I hope we’ll get to a place where they’ll refederate with us. They have some really interesting communities. I didn’t sign up for an account there because I wasn’t willing to write a 7 page essay and take the blood oath to be admitted. I’m exaggerating… a little.
They want to be the “Elks Lodge” of the fediverse and that’s totally fine. They were pretty transparent about their reasons for defederating with us and their reasons were understandable.
Anyone who cares about downvotes needs to get their head examined. A downvote can mean the person doesn’t agree with your comment, doesn’t like your tone, thinks you are incorrect, thinks the comment doesn’t add to the discussion, hell they could downvote you just because they don’t like your username. None of that matters. All it does is show you if your comment goes against the zeitgeist or not.
I’ve had plenty of times where a comment I made got downvoted like crazy, but a response I made to a comment asking for clarification got a lot of upvotes. It seems people really like to jump on that downvote button, especially if they see something already getting downvotes (i.e. maybe they don’t even read it, they just downvote on reflex).
Votes happen to be really easy to deal with in software, which is probably why they’re so commonly used. However, when it comes to people actually casting votes, they behave a lot differently than software creators expect.
So perhaps we should try something else, like maybe sort by “activity” (how many times the comment was replied to) to sort of counteract that reflex-like urge to use it as an agree/disagree button (if you agree or disagree strongly, you’re likely to comment).
Exactly. The way people us it is too broad and generally not conducive to the intended goal of pointing out low-effort/unwelcome commentary and posts. It just says “no.”
The whole point is that people can downvote you for any stupid reason and doesn’t accurately reflect why a post is being rejected by the community. People will do it simply because they want to silence you.
And it causes issues with brigading, botnets, etc. It’s why hexbear and lemmygrad are being defederated – and their members are able to get around it simply by making accounts on other servers and going right back to the brigading. Removing the voting option and giving admins tools to IP ban everyone from an instance upon defederation would go a long way toward fixing the problem.
Votes still get federated. Even if not exposed via UI anyone running their own (federated) instance can query for who voted on beehaw posts. Only a matter of time before that’s directly exposed as a mod tool.
Just from those vote counts, I can be pretty sure the first comment is insightful, the second controversial, the third a troll, and the fourth is definitely spam. The fifth is probably a cat pic, relevant xkcd, meme, or a single-sentence comment that everyone loves, but doesn’t actually add anything important to the topic. If I’m looking for an interesting conversation, I’m focused on the first two, maybe the third. If I’m looking to be pissed off, the third and fourth. And if I’m looking for an easy read, the fifth.
+80, +50, +20, +1, and +100 doesn’t provide the same information. It’s the downvotes that provide the relative context.
You can also be “downvoted into oblivion” if you’re 100%, objectively correct, but your conclusion goes against the “hive mind.” I have had comments with a ton of sources and detailed analysis that got downvoted like crazy, and then the top comment is like “X group, amirite?”
You’re 100% correct that reddit rewards snark far more than constructive discussion. That’s part of why I’m here, and why I’ll probably be perennially disappointed with social media.
I value the ability to view the community sentiment more than I value artificial manipulation of the voting system to make the community seem more fair and open minded than it actually is.
When my opinion is not well received by the community, either I am wrong, or I have not presented it in a way they can understand and accept.
“Downvoting to oblivion” is not an inherently bad thing, even when it is due to a mistake or misconception. Just because that particular conversation has ended and 99.9% of the traffic has passed through does not mean the topic is finished. It will come back up in the future, and I know I will need to focus on that mistake or misconception when it does.
I also reject your characterization that upvotes are a “reward”.
it isn’t sorting by “contribute/doesn’t contribute,” that’s for sure.
It’s both. You’re not wrong with the groupthink thing, but they absolutely do help to combat disinformation and useless comments. I get that you’ve made a decision, but you don’t need to rationalize away the negatives.
It is functionally a “I don’t like this” or “I’m right” button.
Sometimes comments are just wrong, and detract from the community. Downvotes (plus an interface that hides negative voted comments) clean things up without need for formal moderation.
Whatever can be said about downvotes (an automated system for marking one’s disapproval) is probably true of reporting (a human reviewed system for marking one’s extreme disapproval), too.
