How the “Down-Vote” Leads to a Vicious Circle of Negative Feedback
medium.com
medium.com
Ding ding ding.
I think, aside from the issues with downvoting, upvoting by nature slowly creates hivemind, circle jerk communities that quickly start to lack any real critical thinking.
Go check out just about any subreddit and it becomes very apparent what illogical silly ideas dominate. If you are logical but uncontroversial you'll get ignored which is just as bad as the controversial opinions which get downvoted to hell. You start to wonder if the confirmation bias we are all building towards is more dangerous than just being uninformed.
There's lots of research on voting behavior in political science, I'm slightly surprised more hasn't been down with it.
I joke. Reddit is the best example, I think because of how subreddits usually follow a very specific cycle of creation to focus on a specific topic, then the upvoting dynamic creates a strong hivemind, then the dissenters leave and create their own even more narrowly focused community (see /r/politics to /r/conservative), and then it starts over.
It's destructive. HN is a little better because there are actually some limits on democracy if you will (thresholds, flagging, etc), which goes back to the heart of my mention of political science. Different political philosophers have been discussing the dangers of overly simple voting scheme since Plato or earlier.
Yes, you would. Criticizing and complaining about HN is popular on HN.
I think you nailed it though, it's the "points" thing. You're creating an incentive for people to desperately say witty things to get more points, but when people forcefully try to be witty or helpful they end up being formulaic in the worst way ... they find patterns that people almost always approve of and use that.
I wonder what would happen if you actually hide all the numbers ... all karma/etc is still there, just not visible to the user.
That's a pretty interesting idea. I like it. I don't know of any community that has tried this.
I think limiting the number of available downvotes would drastically reduce these quick downvotes, which would be a good thing.
Edit: I'm new here and I still don't see the points.
Not having a downvote is valuable. Limiting max score is valuable.
but people still abuse overrated/troll/flamebait on Slashdot.
the core of the problem is that truly intelligent people have moved on to greater aspirations than internet posting. Also, the dumb people on forums these days are a lot dumber than they were 15 years ago when I was getting started. And no, that's not just my perception in hindsight. The noise has gotten bad enough that I just don't participate in them. People don't see clearly like they used to, so it's not worth pointing.
Probably correlated with more internet connectivity than 15 years ago.
I think we actually strike a pretty good balance. There are clearly large contingents of Apple, Google, and Microsoft fans/employees, all of whom tend to balance each other out. Then there is a large group of younger civil libertarians/libertarians as well as a large group of liberals. And then there is a large group of older, traditional "MIT-style" hackers.
I guess that there is some technophile group think that goes on, and it's true that among the SV contingent, there's a certain amount of ignorance about the state of the country outside of Silicon Valley. But all in all, I think there are enough counterbalancing ideologies and interests here on HN that the hive mind tends not to occur to the same extent as on subreddits, which are by definition single-interest groups.
Why would you make a comment like that seeking to make fun of what I wrote? It definitely doesn't further the conversation. Are you hoping to shut it down?
And if you disagree so strongly, tell me why. I'd like to know.
Edit: Seriously, what are you laughing at? My criticism of Silicon Valley or my defense of HN's relative balance?
Sure. See any comments relating to "idea guy" vs "hacker" or "founder" vs "employee."
The hivemind attitude that I see on HN could be summarized by "People who can write code should be given preferential treatment."
Which makes sense, given by and large, people who participate here have some sort of coding capabilities, so that mentality is clearly self serving. But hardly makes this balanced, and not hive-minded.
So yeah, guilty there.
Lets say you have two groups of people, one of which thinks you should put sugar in bread, and the other which thinks putting sugar in bread is blasphemous. On the issue of sugar in bread, you will get a rigorous debate for the affirmative and negative.
However, if someone posts something to the effect of "Humans shouldn't be eating bread", both of those groups of people will vote that comment down, regardless of the argument presented.
Apple, Google and Microsoft fans all agree that computers and software are 'good things', it is the implementation details where they disagree, so any dissenting opinion to common ground that those groups share will be prejudicially downvoted into oblivion.
It is this common ground where group think is created and reinforced.
Some trolls make you think. Some trolls only hope to destroy online communities, and they are usually very good at it. It can be very hard sometimes to differentiate between the two.
