
How the “Down-Vote” