Probably the best example is legal type advice.
Personal example: The whole situation with internet archive and their e-book lending process. I was vocal that they didn’t have a leg to stand on and would lose. The comment was just about the legal situation.
I was downvoted to hell for that opinion and identified as some sort of book publisher advocate/ internet archive hater. As was anyone else predicting a loss or just raising questions.
Personally I love the internet by archive, but I didn’t think they had a chance at winning.
But go by the comments and it was a slam dunk win because of some idea of “freedom” the comments and voters had. And yet they lost the lawsuit…
Interestingly, here on HN the response seem to be a generally more balanced. That’s not an endorsement of HN all the time, but it was an interesting contrast.
Yes, I know reddit can be valuable for niche and non-contentious topics but such examples are becoming increasingly rare. Snark and combativeness pervades the site and it seems to be a function of the voting system and monkey-see, monkey-do from how commenters are rewarded in the default subreddits for this kind of behavior.
I dread AI models being taught to comment like a redditor.
- the voting system is about what people want the truth to be, not the truth.
- the users can be very easily gamed in comments to vote one way or another just by the initial voting being negative or positive (aka most just vote with the trend)
- the opinions all come from a bias of urban and major metro area people. It's painfully obvious they don't understand any mindset outside of this one.
- it wasn't always this way.
I agree with you, the quality went down as the quantity went up, and it may be possible to use the comments, but using the vote data as a signal of truth is going to produce a terribly narrow minded AI.