Please Bring Back Our Downvotes: Society Desperately Needs It

Everything else you said resonated, but that part strongly contradicted for me.

I wish I saw more consensus - things that are agreed upon by multiple sides - but in practice I tend to see a tyranny of the majority - whoever can win the upvote vs. downvote contest. The winning side rises to the top, while dissenting voices are silenced.

One sensible thing that I thought HN did but I don't see immediately in the guidelines is to suggest that downvoting isn't supposed to be a "dislike" button but is intended for comments that are spam, trolling, etc..

On HN, the first post to gather a lot of replies also seems to rise to the top.

Nonsense.

A small group has a small impact, so as soon as there is more than 1 post, a bigger group will quickly “win”.

Because the latter is easily identifiable. You basically complain that people upvote the wrong opinions, which I would not disagree with.

Credible sources have also spread misinformation. I think the current system is fine and heavy handed approaches and information hierarchies are counter productive. There are great communities without a leadership and hands off approaches. You idea would lead to "Influencers" getting more control on content because those would be the "leaders". Can be good, can be bad. I think the latter would be the more common occurrence.

But people too invested in online communities also tend to do a large amount of damage. An example would be the people at the top of Reddit karma.

If we had "credible" leaders, there would be less room for objections, which I would like to see more often.

That's how I feel with YouTube's aggressive recommendation system -- I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. It's a radicalization pipeline where I touch some innocent surface-level stuff and YouTube goes, "hmm, well, of the people who liked that, our most highly-engaged users who click through videos all day long REALLY like THIS" and wants me to become that person.

There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.

Do I have time to make 4 or 5 burner accounts to enforce my votes? No. I have things to do.

Do I have time to post ad nauseum about any given topic to make my point? No. I have things to do.

And I'm sure you have things to do as well, so do a lot of people. But those that don't, have the thing we lack: time. And there's often reasons they have all that time. Often good reasons. And it's not because they're pleasant people.

A bad vote is more harmful than a bad comment. Bad comments get sorted. A bad vote makes the front page worse.

Making votes visible makes the bad actors visible. Though I think other feedback mechanisms are better.

So original post states x (it can gather up votes that mean relevance). Then responses are posted, positive, negative, adding nuance - doesnt matter.. then those responses get up votes.

Seems to me that everything can be done with positive re-inforcement.

I would like to be able to filter out out votes though, maybe within a scope. So if you post x, someone disputes it with a comment that i disagree with that gets lots of upvotes.. i would like to be able to flag all those users as incompetent within that domain (this would just be my opinion and no one else would see it) then i can have two upvote scores: the masses, and the "competent in my eyes" masses.

I know this isnt a full solution.. just putting ideas out there

In HN you can send an email to the mods so they can take a look. Also the site may detect it automatically (the details are unclear, it's part of the secret sauce).

> because I'm not sufficiently ideological

Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.

Try to stick to technical threads, preferably if they have less than 100 comments. You will be happier.

I think the Reddit server software actually detects that kind of thing now and will make those votes not count.

Likewise I think they’ve also made it so that a single comment alone that downvotes get piled onto will not hurt the account of the person that wrote it that much any longer.

I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. So instead of a global channel, your primary feed would come from your pod of 150ish that you would interact with more directly. This would mirror the concept of a village. Then maybe there would be another tier, the "region" if you will, where a single top post of the day from each village would get posted, then maybe a larger "nation" type area where the top post from each region over a week would get posted weekly.

This system would let people spend most of their time with like-minded people, which is exactly what people want as exhibited by downvote behavior, but still allow for a degree of cross pollination of thought.

Zoomed out, it seems like there really are two types of social media networks. The first is the hyper niche one where the entire conversation revovles around the topic and nothing but the topic. But once you leave your niche and become a more general site, cultural and idelogical alignment becomes a much bigger driver than topic and interest alignment.

They clearly do, to you. I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego, but if I were to downvote this it would be because you don't have a persuasive argument for why an upvotes-only feedback system (which can also be easily gamed) is any better than one which supports both.

