The reason this makes me uncomfortable is that, as with most technologies and policies, when applied to a large enough population create constraints that mold behavior.
This can be good but I can easily imagine two different discussions on the same topic in the same board.
On a post on climate change:
All climate change deniers ignore their detractors and reinforce their own worldview; All rational people who understand that climate change is real now have removed themselves from the conversation because they cannot âwinâ an argument on the Internet, (theyâll just hang around talking about how stupid some people can be, thus reinforcing their own worldview, polarizing the conversation even more).
I agree. It would be weird if encouragement led people to post âbetterâ quality posts. Writing is a skill. I wouldnât expect to start winning more games of chess if I got upvoted for my wins. Maybe those upvotes make me play more and then Iâll get better eventually, but thatâs some extremely weak feedback.
Still, the difference is illuminating. Name calling, offensiveness and nastiness are skills as well, so why are people able to get better at those with so little effort? If the study results are correct (the trendline is downward once you start getting downvotes) it would suggest that most people who are new to posting are actually trying to do a good job and meaningfully participate. They donât have a lot of room to upward improvement (without practice) but they have lots of room for downward âimprovementâ.
I think moderation is the biggest factor, but yes, obviously there are issues when the number of comments gets too large. The absolute most civil forums I have ever participated in were the ones at Elitist Jerks, and that was a discussion about a World of Warcraft, so they had a pretty tough crowd to deal with. They banned people all the time.
The study could be read this way. Rather than writing off all the people who get downvoted as âtrolliesâ we might wonder if they arenât just forming their own community in the downvote section. I get that those comments are often transparently terrible, but when it comes to something like climate change denial, the climate change deniers can actually go to the downvoted comments and share ideas with other climate change deniers.
In my experience, forums (like every other collaborative human endeavor) are almost exclusively popularity contests. Even relatively good forums, such as BB, are mostly people trying to come up with something witty and amusing, rather than informative or thought-provoking. Which is fine! But I think one should come to terms with that.
Climate change is probably not the great example because discussion and argument about climate change is effectively over (if it ever started). You have science on one side (where there is discussion and argument, but not generally in public forums), and on the other side screeching and paid FUD. And I guarantee that not one person has ever had their mind changed about climate change by a forum âdiscussionâ.
Fanboi topics are perhaps a better thing to analyze, since the problem is not one-sided. What is at stake in those âdiscussionsâ is not facts or ideas, but tribal identity, and tribal identity cannot be âarguedâ to a conclusion. However, these threads have the potential for worthwhile discussion, as in between Brand X Fanboi Tribe and Brand Y Fanboi Tribe you can, in this circumstance, have unaffiliated parties interested in the product or products being discussed.
It seems to me that selected hiding, in this instance, is great: comments from fanbois are easy to recognize, so you just go through eliminating those users. Likely they have little interesting to say on any other topic either. But downvoting, I recognize, is a issue here, because even a thoughtful post that isnât sufficiently obsequious to one or another brand will be downvoted into oblivion by the fanboidom.
So hereâs an idea: maybe if you actively select to screen a user, perhaps you also discount all of their up/down voting, or maybe just their downvoting.
One thing Iâve wondered about was whether it would be helpful to algorithmically force those who rate to conform to a Gaussian or logarithmic (or as I might say, a Sturgeonâs Revelation) distribution. That is, if we acknowledge that most comments are at best average, or at worst unhelpful, require users to evaluate the full range. Or at the very least, I think it would be interesting.
Another thing I always liked, but no one ever did, was Slashdotâs old metamoderation system, where you rated moderators. The problem with the way it was implemented is that you never got the direct kind of feedback regarding what people thought of your use of mod points, or of the way metamoderation went. So no one ever did it.
Right, Ars is a step in the right direction but Slashdotâs got it right: visibility of posts is determined by upvotes and downvotes, which can only be portioned out by a select group of moderators, whose moderation choices are, themselves, subject to positive and negative feedback from a random sample of the community.
There are a couple of downsides to this.
First, itâs a complicated system.
Second, it doesnât feed the Cow Clicker addiction that the âLikeâ/âThanksâ/upvote/downvote scorecard system is actually going for. Assuming the purpose of upvotes and downvotes is actually to improve conversations and provide valuable feedback is, in the vast majority of all cases, a fundamental misunderstanding. Sites donât put the Up and Down buttons there to make the conversation better, they put them there because people like scorecards and like clicking on things.
To me, itâs more about hanging with a fun group of folks. I like to click my appreciation by sending out some love to my fellow happy mutants, and I def love to receive my <3 s here too. It makes me feel appreciated. But I donât come here for the gamification angle, though maybe Iâm just not wired that way. I guess I didnât get that much troll DNA.
I said I was uncomfortable with the idea because of possible implications that I outlined, its not a bad idea, or one that I oppose, I was just thinking of an extreme example of a discussion about things that matter.
If you mean something along the lines that you canât get people to finish a conversation by saying, âYouâve convinced me, by George, I think youâre right!â. then, by George, you are right. Arguments on the internet are silly.
But I fundamentally disagree with the idea that conversations need a clear winner and that not getting your point across means you lose, sure, nobody changes their mind while theyâre arguing their side, but if you are able to make your argument anything other than âyoor stoopid!â, people will consider what you have to say. And thatâs as much of a âwinningâ condition as you can hope for on the internet (and in real life).
If you want to read the comments of some fucked up people, read the one star reviews on Amazon. These are folks that wonât read the product descriptions of the things they buy, they wonât read the directions that come with their purchase, and they are baffled by common everyday objects. And they typically have a horrible anger problem.
Better yet, read the reviews on AllRecipes.com, where people donât cook the recipe that is posted, then rate their substitution choices. I once read a review for a Pot Roast in the slow cooker recipe where the person started, âI give this five stars. I made the following modifications: added carrots, added onions, subtracted the onion soup, added celery, used wine instead of water, and added a teaspoon of cayenne.â So basically, the person made an entirely different recipe.
Slashdot went downhill badly, but thatâs to do with their management and not the moderation system.
Their system isnât about âwinningâ, itâs about separating the wheat from the chaff. Itâs designed to encourage you to write good replies, stay reasonably civil, and moderate carefully. The end result is you can open up an article and be confident that the 10% of comments you see and the 10% best comments on the article correlate pretty highly.
Itâs a flawed system run by fallible people. Itâs just the least flawed system I know of.
The guys at soylentnews are trying to fix old slashcode, and making metamoderation more friendly is on their list. If you have suggestions you can probably put them here.
