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Comment by Tarsul | Hacker News Reader

I stil don't understand why none of these sites counts downvotes for their algorithm. Look at HN which does; the best comments are at the top which means that the user sees the more interesting posts first. And troll posts would never rise to the top. There's a lot of tinkering that could provide which is the best up/downvotes-algorithm but imo it simply does not work without downvoting. E.g. Tiktok allows a lot of options to downrank things that you do not like, meaning the user who curates his own feed gets a stream of posts that are more aligned with what he wants than anywhere else. And that's why TikTok won.

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Troll posts definitely rise to the top on Hacker News. That's why there are multiple buttons to bring them down.

Social media orgs discovered a while back that what they want is "engagement", not "good content". Enraging content is as good as "good" content in terms of clicks, and downvotes would bury that enraging content.

Making you mad is as good as making you feel any other thing in terms of engagement.

yeah that's the story that I read a lot. But it doesn't make sense. E.g. I don't use Twitter because it's just a shitshow (e.g. even before Musk took over). Of course the algorithm from Twitter doesn't see it like that because it never analyzed me. It only analyzes those who are there not those who are not there. Thus, there's a hole in their algorithm. Or in other words: It's a short-termin optimizing algo (for those who are already there), not a long-term optimizer (long-term user growth).

To my understanding, removing downvoting removes a vector of abuse. ie: "downvote brigades" on Reddit

While Twitter doesn't have downvoting, it is still dealing with "report brigades" - various interest groups will organize via Telegram (or similar) to mass-report tweets they don't like.

I wonder if you could strike a balance by incorporating downvotes as a visual metric, but not using it to rank content, thus allowing the expression of dislike while removing the abuse vector.

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