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Comment by Techonomicon | Hacker News Reader

The problem is people make honest livings off of doing things that at this day and age require these sorts of mechanisms within social networks to allow them to thrive and work for themselves vs a company.

Many individual / independent creators 100% rely on the ability to reach others and people generally respond to the flock of many people liking / sharing a single post of some kind. I don't think it's fair to negate this as being useful.

We with generally much better paying jobs to stress / work life balance ratio within the tech industry have the privilege of not having to worry about such things being taken away and literally taking our paychecks away as well.

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That's a buggy whip argument; defending an industry that essentially nobody wants because there's economic activity in it somewhere. It can be made about just about anything.

Besides, having a broken labor market is a pretty poor reason for intentionally perpetuating a broken internet

On the topic of votes.

At the time of this writing the comment I’m responding to is grayed out. Presumably due to downvotes from people not agreeing with the sentiment.

I probably don’t agree to it either, but I find the perspective brought into the discussion to be a good contribution.

I see this quite often, and actually tend to spend most of my votes “rescuing” comments, that at least shouldn’t be suppressed just for being unpopular.

There is a kind of bias at play where dissenting opinions are held to a much higher standard of quality and thus having a higher chance for being censored.

So I’ve been thinking if there should be a separation of quality and sentiment votes. Perhaps it would prevent some accidental censoring.

Writing this it occurs to me that the bias would probably still be there though. So a more qualitative approach perhaps. One could imagine some mechanism by which the poster is allowed to iterate on the comment, based on feedback, before final judgement.

I too would like to see an experiment with two types of votes (agree/disagree and quality/shitpost), but I don't think there's a big problem here. Things balance out in the end. Some people instinctively downvote things they disagree with, other upvote posts for quality regardless of their personal position on the topic; some, like you, rescue comments. Things can be in flux initially, but within couple of hours they stabilize, and the outcome is decent enough. The key thing is not treating karma points and "black/grey" instability personally; it's just the mechanism at work.

same.

Why not require that written replies or justifications be provided for each vote. probably because of the voter's utility of voting is cheap expressions of approval or disapproval, without requiring the effort of engaging the poster or formulating the reasons for voting at all. Hence, I suspect voting discourages engagement. For downvotes it discourages the kind of engagement that derails productive conversations (ie it inhibits flamewars by providing cheaper outlet for negatively valenced emotional responses).

“Many individual / independent creators 100% rely on the ability to reach others and people generally respond to the flock of many people liking / sharing a single post of some kind.“

what if Instagram let you see only your page metrics, but nobody elses?

The problem is, individual/independent creators making honest living off these features have to do it this way because of all the people - advertisers, content marketers - making dishonest living (and quite good a living), creating a people-hostile environment. The system needs very deep changes, but that doesn't mean we can't have the welfare of artists and writers in mind when proposing or implementing those changes.

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