First and foremost, I agree that this will probably end poorly.
However, I could see this being a good idea in the right hands, because it _could_ be used as _part_ of a more comprehensive auto-mod tools, including self-shadow-banning.
Imagine you had a human reviewing highly ratioed comments, providing a final judgment on "is this comment actually unhelpful, or is it just being brigaded?". (And let's imagine one judgment option is "unclear, do nothing".) You could then keep a per-user metric of their (mis)alignment with that judgment across all their votes. That metric could then be used to weight the votes of that user.
High alignment then classifies that user as a "trustworthy unpaid mod" behind the scenes, which can then be used as a signal to determine future human reviews. Similarly, if someone has an absolutely stellar alignment, you can use the occasional disagreements to do meta-mod reviews of your mods' judgments. If you go really wild and draw some correlation between mis-votes and hashtag/topic/channel/whatever, then you can use that.
Low alignment could then be used to devalue votes from that user, leading to a slow shadow ban, and potentially even other more visible effects.
All of which can be done regardless of the visibility of the votes, of course. But hiding "down" votes should help to reduce the pile-on effects of brigading ("a ton of other people downvoted it, so I am safe in the crowd") and thus the temptations leading to slowly shadow banning yourself. But unlike completely taking away down votes, like YouTube, you leave enough rope for bad actors to hang themselves.
It's equivalent to the system Slashdot has had for decades (IIRC).
Do I trust Twitter to put in place something with that amount of utility, feedback, and nuance? Nope. And even if they did, they'd throw away the value of having invisible scores for the opportunity to add "gold checkmarks" or some other BS.
> It's equivalent to the system Slashdot has had for decades (IIRC).
That's exactly what I thought when I read this too. That system worked really well (not perfect, but did the job) back when Slashdot was super popular. I think your right, good idea in the right hands and if they are careful with how they do it.
Agree, and this goes along with Twitter's desire to curate feeds by showing, for example, tweets that were 'liked' by people you follow. By doing this, they broaden the amount of content they can show you and therefore increase the discretion they have in surfacing content they want to spread. (It's also super annoying — I follow someone so I can see what they tweet and RT. I do not care one bit about the things they like.)
Hidden downvotes are the flip side of the coin — instead of being used to boost the spread of certain tweets, they can be used as an excuse for why certain information is hidden.
Basically, these changes remind me of p-hacking. As more variables are added, you can figure out ways to structure your algorithm so that you promote the information that you already wanted to promote and demote the information that you wanted to hide. This could be for profit-seeking reasons, political reasons, or other reasons. In any event, it decreases transparency and reduces trust in the systems.
I disagree that hidden downvotes are generally a terrible idea. Downvotes should probably usually be hidden and used as a measure of whether to surface information - except when that information is factual. Twitter contains absolutely nothing except opinions and thus visible downvotes are useless there.
There are other platforms (like YouTube) where downvotes make a lot of sense because users post guides and tutorials where the downvote ratio is a good indicator of how accurate or useful that guide is.
Which is really a shame considering how many informational(ish) videos are on YT. Downvoting was really helpful to tell, when you search for "How do I unblock my sink drain" who is full of crap. Downvoting on opinion, social and gaming videos serves no purpose.
Twitter as a platform which has no ability to store and reliably surface informational or factual messages is completely devoid of the types of content where peer feedback is helpful - the only thing tweet scores measure is "hotness" which could be entirely opaque to the user base (both up and down).
It's only going to work for a couple of months, because YouTube has promised that the API will start returning zero for that number fairly soon. They have not committed to a date, and I doubt they will, simply roll it out when they feel they can.
That and all the mainstream media outlets who hate that they can no longer fool everyone by buying off critics for favorable reviews. Oh yeah, and it just so happens they also pay YouTube huge sums to promote their content.
Had a fun one the other day: try to figure out which is the correct pronunciation of puissant. They’re all different and the most viewed ones are wrong.
I picked the most-viewed one I saw on there and it was like "pWISS-unt"
I really hope that's one of the incorrect ones, because otherwise I've never once pronounced it correctly. I pronounce it as in the French but without the nasal on "-ant" and I hit the T just a bit (it's typically written as a loan word, not an italicized foreign word, after all).
Youtube didn't remove the downvotes, just everyone's (besides the creator) ability to see them. But they still matter for internal algorithm and the creators are still affected by them - by both being pushed down in relevancy, and also psychological impact?
Twitter is also apparently keeping the downvote number secret except for the poster.
I left Facebook shortly after they removed the chronological feed on your wall because it made it so I kept seeing the same few posts over and over again and missed a bunch of smaller posts that weren't high interaction.
In retrospect, that was a necessary precursor to all the dark patterns they would later implement to the feed. It empowers the company to decide what users see and that's an incredibly valuable thing for a company with billions of eyeballs. The temptation to monetize that power will be irresistible. At the very least, "Sponsored Posts" incoming.
Technically, FB still allows you to view a chronological feed, but for much of the past several years this mode has been broken. It shows me posts from 3 days ago at the top of the feed, even though I know that there are posts that are just a few hours old.
That was such an annoying thing about Facebook. Not only would it show a lot of the same crap again and again, but most of what I wanted to see would only appear in my feed hours or days after everyone else saw it, meaning that any comments I might leave would never be seen by anyone. I quickly realized that my comments would never be seen (i.e. upvoted or replied to) if the post was more than a few hours old.
