Otherwise, you have to actually read each comment and think about whether you agree with it instead of lazily appealing to votes.
It's like not collaborating with another skateboarder or ecologist because they don't share the same political team as me. "Internet teams" is a complete mental construct, taking advantage of xenophobic, tribal tendencies we have innately to protect us in the physical world.
I tend to lean towards low-tech anarchist and I have a lot in common with socialists, fascists, and jeffersonian-democrats (anti-federal govt, pro-working man), and even muslims where I'm against central banking or charging interest. But nobody could ever talk about it because "teams".
By activity I mean chat activity in a given post. Right now the ranking algo for "hot" is based on how many people are chatting + decay time function. It's somewhat simplistic for now (still mvp), but I have ideas for other signals that could be used to determine how relevant a particular conversation is. It's certainly vulnerable to being gamed, but I think there are ways we could try to limit that, and filter out noise etc.
One of my goals is to focus as much as possible on the conversation and build features around that. For instance instead of a "like" button, it could require a user to _write_ something relevant (just idea). I think the key is that we try new things, hopefully learn from ideas that have been tried elsewhere, and build a place for high-quality realtime conversations.
The site does follow the twitter/IG/twitch model where it's a flat user(nest) hierarchy, but I have considered later enhancing it to allow multiple users to manage a single nest which would allow both community-led or single-entity led. Right now the goal is just to get mvp features and start getting feedback! So thank you :)
When the net was young, it was programmers who put counters in front of content - the urge and obviousness to do so, is so banal and basic that the lack of a counter is comment worthy, not its presence.
Imagine a pristine social network without any counter - how many seconds before one of us posts "I made a small change to the site, which looks like this".
Metrics are such a basic extension of the programming mindset that without a corporations will being imposed to remove them, I cant imagine a site without a like counter of some sort. (Not that firms will remove them, but their absence can only be achieved by a force from above imposing its will on normal human nature.)
Validation culture has always been in some ways a part of the internet. Even before the things I spoke of. But I agree though, today it's taken over too much of culture in general. Whereas back in the day, someone may be happy or excited, chances were it didn't affect their life much. Now people's entire lives and fortunes exist because of those validating likes.
I’m being only partly sarcastic here, the social proof is real. But I find it interesting because on Reddit I’ll deliberately read downvoted comments, on YouTube I will not bother with anything below the top 10 presented to me, here I’ll read almost everything (obviously if the thread interests me).
Also, I recommend https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/ to remove metrics from twitter.
Not for those who like their information spoon-fed.
emotional context truly is the 6th sense.
IMO, no single feature ruins online social platforms more than size. The best subreddits are the small ones, the best * chans are the small ones, the best forums are the small ones. "Features" don't ruin platforms, users do.
A site could still allow accounts and banning and have guidelines around discussion topics, it doesn't have to be completely anonymous like 4chan.
Probably the best, deepest LGBT+ issues discussions I've ever had have been on their /lgbt/ board. They were filled with people yelling obscenities too, but that doesn't bother me. I guess it's the culture I grew up with, it's natural to engage in discussion while people are yelling around me.
I'm really glad there's still a place out there that believes in free speech as a foundational principle not to be infringed upon except as an absolute last resort. I'm glad not everywhere is 4chan, but 4chan is a gem of discourse in today's world if you ignore like 90% of it. I'm increasingly convinced that that 90% is the inevitable cost of the wonderful 10% that represents the sharing of intelligent thought without fear of reprisal.
high IQ post. that seems to be a pattern in many facets of life. (raising children, starting companies, dieting, traveling)
The Wikipedia page[1] claims that “Registration is not possible”. Is it wrong, or am I misunderstanding?
There is also the concept of a tripcode, which is basically an HMAC with a key that the server has a user provided code that is shown next to your post. You can use this to prove knowledge of the code. Usage depends a lot on which board you're on, but is generally frowned upon.
Some boards (such as the infamous /pol/) also have IDs on posts (IIRC derived from your IP address and the thread id), so that posts by the same user in the same thread can be correlated.
