Ask HN: Does allowing downvoting encourage groupthink?
I’ve now spend a fair amount of time on Reddit, and I find that the same pattern holds: if one expresses an opinion that the forum orthodoxy, it gets downvoted. On Reddit this led to toxic subreddits being created with their own groupthink. Even HN isn’t immune to this. Is this a widely observed phenomenon?
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My personal observation is that "downvote to oblivion" seems to facilitate upvote/downvote wars where one side tries to downvote its opposition to oblivion rather than letting it just sink on its own.
In practice downvoting seems to largely be a "dislike" button. Personally I'd prefer if it were eliminated or at least sliced by category such as spam, trolling, or flamebait. I'm not even sure that off-topic posts should be downvoted - I would expect other posts to naturally rise above them in most cases.
You can turn on "show dead" in your profile to see what kind of dreck gets filtered out. You can also vouch for a comment if it's unfairly been downvoted.
Ironically, I don't think that's correct. HN is good because the signal-to-noise is very high, and comments that violate guidelines or otherwise don't meet community standards get downvoted. While contrarian opinions may get caught up in that, the goal is not to suppress "misinformation" which is mostly only a pretend political problem anyway. On forums like this, even the strawman of "the average person isn't smart enough to be allowed to think for themselves" which is used to justify censoring bigger platforms doesn't apply. People can easily make up their own minds.
Downvoting is about community standards, not misinformation policing.
Obviously if someone is just plain wrong about something they should be corrected and not downvoted for it, but when someone posts misinformation it's nice that it can be downvoted out of sight fast enough that it's gone before many people are exposed to it and before a bunch of people have spent their time posting facts/corrections or providing critical context for the benefit of others.
We'll likely just have to agree to disagree on misinformation being a "pretend" problem, and it's understandable if your perspective means you don't consider the downvote's utility in fighting against misinformation important, but I'm glad for it.
How can you tell the difference between someone being plain wrong and misinformation? Are they not one in the same?
The dictionary definition seems to include deliberate misinformation for deceptive purposes, but I might call that "disinformation" instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
[1]:https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-0...
There are other studies particularly focused on different social media sites, but a lot boils down to social/psychological impacts. Hope it is insightful.
If you posted anything along the lines of "maybe Java has some good points" or "I am at least partially into programming for the money" you would get always get downvoted into oblivion on proggit for instance.
The average intelligence of HN users with downvote capabilities isn't as high as one would hope. Going against the grain gets downvoted regardless of whether you're right or not.
All discussion forums (digital and flesh-bound) are susceptible to the echo chamber effect.
- someone speaks positively about crypto
- someone speaks not positively about the American Dem party
- someone mentions the above reasons for downvotes (as seen here soon)
Those are both very petty and, among a group of likeminded intelligent people, is pretty sad.
To be fair, you are trolling for downvotes (snarky comments go grey very quickly - as well you knew before you posted).
On the politics side, as long as you're acting in good faith, and thinking about what you're posting, I doubt that you'll get downvoted (ignoring that politics is generally off topic for the site).
Regarding cryptocurrency, nothing good has come of it.
There are many uses for a distributed ledger - some very useful. None of them need proof-of-work and a DAG would be more useful than a LinkedList for the purposes of decentralisating.
Plenty of crypto is scammy but I believe in a form of currency not backed by bombing brown people and guarding Arab oil investments for profit. Pipe dream? Maybe.
Well, yes.
And it does look like you are currently being downvoted.
It works for small, non-platform community forum, because you can just go somewhere else if you don't like it.
Downvoting facilitates the formation of islands of like-minded thinkers quickly on websites that allow people to connect to each other (any site with groups/friends). For something like Reddit, which is literally a collection of islands like this, the tool is a good fit for building cohesion. Without downvoting, people will still resort to being unpleasant to each other to create homogeny; they find like-minded thinkers, group together as friends and are unpleasant as a group to people not in the group (how you can have definite cultural groups on twitter).