No, Facebook, I'm not going to sit there obsessively refreshing the page and scrolling through dozens of pages of content just for a shot at others noticing my existence in your little play-world.
Perhaps I'm not the kind of user Facebook wants. They probably reached the same conclusion as scam artists; make your platform unappealing to the users who won't continually lead to profit, but give it the right qualities so those who don't know any better keep falling into the trap and stay there.
I don't see how downvotes can be effectively implemented online without extensive action from community moderators/admins. In particular, you need people with platform-wide scope and permissions to prevent communities from brigading and such.
As a small-community moderator on reddit, we get blamed all the time for "downvotes from our community" by new users which is something we neither have insight into nor control over.
I'm not sure, and I suppose it largely depends on what the results are for different actions. On Reddit, posts and comments that get upvoted get more views and engagement because the entire site is more or less stack-ranked on /r/all, /r/popular, and any given user's home feed. Downvoted posts and comments get sent straight to the bottom, and really don't get seen or engaged with.
Hearts, retweets, replies, etc. on Twitter I presume have a slightly similar result but I suspect it's not the same as "reaching #1 on /r/all" on reddit. The way Twitter works is fundamentally different. So whether Twitter really needs to care about people "getting ratio'd" or buying likes is different than the concern on Reddit. What happens to mass-downvoted tweets will determine how important it is to make sure all downvotes are "real" or "in good faith" or whatever.
Based on my experience bringing this up in person and online to various Reddit mods (which usually get pretty upset about the question) the main problem with brigading is that the side that victimizes itself as getting brigaded doesn't enjoy the experience. They operate under the theory that most people on online communities just want to discover other people with whom they would get along, and do it in a safe manner kinda isolated from people with whom they would not get along.
The problem is when your online community decides political propaganda or marketing stuff is ok because you agree to participate in a "cultural battle", so you will need to make splitting decisions like who's the brigands and who's being brigaded.
If you start a group centered around, idk, using VSCode. Nice plug-ins to have. The roadmap of the software. Answering questions and helping folks use the software well, etc.
But your community gets raided by the IntelliJ community so that the only discussions are about how VSCode is awful, everyone should use IntelliJ. Why even discuss the roadmap of this stupid not-even-an-IDE? Use IntelliJ.
Anywhere the VSCode community tries to go, it just gets followed by IntelliJ zealots.
If you ban downvoting, you just get upvoting of troll content instead.
In my experience, essentially every political subreddit is full of complete and utter nonsense for this reason. There's some great stuff on the site if you're into woodworking or robotics or whatever, but the country/city/political subreddits are like "Hypernormalization" in website form.
It gets even worse because eventually those subreddits get captured by moderators that stoke the flames even further. I'd be surprised if most of it wasn't state actor troll farm stuff.
There was a browser extension a couple years ago that marked every user that had commented on controversial subreddits, so that people no longer had to read comments and instead could just ignore/report them[0]. Attaching such a list to something that can use the blocking API is the superlaser on the propaganda death star.
Nobody can disagree with you anymore. I believe it is time to use such a list to block everyone on my account that has ever posted in r/emacs, because they cannot see the error of their ways by not choosing ed(1).
0: In many cases I saw that people would also comment under said user stating something to the effect of "This person has commented on r/emacs, they are stupid, it doesn't matter that they're talking about their thoughts on the Disney+ catalog." Which had the secondary effect of people jumping to conclusions about OP without even opting in to download the extension.
Your examples (emacs and ed) are intentionally silly, but as I recall the actual targets of those extensions were significantly less lighthearted: many were explicitly racist or reactionary communities with histories of brigading/raiding other subreddits.
Put another way: we shouldn't confuse a civics problem with a platform problem. These extensions (again, as I remember them), were primarily created to eliminate a platform problem that Reddit themselves refused to address.
Edit: my personal anecdote with this is NYC's subreddit: accounts with histories that indicate no connection to NYC love to comment on every crime-blotter article with the same tired comments about the city. It's incredibly convenient and improves the quality of the discussion to be able to filter them.
Yes, you're correct, they were mostly racist or far-right subreddits. But that didn't ever make much sense to me, because even if the person was evil elsewhere, a comment that didn't have that sort of content shouldn't be moderated IMO. Brigading should be detectable regardless of what subreddits a user is a part of, given it usually coincides with bizarre usage patterns (downvoting everything in new as soon as it appears or something).
I get moderation is hard, but this makes it too easy. What if someone was evil but then saw the error of their ways? Should they be forced to make a new account? Or what if they were trying to start debates (as unlikely as that is) in said evil subreddit?
> I get moderation is hard, but this makes it too easy. What if someone was evil but then saw the error of their ways? Should they be forced to make a new account? Or what if they were trying to start debates (as unlikely as that is) in said evil subreddit?
This is a great point, and it's a problem that's created by these extensions. I'd argue that it's a lesser problem than the original one, and so it's a pill I'm willing to swallow (and subsequently tackle).
In general, I think that anonymized reputation and vouching systems are the way forwards for online communities. Vouching solves the "blacklisting" problem: if we incentivize high-reputation people to vouch for good-faith accounts, then people who fall into the categories you've mentioned can be correctly exempted from the filter. But that's awfully hard to do.
> Will people be able to downvote tweets from official accounts for heads of state?