Now this is the highest heresy in our new world religion, yet I only lost a single vote. Granted I didn't get any useful feedback on why I was wrong, likely because that would have involved 2 minutes of googling and some basic math, and it's just easier to believe what you want and click downvote. But Hacker News is still way better than anyplace else for serious discussions.

I often raise somewhat controversial opinion and topics. Very rarely do I see clusters of downvotes, and I'm not surprised people are against my own ideas. Otherwise they would be common! It also mirrors society outside academia. It happens that later upvotes changes the score significantly. Such is it with all change.

Without some skin in the game, it's all spam and trolling otherwise. What might look strange in a mod system, might under analysis turn out to be well designed.

For all forums there is an adaption phase, before getting what people expect from posts.

Thank the powers that be who push statistical analysis as being the “one path” to truth.

The mathematicians who first defined our statistical tools warned about using them to run society, as they are all designed with a certain amount of loss of precision.

When it comes to running a society, applying statistical models to people means rounding people off to make a choice work. Human biology works on adapting agency to the most common inputs; currently we are fine with man made behavior of treating each other like rounding errors.

This meme we can just statistically carve up wealth held by a minority is a huge joke of a cultural effort; as you can see here you are berating the efforts of one of the minority we protect as being pathological.

For starters, what real obligation is there scientifically to believe that Zuckerberg is that wealthy?

Oh that’s right; their experts who built their systems that train our biology to stay addicted to them, using scientific theory of biology to manufacture consent.

I've actually considered using a screenname like commentdontdownvote lol.

I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I don't know how successful they are.

I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might have some viability.

As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.

If we're going to have "upvotes" that can amplify things to a ridiculous degree, like all the vaccine mis-information on facebook that's being spread by something like eight individuals to hundreds of millions of people, then we need downvotes too. it's of course bad for facebook's business model.

You don't understand. The dim messages are a nerd badge of honor here! Some of my proudest HN messages are those that finished at -4.

Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means they're not experiencing any harm.

Nothing you can say can hurt me == I have an unhealthy habit of suppressing my negative emotions

While in theory I completely agree downvotes should be around, in practice I have seen they are an ideological voting machine used to suppress opinions.

It is kind of unusual how fast the downvotes appear, as if there are downvote bots running on the HN & Reddit. I've posted a comment and had what appeared to be 3 downvotes within a minute.

Of course, I am an evidence driven technologist that is not very partisan so that could explain some of it.

I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it’s just not a common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an extremely high ratio of ups to downs.

> Why would I participate in that?

This is a good question, but you’ve constructed a straw man version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on how to start and run a business, for the threads where world experts and relatively famous people participate and comment, for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full side of things. Good luck friend!

I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.

Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it.

Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.

Downvotes are of even less consquence.

Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.

As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted.

Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions.

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias.

Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.

Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if you agree with it or not.

One half-cocked idea I can think of is downvotes require a comment explaining why. Conversationally, "I agree" or "that's correct" requires no follow on conversation. However, "I disagree" or "that's wrong" requires some sort of counter-argument or reason why you disagree. IMO, it does some good in making people explain their position, at least copy/paste another position, or shitpost and then they can deal with their own downvotes.

Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down votes the first few comments would have an even bigger advantage than they do now.

[1] just like this comment I am leaving, which probably would have been better with just a down vote.

How do you respond when colleagues or students disagree? Perhaps working in academia so long has given you a false sense of superiority.

You realise downvotes are a big deal for managing information on certain sites that we frequent...

What down votes should be for is rudeness or site violations...but they're effectively used to blackball people with counter opinions.

There's a social cooling that goes along with anyone who has a counter opinion to the tribes narrative but doesn't want to be digitally outcast.

And eventually those with differing opinions who do speak up accumulate enough down votes and are outcast.

And over time the echo chamber continues to grow....

Edit: god bless HN echo chamber and the down votes.

/snip

> It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.

I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact, it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of exposure.

I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture. This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters. Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general, downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and not worth complaining or even thinking much about.

Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but".

[1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with them

In my opinion, stackoverflow-style downvotes are a good solution. Downvotes cost reputation points to cast, and can only be cast once you are at a certain trust level. SO has other issues, but I think they got downvoting right.

