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I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button. It's a legacy holdover from Reddit but it really doesn't fit the theme of the motte. Downvoting increases the intensity of heat while doing little for light. Humans are hard-wired to care about the popularity of their ideas, even people very low on the agreeableness spectrum (which I'm sure accounts for the majority of posters here). People who are routinely downvoted are much less likely to post, intensifying the echo chamber effect.
If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.
If a post is just using bad logic, it's much better to refute that logic with a response than to downvote. There's nothing I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses. This doesn't happen nearly as often on this forum as it does on Reddit, but it's still a nuisance when it does occur.
Voting has always been one of the worst functions of Reddit and should have been discarded with the offsite move. I voted on one comment in my decade plus on Reddit, and it was a technical solution to a video game bug buried under dozens of useless comments with bad advice. As a subjective “I agree/disagree” button, which is what it morphed into on Day 2 of Reddit going live, the philosophy of its inclusion is counter to the Motte’s explicit rule against consensus building.
Let ideas stand on their own, without the peanut gallery’s worthless input. Motte monkeys are often not nearly as informed as they believe themselves to be, either, outside of their favorite subjects of “computer science careers” and “why girls don’t think programmers are alpha males.”
Dial down the antagonism, returning-alt-with-a-grudge-against-the-Motte.
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Can you give examples where it happened undeservedly? (Reddit-grade jokes or trolling or blatantly bad posts or -1 buried deep in some 1 vs 1 thread do not count)
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Vote counts should at least be hidden for longer. Perhaps a week. The impulse to focus on upvotes is a siren song.
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Downvotes are a feedback mechanic and I think a good one.
I understand that it was abused pretty heavily on reddit but karma isn't really a thing here, votes are hidden for a day, popular sorting isn't that useful here, ...
You mind giving an example or two?
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Is it really that aggravating to get a secondary signal for your post quality?
This forum is extremely well-mannered when it comes to downvotes. Everything I've ever seen under 0 deserved it.
It's not a signal for post quality. I make posts which meet quite a few quality standards, but they get downvoted for making left-wing arguments.
I have seen that happen, and many of my posts have been downvoted because they also went against the hive-mind.
Very rarely do they drop below zero, though. More likely, they are "ratio-ed" by simplistic quips that align more with others.
From my point of view, compared to the perpetual abuse of fucking idiot pre-teens on Reddit and inevitable negative karma, this is still a big step up. It's, of course, easier said than done, but if you don't view votes as a symbol of quality, you can just ignore them instead of the site being changed for it.
My posts do go below 0, especially if I make my kind of arguments. I don't know what specific arguments you're making that get you downvoted, but it was a consistent pattern in on Reddit that left-wing arguments took hits only on the basis of their position.
I would argue that downvotes don't help us - they encourage people to signal their approval of an argument instead of actually engaging with it. Better to remove them and force people to respond or move along.
I will chime in and say yes, sufficiently blue opinions are more likely to get downvoted.
But I’m still tentatively in favor of keeping downvotes. My reasoning is that expressing disapproval is going to happen, and it’s better done through (initially hidden) downvotes than through reports. I’m not very confident in this; vote buttons do feel pretty tribal, which is reason enough to be suspicious.
Abuse of the report function can also be modded. Reddit, for example, bans people who abuse the Sucide Prevention Bot. Set a few examples and people will learn.
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Not if the moderators decide to not do their job because they like a troll poster, or want to encourage similar troll posters for "forum diversity." Very few posts that make good arguments are ever downvoted, and it gives the forum population a voice to deal with spammy agenda-posters (or hock-posters) that doesn't rely on the mods.
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I think we should remove both. "Bad post got upvotes" complaints are as bad as the "my post got downvotes" ones. The only function of votes, as others mentioned, is a sink for low effort comments, but if the mods are up to it, I'd say just start banning for low effort. Unlike some of the more esoteric rules, this one is pretty easy to understand, and to apply in a relatively objective way.
You want to give the mods more control over the conversation? Who are you and what have you done with Arjin?!
I was always in favor of civility norms. I'm not really that much into demanding high effort, but it might be worth it, if it frees us from the hand wringing about up/down votes.
It sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me. You get rid of the, what, quarterly bitching about upvotes and downvotes, but in doing so you take away one of the public's few methods of influencing the discourse and put it on the mods, who are overworked already.
Problem is that people who shouldn't get influenced by votes (completely fine posters with a minority opinion) are, and people who should (trolls) are not. I sympathize with mods being overworked, which is why I said "if they're up for it".
