My latest campaign has been to find a way to add the tiniest bit of accountability for downvotes. I believe at a minimum the total number of downvotes given should be shown publicly on user profiles.
As things function now, downvotes are for all intents and purposes anonymous.
Why do any votes need 'accountability'? Their purpose is to identify comments worth reading. Almost everything people write about voting itself is not worth reading and the less of it, the better.
Worth reading is very subjective. I think you are looking at popular opinions. The current system works that way as opposed to some randomized insertion in between. One often problem with popular opinion is that readers might jump on that trail and build a deep thread, which probably reduce the incentive to read any further by either skipping the middle to the end, ir simply ignore the rest.
Would be an interesting research to conduct if randomness can help based on say user karma. For cryto and security we know there are certain users seen as “goto”, so their opinions weigh much more and might end up being the top all the time. I’d like to see some “penalty” by promoting the less-popular users (not comment).
The point is treat tge display not entirely based on number of upvotes the entire time.
My intention is to ensure contributing to publicly censoring/censuring costs something (intentionally tiny, but greater than zero/nothing) each time, beyond the one-time minimum karma requirement. "Downvote to disagree" seems unlikely to scale indefinitely, particularly as mobile means less willingness to contribute beyond clicking up/down (specifically now that there are apps catching on that remove all "fat-fingered web UI" friction!).
It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!
On StackOverflow reputation is subtracted when downvoting answers but not questions [1], which is a neat approach. On your own profile, you can see the proportion of upvotes to downvotes (as well as other activity), but others cannot (maybe moderators?). So, there is at least some personal impact to having a user be accountable for a downvote. There is also generally a culture of "if you downvote, you should explain why", which sometimes seems to be here on HN as well. I remember Disqus removed the downvote count some time back, and Facebook doesn't have a "Dislike" button, so there are different approaches to it. I wonder what some other approaches some communities have taken, and what would be effective? Or even, what is the desired impact?
I'm developing Talkyard which has its own voting system: there's the Like vote, and the Disagree vote.
But the Disagree vote isn't a downvote — it doesn't affect karma or sort order. It justs shows how many people disagree about something. That can be good to know, so one can avoid harmful advice. Or just because one is curious about others' opinions.
There is a downvote too, actually, but only available for staff and core members. It works a bit like the downvote here at HN (e.g. removes "karma" and moves the comment downwards, dims it a bit).
Downvotes could remove from users karma. It acts as a constraint. Basically, the more popular your posts the more moderation you can do, but you still lose moderation capabilities over time if you use it excessively.
No need to make it visible why a user's karma is dropping, it just is. Could be they're getting downvoted, or they're using their voting action and reducing it themselves.
The only other option that works well is a meta-moderation feature like /. has, but that's impractical for this site, the way it does things.
I doubt that really happens, other than for that very brief moment and tiny minority of users who are right around the threshold. The karma losses are capped, it's hard to lose meaningful amounts of karma without actively trying to.
I always thought that a user's votes should be normalised by something sensible, like total number of votes or time spent online (with sensible scaling). That way opinionated clickers don't have outsize influence.
If either intended or not intended, talking about the downvoting system seems unnecessarily taboo(gets downvoted). Which is a shame because there is an interesting effect that it has on the community which would be worth looking into.
One of the biggest questions I have: are downvotes an accurate way to moderate low-quality comments? I'm not sure how that can be proved by data but it would be interesting to see someone prove it.
I find myself thinking of the Slashdot system (also used by Soylentnews, a Slashdot "spinoff"), where people get to "flag" a certain number of comments on an article they themselves have not participated in. And said flags can never lift the post above +5 or send it below -1, but the most common flag given to a comment is represented next to the score.
pvg|8 years ago
yeukhon|8 years ago
Would be an interesting research to conduct if randomness can help based on say user karma. For cryto and security we know there are certain users seen as “goto”, so their opinions weigh much more and might end up being the top all the time. I’d like to see some “penalty” by promoting the less-popular users (not comment).
The point is treat tge display not entirely based on number of upvotes the entire time.
book_mentioned|8 years ago
It's perfectly fine to disagree with this belief; HN itself does!
[Edited]
mkobit|8 years ago
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251610/why-does-dow...
[2]: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/supportqa/why_was_the_dow...
KajMagnus|8 years ago
But the Disagree vote isn't a downvote — it doesn't affect karma or sort order. It justs shows how many people disagree about something. That can be good to know, so one can avoid harmful advice. Or just because one is curious about others' opinions.
There is a downvote too, actually, but only available for staff and core members. It works a bit like the downvote here at HN (e.g. removes "karma" and moves the comment downwards, dims it a bit).
Here's how the disagree vote looks: https://www.talkyard.io/please-note-2
Jtsummers|8 years ago
No need to make it visible why a user's karma is dropping, it just is. Could be they're getting downvoted, or they're using their voting action and reducing it themselves.
The only other option that works well is a meta-moderation feature like /. has, but that's impractical for this site, the way it does things.
pvg|8 years ago
I doubt that really happens, other than for that very brief moment and tiny minority of users who are right around the threshold. The karma losses are capped, it's hard to lose meaningful amounts of karma without actively trying to.
Y_Y|8 years ago
aaronarduino|8 years ago
One of the biggest questions I have: are downvotes an accurate way to moderate low-quality comments? I'm not sure how that can be proved by data but it would be interesting to see someone prove it.
digi_owl|8 years ago