To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems: Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online, understand each other, and build our own defensive & observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, & growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece of understanding this web ought be able to encompass.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488

I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms. The people who would normally upvote your honest good faith against the grain take are no longer on the platform, because the reigning ideology pushed them out. That doesn't mean you are necessarily ideologically aligned with these people, reality is much more nuanced then black and white.

I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained me at doing. Comment and walk away.

By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most any forum, including Reddit.

Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting pattern, that process might be discouraging.

My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here. That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try.

It doesn't even need to be 4 accounts. Just a single lazy downvote can be infuriating due to the asymmetry in effort and influence.

The root cause is downvotes having been made into a combination of multiple things; yes it is a shortcut for expressing disagreement, but it is also a metric used for decreasing the salience of a point (e.g. in HN). Imagine how much of history of science, religion, philosophy would be lost if disagreeability of a point alone was a good heuristic for its attention-worthiness.

Additionally, since downvotes are an expression of disagreement, they are just opinions that have privileged representations in the UI, but they can't be disagreed with like other opinions. It does not build dialectic, it kills it by not allowing responses.

Ultimately we are trying to dynamically build a model of at least attention and content value based on collective intelligence that can articulate on 2 dimensions.

My humble proposal would be double the size of dimensions; have up-down votes for dis-agreement, which require justification, which can be responded to, and back-fore votes for salience dynamics, i.e. foreground if "I think more people should read this" and background if "I think people shouldn't waste time on this idea".

That's a fine opinion to have, but why are you then in academia?

How do we get from "I am being downvoted" to "malicious and petty people"? That looks like an issue. You said you have no problem being wrong, twice, but immediately assume anyone who downvotes your comment is malicious, when it could be a signal that your comment is just not hitting the right notes.

I agree with everything you wrote except for the part about actually not participating - try as I might (and knowing better), I just can't keep myself away. I've taken long hiatuses, but I'm always inexorably drawn back anyway.

And then we can talk, if they actually have a point. Or we can upvote your point.

Downvotes are anonymous slaps on the wrist with no recourse. They're insulting, offensive, and then further used for censorship (especially here). People who don't know what they're talking about, can't articulate themselves, or are just taking sides all get to punish what they don't like without being caught. They get to be taken seriously. By robots.

The author of the article is a prolific writer. If anyone knows the importance of writing, even long-form writing, it would be him, and it's exactly what he used to make his point about downvotes. He could not have done it with a downvote, or even a tweet.

Nuance is invaluable and context is king. Language gives us all of it. Twitter makes us stupid. Votes make us children.

When expression is limited, the dumber - and more violent - we become.

* "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g., "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on e.g., Lobsters.

* Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3 downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or some random forum...

I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that though.

It allows me to push back on polarizing posts without having to get too psychologically involved.

Actually, that's kind of the problem with democracy in general.

When you add in flagging and other factors, the 'mysterious black box + benevolent moderator' approach satisfies nobody and is easily gamed by bad actors. It's just an attempt at community security through obscurity, and like all STO approaches it doesn't work. There's also evidence to suggest that flamewars do a better job of eliminating toxicity over the long term than the approach outlined above.

You would need a separate mechanism for flagging though to filter low effort contributions and it is questionable if that wouldn't just replace downvotes with flagging. Alternatively maybe only have that rule for comments above a certain length, although that isn't a good metric either.

I get what you're saying, but I don't completely agree. Firstly because, to the extent that we can say we have a "two party system" that itself is an effect with a deeper cause. And if you buy the theory behind Duverger's Law[1], the fundamental cause is the mechanism we use for elections, with "first past the post" voting in single-member districts.

My second quibble concerns more of the definition of "two party system". Clearly we do not have a "two party system" in the most literal sense, as there are plenty of other political parties in the US, and several of them routinely have candidates elected to office (the Libertarian and Green parties come to mind) albeit mostly at lower levels.

