only have upvote button currently here since I haven't hit the karma threshold. I do feel like the HN crowed doesn't downvote comments unless its spam or way out of the current topic. It happens but not like reddit where it acts like a disagree button.

People downvote for disagreement here all the time, it's a cultural norm.

Is this not a problem on HN? I think it is but if it's not, what makes it work here?

While HN tried and abandoned the "no politics" rule, it does have a soft "no partisan flamewars" rule and a vague "stay on topic" rule. It bans violators pretty effectively - if you're just starting trouble you won't last long.

Also, on HN, you can't reply to people, only to a comment. And it doesn't end up in any inbox. This makes it a lot harder to maintain a longstanding "beef"; we have to do that manually.

You can be on topic and only making calm, cited comments, but get shadowbanned for having sufficiently controversial views.

HN is like any other forum which censors certain views for being controversial.

Like stating that BLM is a Marxist organization — with a citation to their founders describing it as such.

HN relies on your belief that they only ban people “starting trouble” to remove certain topics from conversation, like how Marxist activists are using historic wrongs as a way to undermine society and for their own selfish enrichment.

Depending on your views, you can't directly say what you're thinking about certain topics at HN. You need to dance around the issue. Pose questions, give them rope and allow proponents of those ideals to provide their rationales. Once revealed, you can examine these topics.

Perhaps for those who haven't been down these rabbit holes repeatedly, it appears as assumption. The rationales you see may not have been provided explicitly or scrutinized. It can be a bit long-form and tedious, but it is part of assuming good faith.

Consider how your post above might appear to someone who takes an idealistic view of these activist movements. They might not be aware of the Marxist influences. Even if they are, they might genuinely believe that Marxist movements do not result in centralization of power. It is easy to overlook these points.

On HN the moderation is better and the community smaller (and I guess also united by at least one common interest).

Another important difference I see is that the score of comments is hidden, at least to some degree. Seeing how "the community" has already judged a post is greatly influential to future votes. It also creates a bias on the way the comment is interpreted by the reader.

I don't know what would be the ideal system. But I am certain adding downvotes to Twitter in its current state will only make it worse.

There also is this problem I had (have?) on HN:

I no longer dare try to go against downvotes and upvote downvoted comments that I think are perfectly fine. I did that quite a bit - and my voting rights where removed. When I asked by email my voting behavior was cited as trying to be controversial by upvoting already downvoted comments (I don't remember the exact words any more, it was well over a year ago or even much more).

I'm not complaining, the HN site owner can do whatever and has to deal with many emails and decisions every day, but it did leave a sour taste.

> I did that quite a bit - and my voting rights where removed. When I asked by email my voting behavior was cited as trying to be controversial by upvoting already downvoted comments

That's disappointing. I do the same actually. Not to cause controversy but, well, because sometimes I agree and try to vote honestly.

Maybe there are malicious attempts that look the same from the server's perspective, but it's still weird.

I think there's two ways it can go, I don't know which was the case here but I can understand them being treated differently if this is what happened:

* Upvoting comments because you think they are good comments, regardless of whether they are downvoted or not * Voting more for things that are downvoted than things that aren't, because you think the downvoting is unfair

The former is just adding your vote to the pool, blindly. The latter is deliberately trying to undo other votes, distorting the system.

There's a difficulty here if you tend to align naturally with things that tend to get downvoted though.

> The latter is deliberately trying to undo other votes, distorting the system.

That's begging the question: What is distortion in the system? Isn't a system with both upvoting and downvoting one designed around everyone trying to undo others' votes?

What if the first 5 people to see a comment hate it and downvote it, and then the 6th person likes it and upvotes it: should the 6th person not be allowed to vote anymore? What if the first 5 people to see a comment love it and upvote it, and the 6th person hates it and downvotes it: should the 6th person not be allowed to vote anymore?

Is it just a race? Whoever votes first gets to decide a comment's value, and dissenters aren't allowed to vote anymore? Or are some people's votes more valid than others?

