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Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that your notion of what qualifies as propaganda differs significantly from most people.

Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.

The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.

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I think the problem is that the dislike count itself is too aggregated. What you really want is to know if people similar to yourself like / dislike certain content.

This is very similar to the problems where YouTube fits you into filter bubbles, and Netflix struggles to tell you good recommendations. TikTok supposedly does a better job then others at this, likely due to having lots of signals from short videos.

>The ultimate solution is, sadly, even more of a filter bubble: If I could click a button and have every like/dislike by pernicious players (in my opinion) completely removed from any measure shown to me, I would respect online ratings better. And maybe, eventually, given that the majority of people are rational and have better things to do, the bores might get bored of trying to manipulate every measure.

We have this problem with movie reviews as well. I lost all faith in Rotten Tomatoes when I saw Knock Down the House's viewer ranking go from the upper 80s to single digits over the course of two years. As more and more people found out that AOC was a star in the film, the score went down. It is a great film in my opinion. I wrote a script to scrape the reviews and provide details about the reviewers. So many 1 star reviews were new accounts that had just rated this film + maybe the Ilhan Omar film. Furthermore most of them don't even explain why they rated it that way(we all probably know why). This led me to think, what else is being manipulated? Are studios just buying up good reviews?

Recently they have introduced "Verified Reviews". This attempts to link your Rotten Tomatoes account with the movie theater so you can get a Verified Review checkmark if they have confirmed that you actually bought a ticket to the movie. Users can then filter on Verified reviews. This is a good first step and will probably help to curb abuse.

> Some subgroups -- motivated groups who seem to have endless free time and a lot of passion to click little arrows and leave comments -- brigade and basically remove any functional utility of likes, dislikes and often even ratings. Hateful groups tend to particularly dominate, and weird agendas dominate.

And who exactly are these nebulous people? This sounds like something O'Brien from 1984 would say about Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers.

Any asymmetrically engaged group is going to lead to metrics that aren't generally useful. In little bubbles, sure, but to everyone else it's just digital pollution.

Imagine that there was a group that really, really hated the color green, and they're so passionate that they fly "We Hate Green" flags outside their house, completely tie their identity with hating green, go to we hate green rallies (imagine having that little respect for your own time?), wear we hate green shirts, make up childish "We Hate Green" code words (e.g. Let's Go Purple!) for when they are among the greenies, and these people seemed to have endless idle time to sit brigading every bit of content to downvote it or leave nasty comments because something in the video was green. That is just noise to everyone else. Everyone else -- the majority of the public -- finds no value in their hyper-polarized, agenda-driven contributions.

And I'm not just talking about people who like green, but people who are indifferent or even anti-green but they don't find any value in having a review bombed because this idle group was mad that they thought it was "green woke".

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