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The complaints are the worst part, because sometimes yes it is a bad post, but other times it's "that's your opinion based on your views which don't agree with the content of the post".
I don't care one way or the other about up votes, down votes, sideways votes. I get bans because a mod said so or somebody went running to teacher to complain. I don't ever recollect knowing or caring was the 'offensive' comment upvoted or downvoted.
If people want to keep them, keep them; if the majority want to get rid of them, democracy rules, baby!
As opposed to a random user banning you? If that's happening the code base inherited from rdrama must be more interesting than I thought.
I wonder how much bearing that has on whether the complaint was valid. Certainly the gangsters or mafiosos declaring "snitches get stitches" aren't saying so because of their wounded pride from being falsely accused. You did call me a goat-fucker lol.
I do wonder what a system entirely run off user reports might look like, plenty of social media platforms, Reddit and Facebook/Insta included, have that to a degree where a sufficient number of user reports gets things auto-removed. They still have humans in the loop somewhere even if they don't act in every case. Not that I expect this to be a good idea, or work very well if at all, l just want to see novel forms of dysfunction at times!
No, that was 'high decoupling consideration of hypotheticals'. I wasn't saying you, self_made_human, was a goat-fucker, I was saying hypothetical general you who may want to defend goat-fucking.
But that's what amused me about it; suddenly all the silly low decouplers who were getting het-up over simple thought experiments unlike cool brainy people who could distinguish between "suppose I want to fuck goats" and "you're saying I want to fuck goats? that's a lie!" - suddenly you were sounding just like one of them 😁
Eh, some mod decides I said something too much and hands out a ban. I may fight that one out, but generally I just shrug and take my lumps. They have their view of "that was needlessly antagonistic" and I have mine, but they're the Benevolent Dictators of this place so what they say goes and arguing with them isn't worth it. Often I just get overheated, and then the cage comes down.
Uh huh..
https://www.themotte.org/post/760/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/159366?context=8#context
You had plenty of opportunities to state that when I told you I had no desire to fuck goats, or either brand of "kid", but such a considered, nuanced intent was lacking.
At any rate, it's water under the bridge, you took your lumps.
I must hold my hands up to this fault, I was poking you since it did amuse me to see the reality of "talk about high decoupler behaviour and finger wag at low decouplers, then become a low decoupler when it was my ox that was gored" (or goat that was fucked, if you like).
So the mod(s) were in the right to smack my wrist there. However, I was not trying to intimate that you personally wanted to fuck kids (caprine) or kids (human).
That's close enough to an apology for me, while we certainly have our disagreements or outright arguments, you're not remotely as intolerable as some I could name here, heh.
Oh, just wait for the next fight I get into! 😁
If I were any good at this prediction market lark, I'd be able to start one on "When will FNE get their next ban?" and I'd clean up, I tell ya!
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Slashdot meta moderation
This is part of what I'm slowly approaching with the volunteer system, although I have had no time to work on it lately :/
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It is hidden for a week. It is a good compromise. And downvotes are the best way to signal to the trolls.
Vote counts are definitely not hidden for a week, at least on most posts.
If you define troll as "genuine rulebreaker", then reporting is a better option
If you define troll as "person who disagrees with me", then "signalling" should really be done with a proper response.
They're hidden for 24 hours
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It is easier to create bullshit than refute it. Therefore refuting bad posts with good logic is a losing proposition.
Unlike responses, downvotes are typically not moderated, so if a post is so bad that the proper response to it would be moderated, a downvote is the best answer.
Typically? Downvotes are never moderated. (As far as I know, we can't see who upvotes or downvotes a post even if we wanted to. I suppose Zorba could build that capability, but I know of no reason to.)
On reddit you couldn't see it,though AEO could and sometimes did take action based on it. Here, Zorba has control of the codebase so can certainly see it if he wants to.
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The Motte is past the size where mods can be expected to read every single comment. At most they can respond to reports, and even then there's usually a lag time of hours involved. I also personally don't expect the mods to commit themselves to sitting down and personally addressing every bad argument that gets deposited here like a turd on a doorstep.
Sometimes a comment is such utter bullshit that accurately/vividly calling it out as the bullshit it is can stray past the threshold where the reply itself violates the rules here. And that's leaving aside the emotive states where you're tempted to leave something more minimally inflammatory than theoretically possible, at which point just downvoting and moving on is better for you and the forum.
