Twitter expands downvote test worldwide
theverge.com
theverge.com
> I really don’t like the idea of downvotes, just makes it easier to make sure there’s only one train of thought under a tweet. So if a tweet is aimed at a certain subsection of people, the replies will all be full of upvoted replies agreeing with it while all dissent is downvoted.
Followers of a user will downvote to silence opposing opinions in the replies, pigeonholing the reply section into a bunch of posts that agree with the original poster.
If I only interact with like-minded individuals, that means the internet has failed its use case for me, which is to broaden my world view by seeking out opinions that oppose my own.
Of course if by "like-minded" you mean "polite and rule-abiding," then I agree.
In many ways I think maybe HN is an example of how you can make the comment down vote work.
The difference between HN and Reddit to me is that HN has consistently higher quality comments.
Will be interesting to see how down votes will affect Twitter.
But seriously: HN has downvotes, and almost every thread follows the basic structure of a somewhat healthy argumentative environment (alternating positive-negative comments down each child node). Things get downvoted (and you're entitled to any number of sour feelings about which things those are), but the overall structure of this site's comments demonstrates that up/downvotes aren't themselves toxic to discussion.
In my experience, it really isn't! Whenever I see a bad take on Twitter, I generally see some sort of rebuttal within the first dozen or so replies. If you expand that rebuttal, you start to see some argumentation, which to me is the interesting part of Twitter.
I think part of what makes HN's downvote system viable is that it's a well-defined community, you need a lot of karma relatively speaking to unlock the downvote privilege, and in practice comments are only downvoted if they are off-topic or poorly articulated.
In that same vein Stack Exchange's downvote system works well too, because karma (rep) is tracked individually per-community and you likewise need a certain amount of it to unlock the downvote privilege. This makes it so that on SE and HN alike, the people with some seniority in the community are the ones to help dictate what should be surfaced by the site.
On Twitter though, it's liable to turn into the same mess Reddit has. Because there is no hard line between different communities, you can't have a meaningful per-community karma limit for the downvote privilege. This eventually devolves into a free-for-all where users brigade other subreddits (and on Twitter, other users' feeds) to mass downvote opinions they disagree with, no matter how articulate or well-sourced they are.
I also don't think that up/downvotes are likely to change that for Twitter, since Twitter's culture is essentially built around bull sessions[1]. A key part of socializing during bull sessions is mockery, and getting buy-in from your group to perform mockery/ragging on another person in then group (who is supposed to gracefully accept said mockery).
[1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bull%20sessi...
Reddit has its problems but the idea that it’s somehow worse than Twitter is laughable.
Even with vote brigading subreddits are moderated and so actual content brigading is much rarer. Can you say the same about Twitter?
You can try to build a bubble on Twitter but something will inevitably slip in.
It really makes a difference to the overall discourse. Something that is missing on most other places on the web!
> I really don’t like the idea of downvotes, just makes it easier to make sure there’s only one train of thought under a tweet.
Yes, that's for sure going to happen, and the repercussions need to be dealt with thoughtfully.
But we must do it because there are very few human social situations (in person) where some reflexive negative inhibition is not present, as appropriate reaction. (Maybe therapy, but that's a really specific edge-case.) We give negative feedback all the time in our on-the-fly facial expressions and tones, and most humans have some baked in moderating reactions to that.
We can't have digital spaces without some form of negative feedback. Imagine how fucked up your in-person social groups/interactions would be if everyone, for YEARS was for some reason only capable of boosting/encouraging one another, with no reflexive negative responses -- no frowns, no eyebrow emoting, no body language.
Yes, it will be abused. But we desperately need to figure it out. The relational tools and mechanisms that human brains and bodies have learned over millenia of evolution... these are not things to be discarded so lightly as we have when building tech. They're mostly there for a reason, because they helped us get here as collective. There is wisdom in recreating their patterns. <3
I think you are really overstating how bad the interactions would be. Phone calls show no body language, and though it might hinder a deeper intuitive understanding of someone's emotional responses, I would say that phone communication is far from "fucked up".
When someone disagrees with what I am saying over a phone call, they can verbally express their disapproval if no body language is available. In fact, verbal disapproval is preferred so that they can express nuance.
When someone disagrees with what I am saying on the internet, they can express their disapproval in a reply if no downvotes are available. In fact, a comment reply is preferred so that they can express nuance.