Also, it's entirely possible to make people think without trolling (and I know you weren't claiming this). For example, your response to my remark made me think without being trollish. I personally prefer to participate in communities that promote your type of provocative comment, and not in ones where trolls are given free reign. But that's just me.
So fsck you very much you guys. Every last one of you with your little down vote button. Now when I feel the urge to post here, I create a single use throwaway account, say whatever I feel like, and then log out.
HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.
As you may know, what you ran into there were two foundational ideas in HN culture, which are:
1. Don't post "trivial" comments that are common on Reddit, like "+1", "thanks for that!", "interesting article!". HN tries to maintain a very high signal to "noise" ratio by discouraging these kinds of comments, and I actually appreciate it, since reading through lots of those types of comments makes it difficult to focus on comments meant to foster further discussion, or to inform.
2. It's an official guideline not to complain about being downvoted. Your comment asking why you were downvoted may have been interpreted as complaining about being downvoted. If you were just asking why, I'm sorry you were downvoted and that no one bothered to explain.
Every online community has its quirks, and you just happened to run into two of them with your comments in that post. Personally, I've never worried too much about accumulating points on HN. I just try to post informative comments, or comments meant to provoke discussion, and things have gone well.
Again, sorry you were downvoted for asking a simple question. I'd not do that.
> HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.
The problem isn't HN and the hivemind. The problem here is you. You still care about the points (or rather the consequences of them) because you take the trouble to create a throwaway account, so that when your post is upvoted, or downvoted, you don't feel tied to it.
If you truly didn't care you would either:
1) stop posting on here altogether 2) not care about what others thought of your comments, and stop using throwaway accounts.
I have a problem with HN voting conceptually, compared to Slashdot - on Slashdot, you were supposed not to downvote a comment that you disagree with. The purpose of upvotes and downvotes was to facilitate discussion. On HN, the policy seems to be - if you agree/disagree, upvote/downvote (although I am not sure it's official, that's what I have been told, I may have been trolled :-)).
I don't think voting has anything to do with it. I think that people's natural tendency to (1) imitate others that they respond to positively, and (2) seek out communities where there are people they respond to positively and where people respond to them positively, and avoid other communities, tends to lead to communities of likethinkers, especially when the cost to leave or join communities is low the way it is online.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006....
I visit one community website about linux (non-english) that doesn't have voting and I really like the natural, down-to-earth discussions and arguments (usually about current issues, politics, etc.).
Anyway, we released a game one day and some of the first comments were really negative, even though the game was objectively a pretty darn good game. Knowing the game was good I was awaiting the nice comments to show up, but they didn't. It was just a flurry of negativity.
I talked to some other employees and they agreed the game was good and something felt off. We all jumped into the comments, gave good reviews of the game and started discussions with all the negative reviewers. Then the positive reviews started showing up, and the games rating did a complete turn around to overwhelmingly positive.
I feel like if we hadn't intervened, the game would have continued to have negative reviews and end up with a bad rating. There's a kind of hive mind mentality going on, and the first public comments have some sort of psychological effect on the rest of the players.
I don't think that your case is particularly malicious or anything, but it makes me wonder how easily similar tactics could be used in larger websites or about more serious topics. Thinking along these lines, it feels very "real" how quickly things like payola came about in past media formats, and how what was old is new once again.
Early comments dictate the tone and focus of the conversation.
For example, its trivial to highjack any thread about security with a well written comment about the connection (however fleeting) to the NSA/snowden leaks.
Is my comment necessary? Will it teach anybody anything? Did somebody else already make my point?
All in all, I try my hardest _not_ to comment. As a general rule, I won't participate in communities that value one-liners. A basic respect for thought is enough to make one community far better than another.
Just today I was over-listening a conversation about body hair that essentially amounted to "hair is there for protection," and all I could think was "what does that mean? What 'protection'? Do you even know what you're talking about?" It seems like the _entire_ point of that conversation was to find something to laugh about, and that the thoughts didn't even matter. They could have talked about anything. As soon as laughs were had, subjects changed.
In other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years
On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites.
One thing that probably helps here is that HN doesn't use avatars and visually de-emphasises the username - if I don't specifically look for it I usually have no idea who I'm replying to.
Parenthetically, I'd go even farther than HN has gone and make the reader navigate to another page to see the username.
> Downvoting: reserve downvotes for posts that are explicitly breaking subreddit rules. Do not downvote someone simply because you disagree with them.