Don't ask me how I know the latter.
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It's not against the rules to post bullshit, at least provided the bullshit is in long-form prose.
If someone posts bullshit and someone else posts "Bullshit." in response, the second person will get moderated. If they merely downvote, the second person will not be moderated.
We need a rule against long-form bullshit then.
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Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad, downvoting things you disagree just ends up looking like "they hated him because he spoke the truth".
That is, a downvoted post be such due to it being wrong, or due to it being heterodox with regards to the majority opinion on this site. A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.
[1]Apocryphally:
The assertion that The Motte can or should be building consensus, let alone good consensus, is laughable on its face. The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals, which is obviously false to anyone who actually interacts with idiots, and not insulated morons subsisting exclusively on a social diet of nerdy coworkers and college friends.
No, they weren't. Many people pushed back against that claim. The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.
You worded this as an unqualified absolute just to troll all of us who disagree with it at that extreme, didn't you?
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this comment has a nice "to be fair you have to have a high IQ to understand themotte" type vibe to it, which comes across as pseudointellectual at best.
more seriously though, just because a comment is highly downvoted doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently garbage or that it was a "low IQ" opinion. a lot of very smart opinions or ideas were not deemed to be very popular in the past, and I think it'd be foolish to think that what we think is objectively correct.
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just 100 years ago, high IQ people had consensus that smoking was good
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I'd say I covered that with "Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad".
Strong disagree. Even if you're right about the IQ and what it means (I personally lean to us not being as smart as we think we are), high-IQ does not mean unbiased, and so we are not a representative sample of all high-IQ people, which means we are perfectly capable of downvoting comments just because we don't like them, rather than them being wrong.
To expand on that, a +35 comment is easily in the top 10% of most-upvoted comments on any given thread. Most comments are +10 or less. Community consensus with such a small group means very little.
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Downvotes don't refute BS to any meaningful degree. Most trivial BS can be refuted by knowing basic fallacies, and prolific BS'ers will get modded for low-quality posts.
Downvotes in practice are just like people writing "You're wrong" without elaboration.
Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged. Downvotes are more efficient at that than actually posting "you're wrong", and attract less moderator ire.
You're wrong.
I don't have vast swaths of time to devote to responding at length to certain posts, even when I want to, and on the occasions when I do the iron is often no longer hot, as it were. I don't see a problem with downvoting and moving on.
This assumes your agreement or disagreement on its own is important or worth sharing. It isn’t.
Oh? And why isn't it? Presumably we aren't all conversing in a vacuum, nor is the detailed articulate response of every single person necessarily desirable, even for the most riveting posts. I don't agree generally with you about what you term "Motte monkeys," however, so I don't imagine we'll end up in agreement.
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Being a Metafilter exile, from my experience a lack of downvotes serves to push would-be downvotes to become upvotes for the nearest antagonistic reply. This has the effect of giving upvotes to whoever can write an opposing comment the quickest, regardless of the logic of the response.
Then get rid of upvotes too.
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Transforming downvotes into upvotes on replies is something I've seen, but that seems like a good change to me. I've not seen the downvotes go to low-quality posts, at least not once a few higher quality posts have been made.
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You can't remove the impulse and behavior by removing the button, as YouTube and twitter learned the hard way: people just start "ratio"ing each other instead.
This would be a purely cosmetic and ideological change. So I'm against it by default.
Ratioing on Twitter takes a significantly larger amount of effort than a simple downvote and requires lots of participation to distinguish it from random noise. The Motte also has rules against written downvotes so that would make it an even bigger hurdle.
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I'm sorry to report that I could not resist downvoting this post, but will make amends with a comment.
Also - I think the downvote is useful, it's interesting sometimes to see the tally of up and down votes. Highlights contentiousness in an interesting way
Don't worry, I downvoted your reply as well.
Could still be done indirectly by looking at upvotes on original post, and upvotes on the replies.
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Since we don't use it to order or hide posts (I think?), I don't think having downvotes hurts too much. What I'd like to see are additional or replacement dimensions. LessWrong added an "Agree/Disagree" vote, which I like, with the original upvotes indicating quality alone. That can make it easier to get the highly upvoted, highly disagreed with posts that are really the ideal.
i don't really see the point, i think it'd likely just be as abused as upvote. it'd just be that "quality post" would be the new upvote and "not quality" would be the new downvote where "agree" is just a weaker form that would be uncommonly used.
i think it would be neat to see some indicator of controversiality though.
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