What's your point here, exactly? That they should, or should not be able to do that? Because this already happens, except it's even worse than letting people do it, because Twitter does it by itself. With zero oversight by anyone (not that other big tech platforms don't do the same). Twitter already rank boosts content it likes and content it doesn't like gets downranked, shadow banned or just permabanned. It already filters trends and search and autocomplete. So we have a situation where a big tech company does what it wants and does it so much that it literally skews elections (all of this is common sense, but there are also many peer reviewed studies about this, some authors of which have testified before congress and some of which are represent bases for many US & EU investigations into the big tech monopolies/cartels). So given all this, is it really a problem to let people downvote stuff... or is it actually about not letting the people you don't like have a vote?
Youtube dislikes were completely fine 99.999999% of the time and lasted for like a decade without issues. Until someone like you, sadly in a position of power, decided that (speculation starts) Biden got too many dislikes on his ramblings and it was a bad look for Google (speculation ends).
Some people just HATE democracy because democracy means even dumb people, rednecks, racists, sexists and all kinds of "irresponsible" people get to vote. Ironically, most of the time (in recent history at least), these people who hate democracy call themselves democrats or liberals. In reality, they're anything but that. Actual liberals recognize that everyone deserves a to have a voice in a democracy. Even the bad voices are valuable, because they allow the marketplace of ideas actually do its magic.
I think they have a problem with hated content that's technically allowed - "buy AnimalCoin" etc. I would hate to just be brigaded against, though, Twitter already feels like a wild west of getting unwelcome replies
Keep in mind HN junkies: We're debating this on a site that allows downvotes. It seems many think this will be a terrible decision yet, here we are. I find downvotes on HN to be very effective at guiding the discussion, maybe it's because the culture here is still homogeneous.
On HN, downvotes are reflected by greyed out comments. The main thing people are complaining about in this thread is that the Twitter downvotes will be opaque.
Also an account can only downvote once it has amassed a certain level of upvotes. It sounds like the Twitter downvote will be open to everyone when it is fully released, which would make it a lot easier to abuse.
Yes, although it would be trivial for Twitter to ignore or downweight downvotes from new accounts. It would be interesting if one of the main reasons for adding opaque downvotes is to give users the feeling that they had expressed an opinion without giving that expression any weight whatsoever. I guess this would be called 'downvote shadow-banning'.
In what way does it guide discussion? I think the discussion climate is pretty good here, but in some other communities I see that downvotes only allow one kind of opinion to be heard - and this is not about politics or something controversial, it's anything, including sports. People upvote what they want to hear.
They still drown out opposing opinions here for specific issues. I think it's more the case that those topics don't come up as often.
One of the issues is that places like Hacker News and Reddit use an aggregate vote count. You can't tell if a comment that has a score of -10 is a comment where ten people saw it and decided to downvote it, or where 100 people saw it, 55 downvoted it and 45 upvoted it. This leads to situations where it can seem like a community rejects a point of view, even whe the point of view is shared by almost half the community.
Further exacerbating this is that, with an infinite number of votes allowed, someone who is less restrained about their votes is going to have a greater impact than someone who reserves them for only exceptional comments. For example, say 60% of the community likes Coke and 40% likes Pepsi. However, the Coke supporters are relatively calm and only occasionally vote for comments about soda, while Pepsi supporters are zealots who will downvote any comment that's supportive of Coke and upvote any comment supportive of Pepsi. A user is just going to see a lot of highly downvoted/greyed out Coke posts and a lot of highly upvoted Pepsi posts, and assume that the community is highly supportive of Pepsi while hating Coke.
That's more of a problem with voting in general (and a larger problem with how time = speech on the internet), but downvoting can certainly exacerbate the problem.
HN downvotes are very measured. Comments can still be seen, the number isn't shown, and you have to have a matured account to even have the ability to downvote.
I never downvote, it focuses on the negativity and is a waste of life.
Upvote only, it rewards the best opinions and analysis.
The problem is, botnets and astroturfing use downvotes to manipulate conversations, perceived word of mouth and ultimately the algorithms.
For instance, since Youtube has removed downvotes from visibility, my recommended videos are more in line with what I want. I think the downvote was a massive tool for shaping the algorithms and recommended videos that becomes something that isn't organic.
I downvote only the downvote. Down with the downvote!
I agree completely with this comment under the article:
> I really don’t like the idea of downvotes, just makes it easier to make sure there’s only one train of thought under a tweet. So if a tweet is aimed at a certain subsection of people, the replies will all be full of upvoted replies agreeing with it while all dissent is downvoted.
Followers of a user will downvote to silence opposing opinions in the replies, pigeonholing the reply section into a bunch of posts that agree with the original poster.
I want more spaces that push out trolls, but where I can interact with non-like-minded individuals.
If I only interact with like-minded individuals, that means the internet has failed its use case for me, which is to broaden my world view by seeking out opinions that oppose my own.
Of course if by "like-minded" you mean "polite and rule-abiding," then I agree.
That's why I put "trolls" in quotes. The amount of people who self-sort themselves into echo chambers is far more than the people who would freely admit they want to be in an echo chamber.
That's one use case, but not every platform or forum can or should be expected to traffic in free-form controversy. If I'm on a car forum, I expect an "echo chamber" about cars with individuals interested in discussing cars, not to have a confrontational debate about race science or vaccines or Christian apologetics, at least not in the car threads.
On the contrary, many people do want an echo chamber. I find the key to enjoying my Twitter experience is to differentiate between the threads where people do want a discussion and the ones where they only want to signal how much they agree with each other. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not.
This is exactly what can occasionally be seen here on HN, although I believe the mods here do an incredible job of tailoring the ranking algorithm to not magnify the problem too much.
In many ways I think maybe HN is an example of how you can make the comment down vote work.
Twitter without downvotes is, after all, famously not a single train of thought under a Tweet!
But seriously: HN has downvotes, and almost every thread follows the basic structure of a somewhat healthy argumentative environment (alternating positive-negative comments down each child node). Things get downvoted (and you're entitled to any number of sour feelings about which things those are), but the overall structure of this site's comments demonstrates that up/downvotes aren't themselves toxic to discussion.
> Twitter without downvotes is, after all, famously not a single train of thought under a Tweet!
In my experience, it really isn't! Whenever I see a bad take on Twitter, I generally see some sort of rebuttal within the first dozen or so replies. If you expand that rebuttal, you start to see some argumentation, which to me is the interesting part of Twitter.
I think part of what makes HN's downvote system viable is that it's a well-defined community, you need a lot of karma relatively speaking to unlock the downvote privilege, and in practice comments are only downvoted if they are off-topic or poorly articulated.
In that same vein Stack Exchange's downvote system works well too, because karma (rep) is tracked individually per-community and you likewise need a certain amount of it to unlock the downvote privilege. This makes it so that on SE and HN alike, the people with some seniority in the community are the ones to help dictate what should be surfaced by the site.
On Twitter though, it's liable to turn into the same mess Reddit has. Because there is no hard line between different communities, you can't have a meaningful per-community karma limit for the downvote privilege. This eventually devolves into a free-for-all where users brigade other subreddits (and on Twitter, other users' feeds) to mass downvote opinions they disagree with, no matter how articulate or well-sourced they are.
Maybe we're in different bubbles, but my experience with bad takes on Twitter is that the entire first level is mockery and quote-tweets, with people doubling down on that mockery in the responses to the quote-tweets. Rebuttals, if they come, happen mostly on locked down accounts or via subtweeting (although mockery is also standard in the subtweets).
I also don't think that up/downvotes are likely to change that for Twitter, since Twitter's culture is essentially built around bull sessions[1]. A key part of socializing during bull sessions is mockery, and getting buy-in from your group to perform mockery/ragging on another person in then group (who is supposed to gracefully accept said mockery).
To me they have the ability to be equally as bad (and this is coming from someone who see’s the negative view of social media as overblown). What makes Reddit a bit more dangerous is their higher technical ability to do damage as opposed to Twitter social ability. In my opinion Reddit is more susceptible to hive mind theatrics since the site is specific designed with communities/groups in mind. You can bookmark a subreddit page and spend your entire experience on that subreddit. Twitter makes that a bit difficult as, while you can choose who you can follow, you cannot choose what the people you follow tweet, retweet, reply to which will inevitably expose you to different views and vice versa.
You can try to build a bubble on Twitter but something will inevitably slip in.
HN also has moderators who can step in when things look like they're getting out of control which really helps. Or in some cases just point people to the rules and tell them to stop causing flamewars or get out.
It really makes a difference to the overall discourse. Something that is missing on most other places on the web!
HN moderation for those of us who have been here longer than some posters have been alive, this place is a lot different than it used to be, and moderation now tends to stifle conversations that in the past would have spawned great conversations that remained civil. Dang and friends do their best but for the most part the community is better off self censoring and exploring ideas and concepts without guidance and supervision. Unfortunately as more people flock to a gold rush a tragedy of the commons occurs and the site starts to see dang and team as absolutely necessary for each discussion when frankly they shouldn't be obviously seen guiding discussion.
I'm a bit passionate about this, so my words below may sound "absolutist", but pls understand that being open-minded is really important to me. I'm willing to listen. With that said:
> I really don’t like the idea of downvotes, just makes it easier to make sure there’s only one train of thought under a tweet.
Yes, that's for sure going to happen, and the repercussions need to be dealt with thoughtfully.
But we must do it because there are very few human social situations (in person) where some reflexive negative inhibition is not present, as appropriate reaction. (Maybe therapy, but that's a really specific edge-case.) We give negative feedback all the time in our on-the-fly facial expressions and tones, and most humans have some baked in moderating reactions to that.
We can't have digital spaces without some form of negative feedback. Imagine how fucked up your in-person social groups/interactions would be if everyone, for YEARS was for some reason only capable of boosting/encouraging one another, with no reflexive negative responses -- no frowns, no eyebrow emoting, no body language.
Yes, it will be abused. But we desperately need to figure it out. The relational tools and mechanisms that human brains and bodies have learned over millenia of evolution... these are not things to be discarded so lightly as we have when building tech. They're mostly there for a reason, because they helped us get here as collective. There is wisdom in recreating their patterns. <3
> Imagine how fucked up your in-person social groups/interactions would be if everyone, for YEARS was for some reason only capable of boosting/encouraging one another, with no reflexive negative responses -- no frowns, no eyebrow emoting, no body language.
I think you are really overstating how bad the interactions would be. Phone calls show no body language, and though it might hinder a deeper intuitive understanding of someone's emotional responses, I would say that phone communication is far from "fucked up".
When someone disagrees with what I am saying over a phone call, they can verbally express their disapproval if no body language is available. In fact, verbal disapproval is preferred so that they can express nuance.
When someone disagrees with what I am saying on the internet, they can express their disapproval in a reply if no downvotes are available. In fact, a comment reply is preferred so that they can express nuance.
For many millennia, there has been understandable evolutionary pressure to ostracize people who look and act different from those in your hunter-gatherer tribe, as you may not be able to trust them with your tools, food, and other tribe members. That evolutionary pressure is antithetical to the optimal functioning of a modern globalized society comprised of law and social safety nets, and valuing freedom of expression.
The most important signal nowadays is whether information is well-researched, not whether people agree with it. If not kept tightly in check, voting systems tend to devolve into surfacing the most popular opinions rather than the most useful or even the most true.
For example, some of the most important information I read on the internet fifteen years ago was the stuff that was heavily downvoted back then, in particular, controversial fringe stuff related to medicine and finance. Fifteen years later it's finally entering the mainstream and being upvoted, but I've had access to the information this whole time in small part because I set Reddit not to collapse downvoted comments by default.
This all sounds great if it wasn't for one thing: upvotes. Because of that, we have a system that changes what/when people see things. If we had only replies in order of posting that would be like this suggestion. It tends not to scale when there are very many (some duplicate) comments.
I don't have a problem with down votes as long as they have zero effect on the conversation thread, unlike here on HN. Greying out and/or making a comment dead does not achieve anything useful. Flagging comments for violating HN terms of service should be more than sufficient to handle things that go out of bounds.
I am in several Twitter antivaxxer "bubbles", mainly so that I can argue against them. Any time I post any cogent argument against their _constant_ stream of misinformation, I get heavily "ratioed" by people who can barely spell or put a sentence together. Similarly, in other more scientific bubbles, anyone who posts a dumb antivaxxer argument gets ratioed and ridiculed as well.
I don't think this downvoting is going to do anything to combat misinformation.
The problems with brigading, and in general using downvotes for manipulating what other people see, can be mitigated by doing personalized ranking (which Twitter already does - this is just a tweak). For your personalized ranking, the downvotes of people similar to you would count much more than those from people different from you. So if a group comes in and brigades a thread, their votes won't do anything to your view if they're not similar to you.
This opens a question, though, of whether the person who started a thread should have any control over the conversation other people see. In the extreme, it could be almost like those browser extensions where your group has a parallel conversation about a website, unrelated to the comments on the site itself. In the other extreme, the OP of a thread is curator of their personal walled garden, where their enemies' replies are all auto-hidden.
Fortunately, you can still get a fairly decent twitter experience by curating your follows into private Lists. You get a chronological timeline of those users' posts, and you actually see all of them, rather than whatever subset the algorithm has decided it wants to show you.
I think both upvoting and downvoting are... a poor form of signal on content, but maybe the best one we have. There can be some pretty good indicators that come out of the combination of up and down votes that you can't get from just up.
Purely upvoted content is (generally) less offensive to the readers. Purely downvoted content is (generally) more offensive to the readers. Mixed content 50/50 up/down is typically more controversial and so isn't purely offensive, but instead depends on who the reader is. Assuming a wide spread of audience (not a pre-silo'd audience).
I'm speculating here but I guess this is a tool twitter plans to use to reinforce silos, find content that's only "mildly offensive (I.E. Pimple Popping threads) and let people who want that to get it. Alternatively, they could find content that's downvoted by people who have a good "donwvoting trend" and upscale those downvotes. It's just more signal in their learning algorithms toolboxes.
IMO it neither helps nor hurts twitter's users to have downvotes it really depends on how they use it. I suspect people who are opposed to downvotes don't trust that Twitter will use the signal well. For example, the fact that YouTube took away "displaying" downvotes but not actually downvoting takes away power from users. They still get the signal but users don't. You no longer get signal on what YouTube is recommending to you.
I think what they really mean to say is "all non-echo-chamber replies will be censored." Any other interpretation assumes something that isn't true: that all Twitter users are calm, rational, thinking individuals.
Better than an algorithm that prioritizes posts based on how much interaction they receive.
The manipulation of a conversation can instead be a democratic process where each participant (even each lurker) gets to decide what comments should be seen first by each new participant. I'm actually really impressed by HN's distributed moderation, the fact that members with more reputation (higher score) get to flag and vouch comments lets HN dodge reddit's curse of having weird power-tripping volunteers with a monopoly on bans.
Conversations need to be manipulated one way or another, I mean maybe 4chan gets by unmoderated, but don't they kick spammers too? So someone has power to shape the conversation, question is how the power is distributed.
All voting is censorship. The delivery of every piece of content should be completely randomized regardless of source, quality, heinousness, coherence, or relevance. All knowledge and reason is fundamentally flawed and thus should never be presented. Words are meaningless. All is void.
As account lock on most social nets happens without stating which ToS paragraph was violated, adding such a feedback as downvoting could lead to more easy account termination process.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadFirst and foremost, I agree that this will probably end poorly.
However, I could see this being a good idea in the right hands, because it _could_ be used as _part_ of a more comprehensive auto-mod tools, including self-shadow-banning.
Imagine you had a human reviewing highly ratioed comments, providing a final judgment on "is this comment actually unhelpful, or is it just being brigaded?". (And let's imagine one judgment option is "unclear, do nothing".) You could then keep a per-user metric of their (mis)alignment with that judgment across all their votes. That metric could then be used to weight the votes of that user.
High alignment then classifies that user as a "trustworthy unpaid mod" behind the scenes, which can then be used as a signal to determine future human reviews. Similarly, if someone has an absolutely stellar alignment, you can use the occasional disagreements to do meta-mod reviews of your mods' judgments. If you go really wild and draw some correlation between mis-votes and hashtag/topic/channel/whatever, then you can use that.
Low alignment could then be used to devalue votes from that user, leading to a slow shadow ban, and potentially even other more visible effects.
All of which can be done regardless of the visibility of the votes, of course. But hiding "down" votes should help to reduce the pile-on effects of brigading ("a ton of other people downvoted it, so I am safe in the crowd") and thus the temptations leading to slowly shadow banning yourself. But unlike completely taking away down votes, like YouTube, you leave enough rope for bad actors to hang themselves.
It's equivalent to the system Slashdot has had for decades (IIRC).
Do I trust Twitter to put in place something with that amount of utility, feedback, and nuance? Nope. And even if they did, they'd throw away the value of having invisible scores for the opportunity to add "gold checkmarks" or some other BS.
That's exactly what I thought when I read this too. That system worked really well (not perfect, but did the job) back when Slashdot was super popular. I think your right, good idea in the right hands and if they are careful with how they do it.
Hidden downvotes are the flip side of the coin — instead of being used to boost the spread of certain tweets, they can be used as an excuse for why certain information is hidden.
Basically, these changes remind me of p-hacking. As more variables are added, you can figure out ways to structure your algorithm so that you promote the information that you already wanted to promote and demote the information that you wanted to hide. This could be for profit-seeking reasons, political reasons, or other reasons. In any event, it decreases transparency and reduces trust in the systems.
edit: added last paragraph
There are other platforms (like YouTube) where downvotes make a lot of sense because users post guides and tutorials where the downvote ratio is a good indicator of how accurate or useful that guide is.
Twitter as a platform which has no ability to store and reliably surface informational or factual messages is completely devoid of the types of content where peer feedback is helpful - the only thing tweet scores measure is "hotness" which could be entirely opaque to the user base (both up and down).
They tried a lot harder on the Biden admin videos, first culling downvotes, but it was still overwhelmed.
A tracker was made during the original culling: https://81m.org/78/
https://youtube.com/results?search_query=puissant+pronunciat...
Previously, downvotes were the sign of which videos were wrong. Now it’s only comments, and most people don’t comment.
I really hope that's one of the incorrect ones, because otherwise I've never once pronounced it correctly. I pronounce it as in the French but without the nasal on "-ant" and I hit the T just a bit (it's typically written as a loan word, not an italicized foreign word, after all).
Green political parties who don’t support nuclear power.
Comments describing positive aspects of covid driven lockdowns.
Twitter is also apparently keeping the downvote number secret except for the poster.
In retrospect, that was a necessary precursor to all the dark patterns they would later implement to the feed. It empowers the company to decide what users see and that's an incredibly valuable thing for a company with billions of eyeballs. The temptation to monetize that power will be irresistible. At the very least, "Sponsored Posts" incoming.
I guess they moved fast and broke things.
In the behavioral science parlance, I think this is called a 'nudge'.
No, Facebook, I'm not going to sit there obsessively refreshing the page and scrolling through dozens of pages of content just for a shot at others noticing my existence in your little play-world.
Perhaps I'm not the kind of user Facebook wants. They probably reached the same conclusion as scam artists; make your platform unappealing to the users who won't continually lead to profit, but give it the right qualities so those who don't know any better keep falling into the trap and stay there.
As a small-community moderator on reddit, we get blamed all the time for "downvotes from our community" by new users which is something we neither have insight into nor control over.
I don't see how this goes well. At least Reddit has managed to build a [propaganda death star](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...) with their new features associated with blocking accounts.
Will people be able to downvote tweets from official accounts for heads of state? What will Twitter do about downvote bot groups?
Do they also have teams that identify "brigading" in order to boost a tweet? What does Twitter do about upvote bots?
Hearts, retweets, replies, etc. on Twitter I presume have a slightly similar result but I suspect it's not the same as "reaching #1 on /r/all" on reddit. The way Twitter works is fundamentally different. So whether Twitter really needs to care about people "getting ratio'd" or buying likes is different than the concern on Reddit. What happens to mass-downvoted tweets will determine how important it is to make sure all downvotes are "real" or "in good faith" or whatever.
The problem is when your online community decides political propaganda or marketing stuff is ok because you agree to participate in a "cultural battle", so you will need to make splitting decisions like who's the brigands and who's being brigaded.
If you start a group centered around, idk, using VSCode. Nice plug-ins to have. The roadmap of the software. Answering questions and helping folks use the software well, etc.
But your community gets raided by the IntelliJ community so that the only discussions are about how VSCode is awful, everyone should use IntelliJ. Why even discuss the roadmap of this stupid not-even-an-IDE? Use IntelliJ.
Anywhere the VSCode community tries to go, it just gets followed by IntelliJ zealots.
If you ban downvoting, you just get upvoting of troll content instead.
In my experience, essentially every political subreddit is full of complete and utter nonsense for this reason. There's some great stuff on the site if you're into woodworking or robotics or whatever, but the country/city/political subreddits are like "Hypernormalization" in website form.
It gets even worse because eventually those subreddits get captured by moderators that stoke the flames even further. I'd be surprised if most of it wasn't state actor troll farm stuff.
Nobody can disagree with you anymore. I believe it is time to use such a list to block everyone on my account that has ever posted in r/emacs, because they cannot see the error of their ways by not choosing ed(1).
0: In many cases I saw that people would also comment under said user stating something to the effect of "This person has commented on r/emacs, they are stupid, it doesn't matter that they're talking about their thoughts on the Disney+ catalog." Which had the secondary effect of people jumping to conclusions about OP without even opting in to download the extension.