For many millennia, there has been understandable evolutionary pressure to ostracize people who look and act different from those in your hunter-gatherer tribe, as you may not be able to trust them with your tools, food, and other tribe members. That evolutionary pressure is antithetical to the optimal functioning of a modern globalized society comprised of law and social safety nets, and valuing freedom of expression.
The most important signal nowadays is whether information is well-researched, not whether people agree with it. If not kept tightly in check, voting systems tend to devolve into surfacing the most popular opinions rather than the most useful or even the most true.
For example, some of the most important information I read on the internet fifteen years ago was the stuff that was heavily downvoted back then, in particular, controversial fringe stuff related to medicine and finance. Fifteen years later it's finally entering the mainstream and being upvoted, but I've had access to the information this whole time in small part because I set Reddit not to collapse downvoted comments by default.
As a small-community moderator on reddit, we get blamed all the time for "downvotes from our community" by new users which is something we neither have insight into nor control over.
I don't see how this goes well. At least Reddit has managed to build a [propaganda death star](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/test...) with their new features associated with blocking accounts.
Will people be able to downvote tweets from official accounts for heads of state? What will Twitter do about downvote bot groups?
Do they also have teams that identify "brigading" in order to boost a tweet? What does Twitter do about upvote bots?
Hearts, retweets, replies, etc. on Twitter I presume have a slightly similar result but I suspect it's not the same as "reaching #1 on /r/all" on reddit. The way Twitter works is fundamentally different. So whether Twitter really needs to care about people "getting ratio'd" or buying likes is different than the concern on Reddit. What happens to mass-downvoted tweets will determine how important it is to make sure all downvotes are "real" or "in good faith" or whatever.
The problem is when your online community decides political propaganda or marketing stuff is ok because you agree to participate in a "cultural battle", so you will need to make splitting decisions like who's the brigands and who's being brigaded.
If you start a group centered around, idk, using VSCode. Nice plug-ins to have. The roadmap of the software. Answering questions and helping folks use the software well, etc.
But your community gets raided by the IntelliJ community so that the only discussions are about how VSCode is awful, everyone should use IntelliJ. Why even discuss the roadmap of this stupid not-even-an-IDE? Use IntelliJ.
Anywhere the VSCode community tries to go, it just gets followed by IntelliJ zealots.
If you ban downvoting, you just get upvoting of troll content instead.
In my experience, essentially every political subreddit is full of complete and utter nonsense for this reason. There's some great stuff on the site if you're into woodworking or robotics or whatever, but the country/city/political subreddits are like "Hypernormalization" in website form.
It gets even worse because eventually those subreddits get captured by moderators that stoke the flames even further. I'd be surprised if most of it wasn't state actor troll farm stuff.
Nobody can disagree with you anymore. I believe it is time to use such a list to block everyone on my account that has ever posted in r/emacs, because they cannot see the error of their ways by not choosing ed(1).
0: In many cases I saw that people would also comment under said user stating something to the effect of "This person has commented on r/emacs, they are stupid, it doesn't matter that they're talking about their thoughts on the Disney+ catalog." Which had the secondary effect of people jumping to conclusions about OP without even opting in to download the extension.
Put another way: we shouldn't confuse a civics problem with a platform problem. These extensions (again, as I remember them), were primarily created to eliminate a platform problem that Reddit themselves refused to address.
Edit: my personal anecdote with this is NYC's subreddit: accounts with histories that indicate no connection to NYC love to comment on every crime-blotter article with the same tired comments about the city. It's incredibly convenient and improves the quality of the discussion to be able to filter them.
I get moderation is hard, but this makes it too easy. What if someone was evil but then saw the error of their ways? Should they be forced to make a new account? Or what if they were trying to start debates (as unlikely as that is) in said evil subreddit?
This is a great point, and it's a problem that's created by these extensions. I'd argue that it's a lesser problem than the original one, and so it's a pill I'm willing to swallow (and subsequently tackle).
In general, I think that anonymized reputation and vouching systems are the way forwards for online communities. Vouching solves the "blacklisting" problem: if we incentivize high-reputation people to vouch for good-faith accounts, then people who fall into the categories you've mentioned can be correctly exempted from the filter. But that's awfully hard to do.
