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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

> You can just ignore things you don't like!

I do think this is one of the big hidden problems with upvote/like systems.

Seeing a post you don't like or disagree with on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit with a lot of likes/retweets/upvotes/etc psychologically puts you on the defensive. 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means you're up against an army of 10,000 people who disagreed with you! So you do what's natural: you fight back, you summon your own army of people (hoping to get a respectable counter-army of likes). This creates a toxic environment and you can see it play out on Twitter: every Democrat-leaning tweet will have its top reply be a Republican-leaning tweet with a counter-point, and every Republican with a Democrat.

Meanwhile, on 4chan or other old-style message board withouts those systems... yeah, it's just some asshole with a stupid opinion. Just ignore them, no need to waste effort engaging.

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It's actually even worse on some sites. For example Reddit does not necessarily show the real sum of votes to begin with, but a different one created in an intransparent manner since the code isn't public. They call this "vote-fuzzing". Arbitrary changes to the ranking algorithm have over the years completely changed what users see when they look at the vote count¹, and I suspect that's just the tip of the iceberg that's made public.

¹https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/28hjga/reddi...

Right, this is sold as a technique against vote manipulators (to not let them know if their bots are working) but it requires a lot of trust in the operator not abusing it.

What the...

My innocence =(

Arguably, the addition of showing links to all the replies to a comment could have contributed towards 4chan's drift further into engagement-baiting content. It's the closest analogue to the visual, numeric feedback mechanism you describe.

Interesting because from a functional user experience perspective, it's an objectively useful feature for navigating discussions. An obvious addition in terms of web design, yet with unforeseen repercussions. The medium is the message, after all.

Very true! But even then, the dynamic is a bit different. Reply-links on a post that's an obvious joke are analogous to upvotes, but reply-links on a politically controversial topic could be anything, though most likely disagreements. Plus the absolute number is going to be orders of magnitudes smaller than likes.

But I do agree it's contributed to bait posts a lot, yeah. Interesting to see the impact of such a seemingly small UX change.

> 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means you're up against an army of 10,000 people who disagreed with you

More like army of 10k bots.

In what way is it natural to summon an army of people? Have you really done this?

I think you sort of do it indirectly. You frame your counter-response in a way that is likely to garner the support and upvotes of the opposing camp (opposing to post you're arguing with). Battle lines having been drawn, the internet goes to war.

That's not summoning. That's just people being there already who agree with you...

>4chan

It is remarkable how well moderated that site is.

Illegal posts tend to get removed immediately, while antisocial types get quickly dealt with (banned).

Site is oddly infamous, but certainly does not deserve the hate.

This is why hiding dislikes isn’t a solution to anything. The problem is metrics on either likes/dislikes.

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