So yes, we have a system where two parties are dominant, but they are not exclusive and I think that difference matters. Why? Because I believe talking about us having a "two party system" creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop further enforcing the Duverger's Law effect and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

I agree, but that's just the punch-and-judy show. The real disaffection stems from seeing how the incentives of politicians are reliably not aligned with their nominal constituents.

We have legal precedent establishing money as speech, and a steep hill to climb for any third party to win the prerogatives which the two major US parties enjoy, like automatically getting your candidate on the ballot in all 50 states in federal elections.

I decided some time ago to never cast a vote for either of these two parties again. Even speaking with people who decry the bankrupt nature of these parties, they still view casting a vote for a third party as throwing their vote away.

any more than a >2 party system?

It's great for creating perception bubbles. Everyone agrees!

I find it genuinely difficult to relate to the other comments on here equating downvotes to oppression or even violence.

If anything, my hope would be that Hacker News becomes MORE strictly moderated via downvotes, and maybe even starts banning some non-tech oriented politics. Now shower me with downvotes, 500+ karma daddies, to show the little ones it is okay.

Most social sites have guidelines that downvotes are only supposed to be used for comments that break their guidelines. On HN and Reddit it seems many people ignore this and readily downvote opinions they disagree with or comments they simply don’t want to hear.

This is most obvious on posts about contentious topics (politics, police, social media, drugs) where well-written posts quickly accumulate downvotes if they don’t agree with the popular sentiment on on HN.

It only takes a few instances of seeing your well-written, polite comments with citations being downvoted immediately to -3 to know that unpopular opinions aren’t welcome. That’s how the echo chamber is propagated.

Absolutely. This is especially noticeable on the state/city/town subreddits where political partisans consistently dogpile on posts that go against their message.

Discerning between truth and misinformation is also a "filter bubble". Any community-driven system that discerns between "this is what we like" and "this is what we hate" is also being used to discern between "this is what is true" and "this is what is false".

Online communities with healthy cultures and downvotes quickly destroy misinformation. In those circumstances, the filter bubble is a good thing. People pushing misinformation should be pushed either to stop posting misinfo or leave.

The challenge is that the people who are doing the most work on this subject - like Facebook and Twitter - have chosen to make it invisible. We don't know how Twitter and Facebook rank their posts and replies. But they obviously have invisible powers as leadership to identify which voices on their systems are "good" and which aren't, and give those "good" voices outsized power in communication.

But to me it seems obvious that something that takes Reddit's simple up/down interface but combines it with the kind of credibility ranking that Twitter does (where people who've been established as harmful don't actually have as much visibility or influence in the system) would be ideal.

Give the leadership tools to establish a preference for fact, and you also give them tools to establish a preference for their particular worldview. You can't separate those.

If you want a discussion system that supports fact over misinfo, you need to have a discussion system that enforces a community bias and creates a filter bubble, and then give the leadership the tools to control that filter bubble and bias, in the hopes that the leadership prefers truth over misinfo. Otherwise the community will organically create its own filter bubble on whatever biases it develops.

And if you have no filtering at all, you get 4chan, where abuse and misinformation run rampant.

Afaik, reddit has a pretty stable upvote vs downvote ratio, like 7:1. (Sorry, no source, but I remember the reddit founder saying it in an interview).

And in your calculations you assumed that every post receives the same number of votes. Also that is not true, because of ranking. Higher ranking posts get more views, more votes, more views and so on. In this case the upvote-downvote difference is different for two posts with different popularity, but same upvote:downvote ratio.

I complained once and dang corrected me.

So I would say: permit downvoting, but as well as removing one point from the downvoted, let it cost the downvoter one point also.

This reflects real life where it's possible for me to lose my temper in a conversation but it always inflicts a psychological cost on me for doing so. I don't get to express displeasure for free. Which helps keep the discourse civil.

1) Votes are tied to comments inherently

2) People can argue with those comments

3) Eventually, when a consensus may be reached in the follow up comments (by having most objections to an argument downvoted to oblivion I guess)

4) If so, the thread is replaced with a stub that summarizes it (maybe participants can vote on the person who they'd like to summarize the thread)

5) People can go on to argue with that stub

Might be neat. The intent would be to create a system that is more directly acrimonious, with the hope that we could eventually actually snip off tangents and create a high-quality argument on a topic as a community. I don't know if it actually is possible to do enough cat-herding, such that an actual high quality argument is produced, but it would be an interesting experiment.