Put another way: we shouldn't confuse a civics problem with a platform problem. These extensions (again, as I remember them), were primarily created to eliminate a platform problem that Reddit themselves refused to address.
Edit: my personal anecdote with this is NYC's subreddit: accounts with histories that indicate no connection to NYC love to comment on every crime-blotter article with the same tired comments about the city. It's incredibly convenient and improves the quality of the discussion to be able to filter them.
I get moderation is hard, but this makes it too easy. What if someone was evil but then saw the error of their ways? Should they be forced to make a new account? Or what if they were trying to start debates (as unlikely as that is) in said evil subreddit?
This is a great point, and it's a problem that's created by these extensions. I'd argue that it's a lesser problem than the original one, and so it's a pill I'm willing to swallow (and subsequently tackle).
In general, I think that anonymized reputation and vouching systems are the way forwards for online communities. Vouching solves the "blacklisting" problem: if we incentivize high-reputation people to vouch for good-faith accounts, then people who fall into the categories you've mentioned can be correctly exempted from the filter. But that's awfully hard to do.
What's your point here, exactly? That they should, or should not be able to do that? Because this already happens, except it's even worse than letting people do it, because Twitter does it by itself. With zero oversight by anyone (not that other big tech platforms don't do the same). Twitter already rank boosts content it likes and content it doesn't like gets downranked, shadow banned or just permabanned. It already filters trends and search and autocomplete. So we have a situation where a big tech company does what it wants and does it so much that it literally skews elections (all of this is common sense, but there are also many peer reviewed studies about this, some authors of which have testified before congress and some of which are represent bases for many US & EU investigations into the big tech monopolies/cartels). So given all this, is it really a problem to let people downvote stuff... or is it actually about not letting the people you don't like have a vote?
Youtube dislikes were completely fine 99.999999% of the time and lasted for like a decade without issues. Until someone like you, sadly in a position of power, decided that (speculation starts) Biden got too many dislikes on his ramblings and it was a bad look for Google (speculation ends).
Some people just HATE democracy because democracy means even dumb people, rednecks, racists, sexists and all kinds of "irresponsible" people get to vote. Ironically, most of the time (in recent history at least), these people who hate democracy call themselves democrats or liberals. In reality, they're anything but that. Actual liberals recognize that everyone deserves a to have a voice in a democracy. Even the bad voices are valuable, because they allow the marketplace of ideas actually do its magic.
Wow I hope not. Conflating these concepts sounds terrible.
One of the issues is that places like Hacker News and Reddit use an aggregate vote count. You can't tell if a comment that has a score of -10 is a comment where ten people saw it and decided to downvote it, or where 100 people saw it, 55 downvoted it and 45 upvoted it. This leads to situations where it can seem like a community rejects a point of view, even whe the point of view is shared by almost half the community.
Further exacerbating this is that, with an infinite number of votes allowed, someone who is less restrained about their votes is going to have a greater impact than someone who reserves them for only exceptional comments. For example, say 60% of the community likes Coke and 40% likes Pepsi. However, the Coke supporters are relatively calm and only occasionally vote for comments about soda, while Pepsi supporters are zealots who will downvote any comment that's supportive of Coke and upvote any comment supportive of Pepsi. A user is just going to see a lot of highly downvoted/greyed out Coke posts and a lot of highly upvoted Pepsi posts, and assume that the community is highly supportive of Pepsi while hating Coke.
That's more of a problem with voting in general (and a larger problem with how time = speech on the internet), but downvoting can certainly exacerbate the problem.
Upvote only, it rewards the best opinions and analysis.
The problem is, botnets and astroturfing use downvotes to manipulate conversations, perceived word of mouth and ultimately the algorithms.
For instance, since Youtube has removed downvotes from visibility, my recommended videos are more in line with what I want. I think the downvote was a massive tool for shaping the algorithms and recommended videos that becomes something that isn't organic.
I downvote only the downvote. Down with the downvote!
> I really don’t like the idea of downvotes, just makes it easier to make sure there’s only one train of thought under a tweet. So if a tweet is aimed at a certain subsection of people, the replies will all be full of upvoted replies agreeing with it while all dissent is downvoted.
Followers of a user will downvote to silence opposing opinions in the replies, pigeonholing the reply section into a bunch of posts that agree with the original poster.
If I only interact with like-minded individuals, that means the internet has failed its use case for me, which is to broaden my world view by seeking out opinions that oppose my own.
Of course if by "like-minded" you mean "polite and rule-abiding," then I agree.
In many ways I think maybe HN is an example of how you can make the comment down vote work.
The difference between HN and Reddit to me is that HN has consistently higher quality comments.
Will be interesting to see how down votes will affect Twitter.
But seriously: HN has downvotes, and almost every thread follows the basic structure of a somewhat healthy argumentative environment (alternating positive-negative comments down each child node). Things get downvoted (and you're entitled to any number of sour feelings about which things those are), but the overall structure of this site's comments demonstrates that up/downvotes aren't themselves toxic to discussion.
In my experience, it really isn't! Whenever I see a bad take on Twitter, I generally see some sort of rebuttal within the first dozen or so replies. If you expand that rebuttal, you start to see some argumentation, which to me is the interesting part of Twitter.
I think part of what makes HN's downvote system viable is that it's a well-defined community, you need a lot of karma relatively speaking to unlock the downvote privilege, and in practice comments are only downvoted if they are off-topic or poorly articulated.
