[chansiky]

Only the initial downvoting commenter would have to reveal his name. Then others can just bolster the downvote which harms the rating of the original comment, sort of like a "let him without sin be the first to throw the stone" situation. Then others can join in if they agree. And that might hurt if they're throwing stones at us but at least we get to see where the stones are coming from. Currently we dont, we just get stoned and dont know why.

[ddingus]

Secondly, being told why doesn't help as much as you would think. That itself is another meta discussion. People won't take the why as given. They will want to argue it, challenge the qualifications of others, and you can go down the list. It all happens.

People I see taking that feedback to contemplate is rare.

The number one reason why people want to be told why so they can argue their case. And that's what's going to trigger The Meta.

On Quora this problem happened and a bunch of us created a court where someone could appeal downvotes, and sort of argue their case. That discussion would involve feedback to the person who got downvoted, and if it all didn't warrant being downvoted, a whole bunch of people would up vote, basically correcting a wrong.

It was a super interesting exercise in the genuine ambiguity text communication has. The fact is we really can't determine intent from text. People can, and we'll take things all sorts of interesting and crazy ways.

And whether they are correct in doing that or not, the discussion to sort it out is laborious and time-consuming.

Now I will tell you, a bunch of people working hard on this problem and sort out a disagreement or downvote that shouldn't have happened. And maybe a third of those were worthy exercises in that the person who initiated the process took away something that genuinely help them to improve.

Another big percentage, were just fixing bad down votes. But it cost a lot to do that.

The rest were fairly painful meta discussions. Unproductive.

No the reason that all made some sense on Quora was the downvotes had Fairly severe consequences and fairly rapidly.

Here, it's not such a big deal. Anyone who makes more good decisions about what they say and not will gain karma. That's all that's required.

So rather than Stones, it's more like little Pebbles.

Frankly, the easiest way to get past this here is to just not worry about it, and try to be a good human.

In a lot of cases, people who get some downvotes here probably weren't trying their best to be good human. If they try harder they get less downvotes. Good As It Gets.

[ddingus]

I'll end with this:

The reason why moderation works here as well as it does, is because dang and others actually care, actually spend the human time interacting with people, and spend time cultivating norms and culture that leads to more decisions that are good than not.

This is a human problem, not something we fix with a rule or algorithm or clever metric.

Someday, maybe when machines can derive real meaning from text, we can revisit this discussion and be productive.

And I even have an indicator for you.

A while back the decision was made to include one space between the period at the end of a sentence, and the capital letter at the beginning of another one. The result of that is also a capital letter after the period required for an abbreviated word.

This ambiguity is why those of us who prefer two spaces at the end of a sentence do so. It is so software can understand when a sentence actually begins. As things stand now, there's no real distinction between the abbreviated word, and the legitimate end of a sentence, meaning we get autocapitalization wrong.

When machines can understand meaning well enough to sort this out, is also the time that we might revisit moderation. Cheers

( going back to two spaces would be really nice, but this discussion just gave me a reason to prefer one space now for the indicator purpose mentioned above.)

[chansiky]

Thanks for the write up, just wanted to note that I read through all of this. I get what you're saying about the meta now, clearly I didn't fully understand why that was bad thing.

Speaking of meta though, I have to say, I still stand by my initial thought that an alternate rating mechanic is at least worth exploring, as the upvote/downvote feels like a system from an earlier era before anyone realized how large its social impact could be. I'd be interested to know what the ideal system that promotes a healthy convergence to the center (rather than one that increases polarization) would look like.

I can't deny the effects of great moderation/cultivation, that they are the most important part, but being a technologist I still want to see what happens when the variables are tweaked.

[ddingus]

And third, discussions are at least two way affairs.

Often, moderation is seen as the objective parent that keeps everything in bounds.

The reality is, our individual boundaries very considerably.

We all have a shared responsibility to not allow discussions to go bad, and how we respond to text we don't like determines whether they go bad.

Fact is, very few of my discussions go bad, because I don't allow it. Importers not allowing it is not worrying about the downvotes, and instead focus on what I can control. And I control me, not anyone else in the discussion.

Someone tells me to fuck off here for example, I'm going to ask him why. I'm also going to advise him to edit that away before they get down voted, because we've got more productive things to talk about.

There are many similar ways to handle these things, in very few people actually employ them.

I feel spending time on that is as productive, if not more than time on more effective moderation.

[ddingus]

First, As soon as we introduce who, then we introduce meta about them. And doing that ends up a discussion that all of us will be impacted by.

There aren't easy answers. Pretty much everything in this whole discussion has been done, impacts easy for anyone who wants to look to see. And I have. This is a topic of great interest to me. I have moderated in the past, and found it difficult and challenging. I've learned more here than anywhere else.

( I did three, now four, replies here, partially because I'm using voice dictation, and partially because there are three major, potential points of discussion.)