- The post is factually right / wrong - Confirms to the site rules / breaks the rules - I agree / disagree - I want to promote / bury this post - Reward poster with XP / punish
I am usually very pragmatic and upvote a post when I want other people to read it (because I want to see the discussion, or because I want to spread the idea). I also upvote to reward the poster.
I don't tend to downvote factually wrong posts when they are still interesting, because that limits the chance they get good discussion, and because I don't want to punish somebody for Being Wrong On The Internet. I do downvote positions that I find bad in order to reduce their reach.
It would be probably possible to have a site that implements two dimensions as a cross (maybe only for users with a certain XP) although the UX might not be to great. Maybe it is a good idea to have "promote/bury" and "reward" buttons?
If you squint you could say the same about emoji reactions on Facebook and probably other platforms, this post got 5 :heart and 2 :scary reactions. They don't have a visible one for relevance but presumably the reactions feed into one behind the scenes.
I'm not sure any of these have been shown to be clearly superior to the Reddit/HN approach of a single up/down vote.
There was also Meta Moderation where you'd randomly get shown a handful of comments and votes on those comments and you would be asked to judge whether the votes were fair or not. Supposedly those votes would affect your likelihood to get tapped for moderation again.
It would only show one adjective, but the ordering was kind of funny. If someone moderates your comment as a troll but enough people marked it with positive votes, you'd get the coveted "+5 Troll" badge.
Social media needs counters that never stop going up, and buttons that are always available for people to reactivity click and express dis/approval.
Slashdot wanted a moderation system and they got one. The moderation points, categories, meta-moderation, comment filtering, it all shows someone was really thinking about what they system was trying to accomplish.
Ars Technica does something similar and it's a great addition to the overloaded upvote/downvote
Until then the process was that someone would submit a post, someone from the mod team would review (and, maybe edit it) and only then it got to the front page. This, in my opinion, allowed for better quality, despite some of the biases the mod team showed. The community was adamant that it should be in charge of what makes it to the front-page and in this regard Digg and reddit were doing it better, so Slashdot became less and less relevant.
I don’t find this to be the case at all. The amount of politics tolerated in each subreddit is almost entirely dependent on the personalities of the mods who run it. And for whatever reason, most Reddit mods tend to be activist friendly or at least look the other way when it comes to obvious soapbox accounts breaking the rules.
In my experience most subreddits choose to flair political posts rather than prohibit them.
Plus, my statement was about "heated political arguments", not a one-time statement from moderators which remains, to my understanding, rather rare. One thread about BLM doesn't deter me from visiting these subreddits.
I haven't spent any time there, so I'm genuinely curious: how does r/history avoid political arguments? Some people say that everything is inherently political, but history seems especially adjacent to politics
askhistorians is the best example I can think of. askscience close behind.
People I like in the world are unbearable on Twitter. I've unfollowed, muted and don't-show-me-their-retweets a good bunch of them.
If up and downvotes can work as feedback encouraging people to stop it with the "sigh" posts, or the rage-of-the-day posts, it could improve Twitter. If not, I'm not sure what could improve Twitter.
Ones that actually have a real interest group are more reasonable.
Users quickly learn that "we don't do that here", and stop.
Why, then, does the outrage porn rise to the top of the Reddit home page?
Because it measurably increases sales in a huge way right now.
To use a baseball analogy, how do you tell a juiced to the gills superstar that steroids are actually hurting their long-term outlook?
There’s no way to show Barry Bonds a future in which he’s shadow banned from the hall of fame and unmentionable even on his own teams broadcasts.
The change will come either with regulation or when a new, better system comes along and steals their users.
Besides, if our brains are designed to zoom in on certain signals, is it rational to expect technology to somehow prevent this?
Technology can mitigate it (by suppressing the signals, offsetting the effect) or exploit and exacerbate it. The former is often socially useful, but the latter is usually the path of least resistance to profits, and capitalism isn't a system whose incentives optimize for social utility.
But the solution is to find a subreddit that works the way you want it to.
r/offmychest vs r/trueoffmychest
r/gaming vs r/truegaming
r/movies vs r/truefilm
r/unpopularopinion vs r/trueunpopularopinion
On Reddit I see many comments, convincingly written, that are (imo) flatly wrong. These comments are potentially very harmful because they're persuading others of a falsehood. Am I supposed to upvote or downvote? (what I actually tend to do is not visit the site)
Downvoting a good-faith comment because you disagree with it does no one any favors. It creates a sense of persecution among those who disagree with you, while not actually providing any counter-argument for the benefit of the undecided. Leave the vote counts alone, make your own convincing argument.
And this is evil being done as good men stay silent.
There might indeed be many that are not so petulant that they would downvote an otherwise non rule-breaking comment they disagree with, but few of them will find themselves upvoting something they disagree with either, and there will still be some that downvote it.
Thus, an unpopular opinion that otherwise contributes will eventually be downvoted for not receiving enough upvotes.
> falsehood
Subjectivity and truthiness are opposed.
* If the question is "who is the current world chess champion" the answer is Magnus Carlson.