All this does is bury comments regardless of quality
But if downvotes (and upvotes) are well correlated with quality, then what’s the problem? Your complaints are about community culture around downvotes, not about the mechanism itself.
I’d love to see a system where votes can be correlated between users so that the ranking algorithm weights like-minded voters and deemphasizes those voters you disagree with, but that would probably create a pretty significant overhead for the service.
And I’m saying that some communities have a “dominant mentality” that’s pretty obviously correct. The only thing worse than a person who says “just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s right” is the person who swings the pendulum too far in the other direction of saying “it’s unpopular so it must be right.”
Nah, we just need to interpret downvotes differently. If we count the votes the right way, it doesn’t really matter if we use downvotes to indicate disagreement.
Reddit used to provide a tally of both upvotes and downvotes, rather than just the sum total of the two. The best top-level comments often had hundreds of both upvotes and downvotes, and vibrant discussions always followed. The quality of Reddit conversation dropped precipitously after they combined up and down votes into a sum total. They made it impossible to find the +500/-498 comments among the +4/-2 comments, calling each of them “+2” with a controversial tag, even though one was highly relevant, and the other was almost completely irrelevant.
A “vote” indicates a strong opinion on the subject, and is the more important metric to consider than the specific composition of the votes. Up or down, any vote is saying “check out this opinion”.
I totally agree here. And I want to take it a step further and instead of sorting by average votes, we should merely be including it as one of many indicators, such as:
number of direct child comments
number of total descendant comments
maybe length of direct child comments - a longer response is more likely to be an interesting rebuttal than a “go away troll” comment
number of independent users among total descendant comments - if it’s just the same two people going back and forth, that’s just a good, old-fashioned argument that most won’t care to read
And so on. But instead, we seem to just sort by upvotes - downvotes and call it a day.
I didn’t sign up for an account there because I wasn’t willing to write a 7 page essay
Yeah, you’re not welcome. Everyone calling a couple questions an “essay”, can shitpost somewhere else. I’m not exaggerating a bit, if someone can’t be bothered to think through a couple answers ONCE, I don’t trust them to think through the rest of their comments either.
I hope we’ll get to a place where they’ll refederate with us. They have some really interesting communities. I didn’t sign up for an account there because I wasn’t willing to write a 7 page essay and take the blood oath to be admitted. I’m exaggerating… a little.
They want to be the “Elks Lodge” of the fediverse and that’s totally fine. They were pretty transparent about their reasons for defederating with us and their reasons were understandable.
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Anyone who cares about downvotes needs to get their head examined. A downvote can mean the person doesn’t agree with your comment, doesn’t like your tone, thinks you are incorrect, thinks the comment doesn’t add to the discussion, hell they could downvote you just because they don’t like your username. None of that matters. All it does is show you if your comment goes against the zeitgeist or not.
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That’s my biggest problem with downvotes. I want to know why someone disagrees. That can initiate an interesting conversation.
If I’m factually incorrect, I want to know. Same goes if I expressed myself poorly. A downvote alone doesn’t tell me anything.
I’ve had plenty of times where a comment I made got downvoted like crazy, but a response I made to a comment asking for clarification got a lot of upvotes. It seems people really like to jump on that downvote button, especially if they see something already getting downvotes (i.e. maybe they don’t even read it, they just downvote on reflex).
Votes happen to be really easy to deal with in software, which is probably why they’re so commonly used. However, when it comes to people actually casting votes, they behave a lot differently than software creators expect.
So perhaps we should try something else, like maybe sort by “activity” (how many times the comment was replied to) to sort of counteract that reflex-like urge to use it as an agree/disagree button (if you agree or disagree strongly, you’re likely to comment).
Exactly. The way people us it is too broad and generally not conducive to the intended goal of pointing out low-effort/unwelcome commentary and posts. It just says “no.”
The whole point is that people can downvote you for any stupid reason and doesn’t accurately reflect why a post is being rejected by the community. People will do it simply because they want to silence you.
And it causes issues with brigading, botnets, etc. It’s why hexbear and lemmygrad are being defederated – and their members are able to get around it simply by making accounts on other servers and going right back to the brigading. Removing the voting option and giving admins tools to IP ban everyone from an instance upon defederation would go a long way toward fixing the problem.