I would submit that the system is broken by design. And how better to reinforce its brokenness than to not allow dissenters to even vote in a manner contrary to prevailing opinion. It's bad enough that dissenters are downvoted to invisibility and flagged by those who abuse the guidelines (once a comment is downvoted and flagged, its chances of receiving corrective attention are minimal). To, on top of that, not even allow dissenters to vote anymore, to try to correct abusive brigading--is such a system not the very definition of an echo chamber?

And what is the purpose of such a place?

Agreed. In the early stages "correction" of the overall score is still possible, and it does happen that the initial votes don't reflect the sentiment of the community at all.

But that said maybe this system only flags a user when it's done too excessively. On average I'd say most users upvote mainly positive or neutral comments, after all downvoted comments are often downvoted for a reason and also make up the minority. If a user however upvotes more negative comments than positive ones that is at least unusual.

Very late reply, but for context.

I had done the upvoting of downvoted comments just a few dozen times total.

> If a user however upvotes more negative comments than positive ones that is at least unusual.

I disagree. There is no real point in upvotes IMO. Nothing visibly changes, and comment "karma" is useless (on all sites) and mostly encourages unhealthy obsessive behavior of karma chasing. Downvotes on the other hand are clearly visible and change reading and voting pattern and flow here on HN. To me, using voting privilege on wrongly downvoted comments makes a lot of sense to me.

> all downvoted comments are often downvoted for a reason

I took great care to only upvote clearly innocent and worthwhile submissions and not the haters and the useless (even if innocent) stuff. I tried acting responsibly and only after giving the value of the comment some thought.

I think it's very common and important for people to vote to undo downvotes. I do it. A single downvote can turn something gray and make it appear like an unpopular side of the discussion when it's not controversial at all except in the opinion of one downvoter on a mission or something. At the same time, I may otherwise be stingy with upvotes unless a contribution is especially deserving (or makes me laugh, of course, which always deserves a reward).

> A single downvote can turn something gray and make it appear like an unpopular side of the discussion when it's not controversial at all except in the opinion of one downvoter on a mission or something.

Yes, exactly: even a single downvote penalizes a comment, making it less likely to be seen by people who might upvote it, and attracting more downvotes from unfair-minded dogpilers.

It turns the whole system into a game of chance, a race against unknown opponents: if a comment is first seen by people who like it, it's likely to attract more upvotes and climb. If a comment is first seen by people who hate it, it's unlikely to be seen by people who would like it, likely to attract more downvotes from dogpilers, and it will likely die a quick and permanent death.

The system does not "surface" good content. Its design encourages abusive behavior.

> upvote downvoted comments that I think are perfectly fine

I can't speak for what you are specifically upvoting that gets so many downvotes, BUT it's entirely plausible that what you think is fine is against the guidelines, and hence an interpretation for "being controversial".

Good example (that you may or may have not done, again, I don't know):

   Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.  

Let's say you see several anonymous "green" posts that get downvoted into oblivion but find those posts beneficial to the discussion (which is very plausible btw). Well, as per the guidelines, just creating these anonymous users is a big no-no. Hence, I would deem someone who continually upvoted those as trying to spark controversy - even though their upvotes were probably very innocent.

I've been on HN for a very long time - it's hard to follow the guidelines btw.

View much were you doing it? I have showdead on, and often I'll upvote and vouch comments I think were unfairly dismissed. Maybe it's an illusion, but I feel the vote counts are often small enough that it does make a difference (as opposed to sites like reddit where I don't bother).

Maybe more options would work in a savvy place like this to separate out important versus trivial reasons for a vote. I often feel like the most upvoted comments are the most worthless as they just tell everyone what they already think. Whereas downvoted moments are often the ones that simply challenge people and make more interesting discussion.

Twitter has a few subgroups. They discuss and some tweet with the dominant opinion on that issue will get 1100 likes and a tweet from the minority opinion will get 400 likes. After this change you might get 800 net votes for the dominant opinion and -300 votes for the minority opinion. I think this will drive minority opinions out of Twitter and consolidate into one dominant opinion.