Other than that, everything is anonymous.
[1] minor exception is the "since4pass" option which just adds a little icon to your post indicating how long you've had your pass. This is basically never used (perhaps because even 4chan posters don't want to advertise that they're paying for 4chan)
I disagree. 4chan isn’t Twitter without visible voting, it also has anonymity baked in, you can’t register an account, and old threads are automatically deleted.
A more apt example of (my understanding of) the argument you’re replying to is HN: you can see your own points on a discussion, but not anyone else’s. Posts are given more prominence due to their score, but due to their invisibility you only get a rough idea of how popular they are inside their own discussion, not how much more popular they are in relation to other posts.
I spent over half my post discussing them. The point is that they are not visible.
Besides, it’s not even a measure of popularity but more of a lifetime scoreboard. If HN reported something like average points per post or per day, that would be closer to a popularity metric (eg more inline with “number of followers”)
That’s unrelated to the discussion, which is about how visible internet points affect how users engage with each other’s comments.
Site permissions are a different matter altogether, and not applicable to most social networks.
Democratized voting systems on pseudonymous platforms can have a content curation effect while limiting this accumulation of social capital, as seen on Hacker News and Reddit. You don't see quite the same level of brands and people building their clout on say Reddit the way they do on Twitter. Conventional cultural leaders like politicians and celebrities don't dominate discourse on these platforms to the degree they do on Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter doesn't have downvotes so its a little better in that regard.
The common "EDIT: <<apology or excuse here>>" I saw on reddit screamed of insecurity instead of people standing their ground. That mentality is bad for young minds.
The point was to discuss how Reddit, Hacker News, and other message boards utilizing pseudonymous voting are not monopolized by brands, celebrities, and businesses in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are. The discourse is still more egalitarian than the alternatives, and it isn't these traditional cultural leaders that dominate discussion on Reddit.
This isn't to speak on issues of astroturfing, echo chambering, or misinformation, but these aren't relevant to the discussion, and aren't unique issues to Reddit.
For example I think reddit played a MASSIVE role in the rise of PC gaming in the last 5 years. It's more indirect, admittedly.
How much of that is simply due to the nature of the product?
Reddit would very much like to have the brands, celebrities, and businesses, and influenced their change to allow users to post to their own profile pages.
Not having any kind of selection mechanism may have worked in the past when the Internet was much smaller, and when the majority of people still cared about making quality posts. But those days are long gone. Even in its current state, I find Twitter borderline unusable, because > 95% of posts are worthless noise.
The larger 4chan communities like /b/ and /pol/, on the other hand, are irredeemable cesspits compared to Reddit's default subs.
I would replace "voting" with "moderation." Voting mechanisms on conversational sites are a form of moderation; so are actual moderators. And, of they're not mutually exclusive.
> Even in its current state, I find Twitter borderline unusable, because > 95% of posts are worthless noise.
I think Twitter tried to replace moderation with curation -- in theory, you're only going to see posts from people you follow, giving you direct control (and responsibility) over the amount of noise on your timeline. In practice, of course, Twitter goes back on that implicit promise in the name of engagement. Twitter itself injects things you don't have direct control of onto your timeline -- not just promoted tweets, but "people you follow liked this" and "someone you follow replied to this tweet" and other such dubious nonsense -- and also lets people you follow inject things onto your timeline through retweets and quote tweets. But, I think the original idea of "give you the tools to curate what you see" was relatively sound, although it should have implemented LiveJournal-esque "only allow replies from people I follow and/or who follow me" type filters very early.
On a personal level, even when the numbers are hidden from the public like on HN, it has a weird effect on me. It's nice to post something and get a bunch of upvotes, but (even though it doesn't really matter) just getting that single point drop to zero hurts so much more. I don't know if it's loss aversion or the idea that some random internet person dislikes me. I don't dwell on it, I'm notice it and move on, but I still get that little sinking feeling for some reason.
