When the unpopular opinions are things like "COVID is just the flu" and "climate change is fake", both of which have a substantial contingent that will support them, those ideas getting downvoted into oblivion is not a bad outcome.
At some point you have to cut your losses; you stay open to persuasion by people who consistently exploit your willingness to listen, you're being played. Downvotes do serve the excellent purpose of saying 'I disagree with this and am not willing to waste further time on it.'
Downvotes can also be abused. But an easy way to get around that is to make the system fully transparent and then do cluster analysis. If a downvoter or group thereof only ever puts out negative votes or habitually downvotes everything fromeone they don't like, that will show up after a while and people can weight away those negative opinions. Absent transparency, then the incentives to game the system go way up, and system operators usually wildly overestimate their own ability to guard against that.
I mean, it would be super-biased but at this point I'm all about systems that are biased in favor of scientific consensus and human rights.
Yes, you could reverse the "credibility" of those paragon users and make a system where the people surrounding the neo-nazi conspiracy theorists are the ones who hold all the power but we already get sites like that without any moderation or voting at all so that would be redundant anyways.
I think platform operators to some extent have to eschew moral judgements and let things play out, eg if a variety of distinct and persistent clusters emerge naturally, and 98% of people in a community make nazis' lives miserable for being in the 'nazi cluster' then it doesn't need any additional help from the platform operator. Of course the nazis will whine 'so much for the tolerant left' but honestly, who cares. The key is that if enough people in a community tag individuals participants in a particular negative way, those individuals can either accept it (and then be habitually ignored) or change their ways.
This isn't always a moralistic dichotomy. For example I post a lot of environmental stories to HN, which are not-interesting to some readers who prefer to focus on pure technology. I'm OK with them ignoring such posts or even downvoting them/flagging if I make too many in a row. Likewise there are many technical topics of wide interest on HN which I find deathly boring, but which I am happy to ignore.
Researchers at Stanford have come up with some results on clustering and conflict in online spaces, which you might find interesting: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
Really sorry to hear that. I hope it is a hobby and not your job.
I remember when Nazis where a joke on the internet. That they are not quite that anymore is not completely their own making as there are some people obsessed with them and even start to mirror them. Or others that want to build a profile about standing against the obvious.
Suddenly there is a significant group that denies civil liberties like free speech or freedom of association. Free speech in interesting here, because it seem to trigger those that fear that Nazis are overtaking the internet. To me this is very indicative of reactionary behavior towards a vastly overestimated threat.
Maybe they would be hard to distinguish from regular user clustered because of group thinking , but even in that case I wouldn’t consider it a completely bad thing… :-)
I think this is still better, than just one bubble, even if the intention is a "pro-science" bubble. Because there are not many people claiming to be opposed science. Allmost everyone claims to be "pro-science", even flat earthers. So it still comes down to what the specific mod thinks.