What's your point here, exactly? That they should, or should not be able to do that? Because this already happens, except it's even worse than letting people do it, because Twitter does it by itself. With zero oversight by anyone (not that other big tech platforms don't do the same). Twitter already rank boosts content it likes and content it doesn't like gets downranked, shadow banned or just permabanned. It already filters trends and search and autocomplete. So we have a situation where a big tech company does what it wants and does it so much that it literally skews elections (all of this is common sense, but there are also many peer reviewed studies about this, some authors of which have testified before congress and some of which are represent bases for many US & EU investigations into the big tech monopolies/cartels). So given all this, is it really a problem to let people downvote stuff... or is it actually about not letting the people you don't like have a vote?
Youtube dislikes were completely fine 99.999999% of the time and lasted for like a decade without issues. Until someone like you, sadly in a position of power, decided that (speculation starts) Biden got too many dislikes on his ramblings and it was a bad look for Google (speculation ends).
Some people just HATE democracy because democracy means even dumb people, rednecks, racists, sexists and all kinds of "irresponsible" people get to vote. Ironically, most of the time (in recent history at least), these people who hate democracy call themselves democrats or liberals. In reality, they're anything but that. Actual liberals recognize that everyone deserves a to have a voice in a democracy. Even the bad voices are valuable, because they allow the marketplace of ideas actually do its magic.
Twitter as a platform which has no ability to store and reliably surface informational or factual messages is completely devoid of the types of content where peer feedback is helpful - the only thing tweet scores measure is "hotness" which could be entirely opaque to the user base (both up and down).
They tried a lot harder on the Biden admin videos, first culling downvotes, but it was still overwhelmed.
A tracker was made during the original culling: https://81m.org/78/
https://youtube.com/results?search_query=puissant+pronunciat...
Previously, downvotes were the sign of which videos were wrong. Now it’s only comments, and most people don’t comment.
I really hope that's one of the incorrect ones, because otherwise I've never once pronounced it correctly. I pronounce it as in the French but without the nasal on "-ant" and I hit the T just a bit (it's typically written as a loan word, not an italicized foreign word, after all).
Green political parties who don’t support nuclear power.
Comments describing positive aspects of covid driven lockdowns.
Twitter is also apparently keeping the downvote number secret except for the poster.
One of the issues is that places like Hacker News and Reddit use an aggregate vote count. You can't tell if a comment that has a score of -10 is a comment where ten people saw it and decided to downvote it, or where 100 people saw it, 55 downvoted it and 45 upvoted it. This leads to situations where it can seem like a community rejects a point of view, even whe the point of view is shared by almost half the community.
Further exacerbating this is that, with an infinite number of votes allowed, someone who is less restrained about their votes is going to have a greater impact than someone who reserves them for only exceptional comments. For example, say 60% of the community likes Coke and 40% likes Pepsi. However, the Coke supporters are relatively calm and only occasionally vote for comments about soda, while Pepsi supporters are zealots who will downvote any comment that's supportive of Coke and upvote any comment supportive of Pepsi. A user is just going to see a lot of highly downvoted/greyed out Coke posts and a lot of highly upvoted Pepsi posts, and assume that the community is highly supportive of Pepsi while hating Coke.
That's more of a problem with voting in general (and a larger problem with how time = speech on the internet), but downvoting can certainly exacerbate the problem.
Upvote only, it rewards the best opinions and analysis.
The problem is, botnets and astroturfing use downvotes to manipulate conversations, perceived word of mouth and ultimately the algorithms.
For instance, since Youtube has removed downvotes from visibility, my recommended videos are more in line with what I want. I think the downvote was a massive tool for shaping the algorithms and recommended videos that becomes something that isn't organic.
I downvote only the downvote. Down with the downvote!
Purely upvoted content is (generally) less offensive to the readers. Purely downvoted content is (generally) more offensive to the readers. Mixed content 50/50 up/down is typically more controversial and so isn't purely offensive, but instead depends on who the reader is. Assuming a wide spread of audience (not a pre-silo'd audience).
I'm speculating here but I guess this is a tool twitter plans to use to reinforce silos, find content that's only "mildly offensive (I.E. Pimple Popping threads) and let people who want that to get it. Alternatively, they could find content that's downvoted by people who have a good "donwvoting trend" and upscale those downvotes. It's just more signal in their learning algorithms toolboxes.
IMO it neither helps nor hurts twitter's users to have downvotes it really depends on how they use it. I suspect people who are opposed to downvotes don't trust that Twitter will use the signal well. For example, the fact that YouTube took away "displaying" downvotes but not actually downvoting takes away power from users. They still get the signal but users don't. You no longer get signal on what YouTube is recommending to you.
