The older get and the more I use the internet, the more skeptical I become of downvoting.
Reddit is the only major social media site that has downvoting, and reddit is also (in my view) the social media site with the biggest groupthink problem. People really seem to dislike being downvoted, which causes them to cluster in subreddits full of the like-minded, taking potshots at those who disagree instead of having a dialogue. Reddit started out as one the most intelligent sites on the internet due to its programmer-discussion origins; the decline has been fairly remarkable IMO. Especially when it comes to any sort of controversial or morality-related dialogue, reddit commenters seem to be participating in a Keynesian beauty contest more than they are thinking.
When I look at the stuff that other people downvote, their downvotes often seem arbitrary and capricious. (It can be hard to separate out my independent opinion of the content from my downvotes-colored opinion so I can notice this.) When I get the impulse to downvote something, it’s usually not the best side of me that’s coming out. And yet getting downvoted still aggravates me a lot. My creativity and enthusiasm are noticeably diminished for perhaps 24-48 hours afterwards. Getting downvoted doesn’t teach me anything beyond just “don’t engage with those people”, often with an added helping of “screw them”.
We have good enough content-filtering mechanisms nowadays that in principle, I don’t think people should be punished for posting “bad” content. It should be easy to arrange things so “good” content gets the lion’s share of the attention.
I’d argue the threat of punishment is most valuable when people can clearly predict what’s going to produce punishment, e.g. committing a crime. For getting downvoted, the punishment is arbitrary enough that it causes a big behavioral no-go zone.
The problem isn’t that people might downvote your satire. The problem is that human psychology is such that even an estimated 5% chance of your satire being downvoted is enough to deter you from posting it, since in the ancestral environment social exclusion was asymmetrically deadly relative to social acceptance. Conformity is the natural result.
Specific proposals:
Remove the downvote button, and when the user hits “submit” on their post or comment, an LLM reads the post or comment and checks it against a long list of site guidelines. The LLM flags potential issues to the user, and says: “You can still post this if you want, but since it violates 3 of the guidelines, it will start out with a score of −3. Alternatively, you can rewrite it and submit it to me again.” That gets you quality control without the capricious-social-exclusion aspect.
Have specific sections of the site, or specific times of the year, where the voting gets turned off. Or keep the voting on, but anonymize the post score and the user who posted it, so your opinion isn’t colored by the content’s current score / user reputation.
This has been a bit of a rant, but here are a couple of links to help point at what I’m trying to say:
https://vimeo.com/60898177 -- this Onion satire was made over a decade ago. I think it’s worth noting how absurd our internet-of-ubiquitous-feedback-mechanisms seems from the perspective of comedians from the past. (And it is in fact absurd in my view, but it can be hard to see the water you’re swimming in. Browsing an old-school forum without any feedback mechanisms makes the difference seem especially stark. The analogy that’s coming to mind is a party where everyone’s on cocaine, vs a party where everyone is sober.)
The older get and the more I use the internet, the more skeptical I become of downvoting.
Reddit is the only major social media site that has downvoting, and reddit is also (in my view) the social media site with the biggest groupthink problem. People really seem to dislike being downvoted, which causes them to cluster in subreddits full of the like-minded, taking potshots at those who disagree instead of having a dialogue. Reddit started out as one the most intelligent sites on the internet due to its programmer-discussion origins; the decline has been fairly remarkable IMO. Especially when it comes to any sort of controversial or morality-related dialogue, reddit commenters seem to be participating in a Keynesian beauty contest more than they are thinking.
When I look at the stuff that other people downvote, their downvotes often seem arbitrary and capricious. (It can be hard to separate out my independent opinion of the content from my downvotes-colored opinion so I can notice this.) When I get the impulse to downvote something, it’s usually not the best side of me that’s coming out. And yet getting downvoted still aggravates me a lot. My creativity and enthusiasm are noticeably diminished for perhaps 24-48 hours afterwards. Getting downvoted doesn’t teach me anything beyond just “don’t engage with those people”, often with an added helping of “screw them”.
We have good enough content-filtering mechanisms nowadays that in principle, I don’t think people should be punished for posting “bad” content. It should be easy to arrange things so “good” content gets the lion’s share of the attention.
I’d argue the threat of punishment is most valuable when people can clearly predict what’s going to produce punishment, e.g. committing a crime. For getting downvoted, the punishment is arbitrary enough that it causes a big behavioral no-go zone.
The problem isn’t that people might downvote your satire. The problem is that human psychology is such that even an estimated 5% chance of your satire being downvoted is enough to deter you from posting it, since in the ancestral environment social exclusion was asymmetrically deadly relative to social acceptance. Conformity is the natural result.
Specific proposals:
Remove the downvote button, and when the user hits “submit” on their post or comment, an LLM reads the post or comment and checks it against a long list of site guidelines. The LLM flags potential issues to the user, and says: “You can still post this if you want, but since it violates 3 of the guidelines, it will start out with a score of −3. Alternatively, you can rewrite it and submit it to me again.” That gets you quality control without the capricious-social-exclusion aspect.
Have specific sections of the site, or specific times of the year, where the voting gets turned off. Or keep the voting on, but anonymize the post score and the user who posted it, so your opinion isn’t colored by the content’s current score / user reputation.
This has been a bit of a rant, but here are a couple of links to help point at what I’m trying to say:
https://vimeo.com/60898177 -- this Onion satire was made over a decade ago. I think it’s worth noting how absurd our internet-of-ubiquitous-feedback-mechanisms seems from the perspective of comedians from the past. (And it is in fact absurd in my view, but it can be hard to see the water you’re swimming in. Browsing an old-school forum without any feedback mechanisms makes the difference seem especially stark. The analogy that’s coming to mind is a party where everyone’s on cocaine, vs a party where everyone is sober.)
https://celandine13.livejournal.com/33599.html—classic post, “Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity”
You may be interested in Kenneth Stanley’s serendipity-oriented social network, maven