In that same vein Stack Exchange's downvote system works well too, because karma (rep) is tracked individually per-community and you likewise need a certain amount of it to unlock the downvote privilege. This makes it so that on SE and HN alike, the people with some seniority in the community are the ones to help dictate what should be surfaced by the site.
On Twitter though, it's liable to turn into the same mess Reddit has. Because there is no hard line between different communities, you can't have a meaningful per-community karma limit for the downvote privilege. This eventually devolves into a free-for-all where users brigade other subreddits (and on Twitter, other users' feeds) to mass downvote opinions they disagree with, no matter how articulate or well-sourced they are.
I also don't think that up/downvotes are likely to change that for Twitter, since Twitter's culture is essentially built around bull sessions[1]. A key part of socializing during bull sessions is mockery, and getting buy-in from your group to perform mockery/ragging on another person in then group (who is supposed to gracefully accept said mockery).
[1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bull%20sessi...
Reddit has its problems but the idea that it’s somehow worse than Twitter is laughable.
Even with vote brigading subreddits are moderated and so actual content brigading is much rarer. Can you say the same about Twitter?
You can try to build a bubble on Twitter but something will inevitably slip in.
It really makes a difference to the overall discourse. Something that is missing on most other places on the web!
> I really don’t like the idea of downvotes, just makes it easier to make sure there’s only one train of thought under a tweet.
Yes, that's for sure going to happen, and the repercussions need to be dealt with thoughtfully.
But we must do it because there are very few human social situations (in person) where some reflexive negative inhibition is not present, as appropriate reaction. (Maybe therapy, but that's a really specific edge-case.) We give negative feedback all the time in our on-the-fly facial expressions and tones, and most humans have some baked in moderating reactions to that.
We can't have digital spaces without some form of negative feedback. Imagine how fucked up your in-person social groups/interactions would be if everyone, for YEARS was for some reason only capable of boosting/encouraging one another, with no reflexive negative responses -- no frowns, no eyebrow emoting, no body language.
Yes, it will be abused. But we desperately need to figure it out. The relational tools and mechanisms that human brains and bodies have learned over millenia of evolution... these are not things to be discarded so lightly as we have when building tech. They're mostly there for a reason, because they helped us get here as collective. There is wisdom in recreating their patterns. <3
I think you are really overstating how bad the interactions would be. Phone calls show no body language, and though it might hinder a deeper intuitive understanding of someone's emotional responses, I would say that phone communication is far from "fucked up".
When someone disagrees with what I am saying over a phone call, they can verbally express their disapproval if no body language is available. In fact, verbal disapproval is preferred so that they can express nuance.
When someone disagrees with what I am saying on the internet, they can express their disapproval in a reply if no downvotes are available. In fact, a comment reply is preferred so that they can express nuance.
For many millennia, there has been understandable evolutionary pressure to ostracize people who look and act different from those in your hunter-gatherer tribe, as you may not be able to trust them with your tools, food, and other tribe members. That evolutionary pressure is antithetical to the optimal functioning of a modern globalized society comprised of law and social safety nets, and valuing freedom of expression.
The most important signal nowadays is whether information is well-researched, not whether people agree with it. If not kept tightly in check, voting systems tend to devolve into surfacing the most popular opinions rather than the most useful or even the most true.
For example, some of the most important information I read on the internet fifteen years ago was the stuff that was heavily downvoted back then, in particular, controversial fringe stuff related to medicine and finance. Fifteen years later it's finally entering the mainstream and being upvoted, but I've had access to the information this whole time in small part because I set Reddit not to collapse downvoted comments by default.
I don't think this downvoting is going to do anything to combat misinformation.
This opens a question, though, of whether the person who started a thread should have any control over the conversation other people see. In the extreme, it could be almost like those browser extensions where your group has a parallel conversation about a website, unrelated to the comments on the site itself. In the other extreme, the OP of a thread is curator of their personal walled garden, where their enemies' replies are all auto-hidden.
Purely upvoted content is (generally) less offensive to the readers. Purely downvoted content is (generally) more offensive to the readers. Mixed content 50/50 up/down is typically more controversial and so isn't purely offensive, but instead depends on who the reader is. Assuming a wide spread of audience (not a pre-silo'd audience).
I'm speculating here but I guess this is a tool twitter plans to use to reinforce silos, find content that's only "mildly offensive (I.E. Pimple Popping threads) and let people who want that to get it. Alternatively, they could find content that's downvoted by people who have a good "donwvoting trend" and upscale those downvotes. It's just more signal in their learning algorithms toolboxes.
IMO it neither helps nor hurts twitter's users to have downvotes it really depends on how they use it. I suspect people who are opposed to downvotes don't trust that Twitter will use the signal well. For example, the fact that YouTube took away "displaying" downvotes but not actually downvoting takes away power from users. They still get the signal but users don't. You no longer get signal on what YouTube is recommending to you.
I think what they really mean to say is "all non-echo-chamber replies will be censored." Any other interpretation assumes something that isn't true: that all Twitter users are calm, rational, thinking individuals.
The manipulation of a conversation can instead be a democratic process where each participant (even each lurker) gets to decide what comments should be seen first by each new participant. I'm actually really impressed by HN's distributed moderation, the fact that members with more reputation (higher score) get to flag and vouch comments lets HN dodge reddit's curse of having weird power-tripping volunteers with a monopoly on bans.
Conversations need to be manipulated one way or another, I mean maybe 4chan gets by unmoderated, but don't they kick spammers too? So someone has power to shape the conversation, question is how the power is distributed.