Wow I hope not. Conflating these concepts sounds terrible.
This opens a question, though, of whether the person who started a thread should have any control over the conversation other people see. In the extreme, it could be almost like those browser extensions where your group has a parallel conversation about a website, unrelated to the comments on the site itself. In the other extreme, the OP of a thread is curator of their personal walled garden, where their enemies' replies are all auto-hidden.
I think what they really mean to say is "all non-echo-chamber replies will be censored." Any other interpretation assumes something that isn't true: that all Twitter users are calm, rational, thinking individuals.
The manipulation of a conversation can instead be a democratic process where each participant (even each lurker) gets to decide what comments should be seen first by each new participant. I'm actually really impressed by HN's distributed moderation, the fact that members with more reputation (higher score) get to flag and vouch comments lets HN dodge reddit's curse of having weird power-tripping volunteers with a monopoly on bans.
Conversations need to be manipulated one way or another, I mean maybe 4chan gets by unmoderated, but don't they kick spammers too? So someone has power to shape the conversation, question is how the power is distributed.
In retrospect, that was a necessary precursor to all the dark patterns they would later implement to the feed. It empowers the company to decide what users see and that's an incredibly valuable thing for a company with billions of eyeballs. The temptation to monetize that power will be irresistible. At the very least, "Sponsored Posts" incoming.
I guess they moved fast and broke things.
In the behavioral science parlance, I think this is called a 'nudge'.
No, Facebook, I'm not going to sit there obsessively refreshing the page and scrolling through dozens of pages of content just for a shot at others noticing my existence in your little play-world.
Perhaps I'm not the kind of user Facebook wants. They probably reached the same conclusion as scam artists; make your platform unappealing to the users who won't continually lead to profit, but give it the right qualities so those who don't know any better keep falling into the trap and stay there.
I don't think this downvoting is going to do anything to combat misinformation.
First and foremost, I agree that this will probably end poorly.
However, I could see this being a good idea in the right hands, because it _could_ be used as _part_ of a more comprehensive auto-mod tools, including self-shadow-banning.
Imagine you had a human reviewing highly ratioed comments, providing a final judgment on "is this comment actually unhelpful, or is it just being brigaded?". (And let's imagine one judgment option is "unclear, do nothing".) You could then keep a per-user metric of their (mis)alignment with that judgment across all their votes. That metric could then be used to weight the votes of that user.
High alignment then classifies that user as a "trustworthy unpaid mod" behind the scenes, which can then be used as a signal to determine future human reviews. Similarly, if someone has an absolutely stellar alignment, you can use the occasional disagreements to do meta-mod reviews of your mods' judgments. If you go really wild and draw some correlation between mis-votes and hashtag/topic/channel/whatever, then you can use that.
Low alignment could then be used to devalue votes from that user, leading to a slow shadow ban, and potentially even other more visible effects.
All of which can be done regardless of the visibility of the votes, of course. But hiding "down" votes should help to reduce the pile-on effects of brigading ("a ton of other people downvoted it, so I am safe in the crowd") and thus the temptations leading to slowly shadow banning yourself. But unlike completely taking away down votes, like YouTube, you leave enough rope for bad actors to hang themselves.
It's equivalent to the system Slashdot has had for decades (IIRC).
Do I trust Twitter to put in place something with that amount of utility, feedback, and nuance? Nope. And even if they did, they'd throw away the value of having invisible scores for the opportunity to add "gold checkmarks" or some other BS.
That's exactly what I thought when I read this too. That system worked really well (not perfect, but did the job) back when Slashdot was super popular. I think your right, good idea in the right hands and if they are careful with how they do it.
Hidden downvotes are the flip side of the coin — instead of being used to boost the spread of certain tweets, they can be used as an excuse for why certain information is hidden.
Basically, these changes remind me of p-hacking. As more variables are added, you can figure out ways to structure your algorithm so that you promote the information that you already wanted to promote and demote the information that you wanted to hide. This could be for profit-seeking reasons, political reasons, or other reasons. In any event, it decreases transparency and reduces trust in the systems.
edit: added last paragraph
There are other platforms (like YouTube) where downvotes make a lot of sense because users post guides and tutorials where the downvote ratio is a good indicator of how accurate or useful that guide is.