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Actually, on Beehaw, you can. If Beehaw has the equivalent of kbin’s “activity” info, I haven’t found it.
Votes still get federated. Even if not exposed via UI anyone running their own (federated) instance can query for who voted on beehaw posts. Only a matter of time before that’s directly exposed as a mod tool.
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+80/-20 +50/-50 +20/-80 +1/-99 +100/-0
Just from those vote counts, I can be pretty sure the first comment is insightful, the second controversial, the third a troll, and the fourth is definitely spam. The fifth is probably a cat pic, relevant xkcd, meme, or a single-sentence comment that everyone loves, but doesn’t actually add anything important to the topic. If I’m looking for an interesting conversation, I’m focused on the first two, maybe the third. If I’m looking to be pissed off, the third and fourth. And if I’m looking for an easy read, the fifth.
+80, +50, +20, +1, and +100 doesn’t provide the same information. It’s the downvotes that provide the relative context.
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You can also be “downvoted into oblivion” if you’re 100%, objectively correct, but your conclusion goes against the “hive mind.” I have had comments with a ton of sources and detailed analysis that got downvoted like crazy, and then the top comment is like “X group, amirite?”
You’re 100% correct that reddit rewards snark far more than constructive discussion. That’s part of why I’m here, and why I’ll probably be perennially disappointed with social media.
I value the ability to view the community sentiment more than I value artificial manipulation of the voting system to make the community seem more fair and open minded than it actually is.
When my opinion is not well received by the community, either I am wrong, or I have not presented it in a way they can understand and accept.
“Downvoting to oblivion” is not an inherently bad thing, even when it is due to a mistake or misconception. Just because that particular conversation has ended and 99.9% of the traffic has passed through does not mean the topic is finished. It will come back up in the future, and I know I will need to focus on that mistake or misconception when it does.
I also reject your characterization that upvotes are a “reward”.
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It’s both. You’re not wrong with the groupthink thing, but they absolutely do help to combat disinformation and useless comments. I get that you’ve made a decision, but you don’t need to rationalize away the negatives.
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Sometimes comments are just wrong, and detract from the community. Downvotes (plus an interface that hides negative voted comments) clean things up without need for formal moderation.
Whatever can be said about downvotes (an automated system for marking one’s disapproval) is probably true of reporting (a human reviewed system for marking one’s extreme disapproval), too.
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But if downvotes (and upvotes) are well correlated with quality, then what’s the problem? Your complaints are about community culture around downvotes, not about the mechanism itself.
I’d love to see a system where votes can be correlated between users so that the ranking algorithm weights like-minded voters and deemphasizes those voters you disagree with, but that would probably create a pretty significant overhead for the service.
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And I’m saying that some communities have a “dominant mentality” that’s pretty obviously correct. The only thing worse than a person who says “just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s right” is the person who swings the pendulum too far in the other direction of saying “it’s unpopular so it must be right.”
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Nah, we just need to interpret downvotes differently. If we count the votes the right way, it doesn’t really matter if we use downvotes to indicate disagreement.
Reddit used to provide a tally of both upvotes and downvotes, rather than just the sum total of the two. The best top-level comments often had hundreds of both upvotes and downvotes, and vibrant discussions always followed. The quality of Reddit conversation dropped precipitously after they combined up and down votes into a sum total. They made it impossible to find the +500/-498 comments among the +4/-2 comments, calling each of them “+2” with a controversial tag, even though one was highly relevant, and the other was almost completely irrelevant.
A “vote” indicates a strong opinion on the subject, and is the more important metric to consider than the specific composition of the votes. Up or down, any vote is saying “check out this opinion”.
I totally agree here. And I want to take it a step further and instead of sorting by average votes, we should merely be including it as one of many indicators, such as:
And so on. But instead, we seem to just sort by
upvotes - downvotesand call it a day.Well, at the time, they hoped for eventual refederation, too. Personally, I do as well. We’ll see!
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Yeah, you’re not welcome. Everyone calling a couple questions an “essay”, can shitpost somewhere else. I’m not exaggerating a bit, if someone can’t be bothered to think through a couple answers ONCE, I don’t trust them to think through the rest of their comments either.