Over time, just like a dog being trained we'll learn to conform to the consensus.
Edit: I don’t mean all down voting is bad - It’s good when people start making personal attacks - but just as often it seems to be used to suppress an unpopular viewpoint.
And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE. "Like" basically means I agree, but "mad" doesn't always mean I disagree.
I can disagree with something and not have it make me "mad". I'm not sure what this emoji is, maybe it's just a thumbs down, but I think it's necessary.
There is actually a "bookmark" function that save tweet into a private list (as opposed to public list of likes).
> And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE
There are downvotes on HN. Do they really make this community better?
I maybe check HN a couple times a day, have never added a new item, but have posted comments.
Due to this after however many years (Edit: almost 8 years) I don't have enough points to down vote.
Like SO was at the beginning I think graduated access like this can definitely help a community.
However, like any other gated community it's easy for the ones with high rep to form a bubble.
I think what's prevented HN from turning into SO, Twitter, etcetera is that
a) there are no real profile pages. The reason for coming here is to see what tech news has been shared. Sort of like subreddits, the driving content is a shared interest, not a personality.
b) there's no profit motives at work. We're not customers (or data to sell), we're people with a shared interest. This is a sort of hobby project, with the 'benevolent dictator' coming by as needed, fixing titles and links, and letting us know about technical issues with the platform.
c) anyone can upvote and see buried comments. I have the option enabled to see people who have been downvoted to gray text. Rarely do I think it's undeserved. If for some reason someone is getting buried for a legit comment usually there's a comment reply questioning the votes, by someone else, and clarifications are worked out.
d) (I assume) a lot of lurkers who can't downvote, but can, and do, upvote.
And there's probably other reasons. Which I guess means it's a combination of things, one of which is how downvoted are handled.
I guess I am not alone in thinking yes. Sometimes I find it badly abused but mostly I think it is good, even when I'm the target.
For others, maybe not, but for the downvote-ees, I think that they can. There's a tendency to bridle at a downvote, but I know that, especially in my early days here, downvotes were very helpful for figuring out what posts were appropriate and welcome in this community. The downvotes were an unobtrusive way for me to get the message without a huge thread in which many people individually would have been forced to make exactly the same point.
(I do notice that, in contentious discussions, downvotes are often used to express disagreement, rather than the idea that a post is not a valuable contribution, and I think that's a shame.)
The like button isn't for saving things. It's for liking them. If you want to save a tweet, Twitter has both Bookmarks and Stories you can use to file it away. If you're liking tweets to save them for later, you're just using Twitter incorrectly.
And a "Disagree" button is just a terrible idea. It immediately invites conflict into every post. Imagine writing a post about your experiences with sexual assault or something and you start getting Disagrees from people...
If social media feels like it's limiting your social expression, you might want to step away from social media.
The early Internet had plenty of poison ("flame wars" of that era were the precursor to what we have now). The Internet hadn't solved it's how-to-get-along problem and it just expanded that situation as it became dominant and the "craziness from the Internet" managed to have more real world consequences.
As other have mentioned, sorting by active thread turns comments into votes and make the least liked and most disagreeable comment stay visible. So the division between voted and not-voted systems isn't as great as one might imagine.
The thing is; then and now, actual moderation is the situation that can solve this. Leadership in humans is sort of divided between attention-focusing behavior and rules-membership-enforcing behavior, both are fine as parts of society. We can see both things at play in online activity but most online forum create a unbalanced in favor of attention-focusing behavior and a certain ideology can this imbalance is great. It's not, it's a part of a rather sick society that America has wound up with, we wind-up literally on the verge of catastrophe from this.
Whether what I stated above is an indication of a problem of the internet or a problem with the suppression of opinion in the real world is probably open to debate. But I do wonder if that's the reason we see such a rift in the tenor of discussion on the internet.
The retweets/likes culture of twitter is orders of magnitude worse, though. People start chasing the likes, tailoring them to what people want to hear rather than genuine expression of thought.
Correct. It's coincidental.