> Upvoting: legitimate evidence, solid reasoning, or respectful discourse; Upvote someone admitting that they are wrong. Upvote outstanding use of logic where evidence can’t be had
That seems to prevent - at least in theory - the whole hivemind behavior. You don't upvote/downvote because you agree, but because you see that there's something good about it, whether or not you share the same point of view.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/ptgxf/meta_...
It might, if "legitimate" evidence, "solid" reasoning, and "respectful" discourse weren't all subjective terms where people's subjective impression will be substantially influenced by agreement/disagreement with the thesis of the post.
At least they weren't giving negative feedback to the one who made the original mistake though. So I guess he won't continue to make worse mistakes as this article suggests.
"...the group answered incorrectly on purpose; it appears that when we are unsure of how to perform a task or how to behave, we may take comfort in agreeing with a large number of other people."
[1] http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed
When people feel attacked by their whole community (which is what a slew of negative votes feels like), it seems like they'd be far more likely to lash out at that community as a whole, and that means throwing out increasingly antisocial posts and attacking people with downvotes themselves.
If the purpose of commenting and submitting is not to amass the most "points" possible then they shouldn't be displayed.
I'm sure you could be very successful.
If I'm not getting any votes or other feedback, I take this as evidence that I'm shouting into the void and wasting my time.
This codinghorror post explains it nicely: http://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental-...
So empty vessels really do make the most noise.
That points to an obvious strategy for improving the quality of comments on any social network site. Clearly, providing negative feedback to “bad” users does not appear to be a good way of preventing undesired behaviour.
I'm not seeing such a strategy from the paper's findings. It suggests several ways to limit bad behavior, but since positive feedback doesn't seem to improve quality of comments or posting frequency, I'm getting the strong impression that the overall tone of an online community is set early on in its life, and while it can easily degrade over time there is not a whole lot you can do to improve it.
So how can unwanted behaviour be stopped? “Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behaviour and provide no feedback at all,” say Cheng and co.
This is pretty difficult to implement, though, since it only takes two people to start a flamewar. All I can think of is very proactive moderator pruning, which would a) become a full-time job and b) creates problems of its own as people start howling about censorship.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857
You need a certain amount of positive feedback relative to negative feedback, and if you monitor that ratio, you can have a good pulse on the quality of your community. If you are not maintaining a high ratio of positive to negative feedback, you can take action to increase positive feedback in meaningful ways. You can also use provided negative feedback to tailor interactions. Someone downvotes a particular thread? Don't notify them of any future discussion on that thread if you otherwise would have, etc...
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio In my opinion this ratio applies equally as well in social networks and online communities.
But I think the authors are a little naive if they think the site-owners are not aware (and in some cases, counting on) this.
For many sites, it seems to be the arguments and battles that drive activity. As if to the site-owner, a (moderate) ding-dong battle is "increased engagement, even from the people who disliked the content" rather than something they necessarily want to stamp out.
I really hope the sites that have downvotes don't take this to heart. There are massive benefits that the authors completely overlooked.
It allows the community to rapidly bury garbage content, and because of this, the pool of potentially good content (with few upvotes) is much smaller and less daunting for the users to sift through, which allows more good content to rise to the top.
I have this thought that instead of 'up' or 'down' a less directed 'agree or disagree' might be less painful on the poster.
Traditional linear forums are still the best format for in-depth discussion, IMO. Threads actually stick around for more than a day or two. Just compare gamedev.net to /r/gamedev.
I really feel like we lost something though. Newsreaders provided a much better way to engage in the kinds of conversations that people have on place like HN or even Reddit. To this day I don't know of any web forums that offer the conveniences of newsreaders like tin or slrn. I miss killfiles (and plonking!) and really, really, really well-maintained FAQs on just about anything.
I'm not sure how much of my Usenet nostalgia is just remembering the good stuff. It may not have been as great as I remember, but it sure seemed like it at the time. I learned so much from it, from so many people in so many different newsgroups. Maybe that's what places like HN are to larval hackers today.
maybe the best way is to simply ditch the whole karma/popularity system all together. you can up a comments contribution to an article, but it ends there.
The person who got downvoted isnt stuck with a scarlet letter and put on probation to repair their 'karma' simply because they had a different way of looking at things.
I guess it's a mirror of real life: people generally only want to be around people that think like they do.