* If the question is "who is the greatest chess player of all time," there are a number of contradictory opinions.
"Bobby Fischer" is a low-quality answer. "Bobby Fischer because XYZ" is a high-quality answer, even if I don't agree.
Unfortunately that's rarely the case. More often three of their last four comments contain racial slurs and misspellings of two-letter words, which doesn't instill a huge amount of confidence that they know what they're talking about.
Together it allows majority vote to simply take control of a comment page, and first rule of online voting is it’s always manipulated.
You know where that goes. You will end up with a self driving system that represents the richest guy there, with little control input necessary, into the walls.
>
> In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree.
Maybe Twitter should go all the way back to the Slashdot model, and let people vote up and down on "insightful", "funny", "normal", "offtopic", "redundant", "interesting", or "troll", etc.
Up/Down : Agree/Disagree Left/Right : Makes the discussion go backward/forward
This way you could express disagreement while acknowledging that the point is interesting, or like a joke without having it drown a conversation
This sort of works, but it also disproportionately empowers psychopaths who are not vulnerable to social moderation and in fact can abuse it against other people.
The people who are good at winning debates in real life mostly constitute the politician class, who are A) usually pretty psychopathic B) seemingly pretty unconstrained by moral censure.
The internet is cool because it kind of makes everyone into a psychopath (because there’s no emotional connection), so actual psychopathic political types don’t have any advantage over normal people.
It would be better if you could create a community where no one was a psychopath but I’m not sure this is possible at scale, or even at all.
Unfortunately there seem to be less places like this now.
Interesting that you say this because Reddit users will tell you that this is a problem in itself since it creates echo chambers that validate the viewpoints you already hold.
That's the HN theory. The twitter theory is that dislikes, like likes and every other behavior on the site is a signal to feed into an engagement optimization algorithm.
Twitter has zero interest in conversation quality for its own sake, and every interest in optimizing audience size and engagement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/style/ravelry-knitting-ba...
I feel its actually We agree, We disagree.
The points induce conformity as its now with likes and shares with every social media and in-spite of personal opinions most will stick with what the majority do.
This can be easily resolved by hiding the points and if it serves the purpose of validation then showing it to the owner alone, I've done so in the forum I run and has improved the quality of discussions.
But those point numbers are the bread and better of social media, Who will let go of those sweet dopamine triggers? Twitter cannot chase both conformity and quality of discussions. Reddit went from latter to now a half-baked social media, But still can produce some quality discussions because of the topic silo of subreddits.
I don't find Twitter any more or less toxic than any other platform, and it's because I'm free to participate in the communities I choose. If the people you follow are constantly talking politics, and that annoys you, why are you following them?
The one benefit of reddit is I can choose the subs I go on, the problem is there are still a lot of subs that are of a topic I would enjoy that end up getting toxic as well.
So i'm trying to find a balance, because reddit for example does give me a lot of my news in topics I love and it's great for finding stuff, like a good movie, book, youtube stuff etc, but then the downside is getting bigger and bigger each year.
I struggle to cut it out completely but I also struggle to find any tool that curates content in a good enough way. Everything is just noise and nonsense online with a small amount of good stuff, but very little that focuses on just giving you that.
Everything just needs clicks and attention, I want something that doesn't need that and just gives me the type of stuff I want, not on a schedule, but when there is actually something worthwhile to say.
Jack said in the infamous interview to Joe Rogan, that they have an explicit goal to mix communities to avoid echo-chambering of ideas and views. Not sure if what you mean is an accident or intended effect (IMO they do a bad job)
I really just think it comes down to Twitter being poorly run. I know Paul Singer made a run to have Dorsey replaced as CEO, but eventually backed off. They seem to lean into the divisiveness. It may be beneficial for short-term engagement but it essentially creates a negative emotional experience for customers. And that's going to come home to roost eventually.
The lists are less used than reddits subreddits but they function in a similar way.
Voting is free. flag something as bad that isn't and there are no consequences.
If a vote represented a stake of some kind, then there would be consequences in being wrong.
I'd bury specifics though so that the vote isn't (too) influenced. Maybe even random voting would work (every user must complete a "quota" of questions for comments they have read).
This isn't really why people are awful. The truth is people want something to say, but most of the time their actual opinions are kind of boring and mainstream. So they end up roleplaying as individuals who have some heinous opinion, and revel in the attention they receive.
Some people are awful in different ways, by supporting someone who is regarded as terrible for instance. Eventually, little cliques form, and toxicity brews.
In reality, upvote = I agree, downvote = I disagree.
However I don't think anything can save twitter from being a toxic platform.
What makes it especially toxic, I think, is its lack of separation of communities.
Reddit is toxic sometimes, but at least there is some separation: if you just want to talk about knitting, you can avoid the people talking about politics.
I think it's important to be able to have controversial debates in real life, as body language and audience response seems to keep people from being truly awful.
The Quakers have an interesting history of trying to facilitate such controversial debates. They have been involved in some contemporary ones too.
https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/210/Inte...
It's concerning to me, how much of real life discussion we have lost due to the pandemic.