There are lots of details that would have to be sorted out, for example it would probably be necessary to group posts as "jointly in support of argument(X).point(Y)" in a way that makes it possible to respond to them jointly with a single counterargument, while still keeping the system from devolving into two sides with horns intractably locked.

Furthermore, I would argue that self-reflection about why people might disagree with your viewpoints is a valuable experience in that it provides an opportunity to practice empathy and awareness in how your words are perceived by others.

> I have no problems with people disagreeing with me

Anonymous downvotes exist in the first place because this isn't a common character trait. If everyone was like that then we'd all be giving each other feedback

Conversely, it's highly inefficient for people to take time to write out their reasons if someone else has already done so and they are merely echoing that. Trolls exploit this because many of them derive amusement from stealing others' time and attention by deliberately posting drivel and then demanding it be taken seriously or that people educate the troll out their misconceptions (a wholly insincere request).

Nobody owes you agreement, and sometimes you will be rejected for unfair reasons. That's life. Expecting to only get positive reinforcement or always be fully supplied with context will only lead to disappointment.

You can come with a mountain of evidence and/or a well written edited thought out post and they'll just ignore it, post elsewhere with the same argument, or complain about inconsequential things. In my younger days I used to waste time arguing with racists, Nazis, etc but the argument comes from bad faith and they've already made their mind up. I just down vote or report them and move on.

They are specifically egregious but similar people are not owed my time and if it's an actual good faith argument they'll eventually learn to word their statements better.

Some people downvote all jokes, others downvote opinions they disagree with, others downvote misinformation. It's a very ambiguous signal with little value.

Slashdot had it right very early on with the various tags (insightful, funny, interesting) but also gets it wrong by allowing only a very small percentage of the user-base apply those tags. Tags like misinformation, and agree/disagree would allow more nuanced and better filtering options.

Voting is power and people love one thing more than power, and that’s greater power. Imagine if there were no up or down votes, and how people might respond to having no ability to silently express their opinions.

Neither your premise nor your conclusion are valid. A downvote could simply mean you stated a counterfactual or alleged a fallacy. Nor can any automatic inference of quality be drawn. By your logic, someone who just posts the equivalent of fart noises and is habitually downvoted for doing so is a genius.

Frankly, your comment's harping on shaping narrative seems like a case of projection.

Social media is not the cause of toxicity. It's a mirror for it, albeit a collection of various distorted mirrors that many people aggressively manipulate.

People were shitty to each other on usenet and bulletin boards, people were shitty to each other via broadcast media, people were shitty to each other via newspapers, and people have been shitty to each other in person.

People have tribal tendencies and some tribes are more aggressive than others. Sometimes you have to choose between different tribal affiliations because conflict is happening whether or not you want it to. We are living in one such period and the internet (like many previous iterations of communication technology) is having an accelerative effect.

If you ignore the article's hypothesis that "things are getting worse" and that social media is contributing to it, then... yeah, companies making money from social media are doing just fine. Is society doing fine? Does it matter?

You have to be careful of assuming successful companies are making the right choice in individual decisions. Success has a way of hiding failure. People tend to overlook all of Facebook's failed products and features, because their overall income is so large, but bad decisions must have happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment

How are you gonna deal with the spam that we know to appear and clutter up time-ordered systems? What's to stop me (or m tribal group) wrecking a good discussion by flooding it with 50 nonsense posts to take over the front page?

Votes are absolutely imperfect and are not working as hoped. But they gained currency because sometimes any ranking system is better than none at all.

To explain why your post was (as you so correctly predicted) downvoted: Her stuff isn't "moderately controversial in some circles"; it is utter bullshit through and through, and a surefire indicator that the proponent is either stupid, misled, motivated by hateful politics, or two or more thereof. Any downvotes are utterly well-deserved and a valuable life lesson that should be taken to heart.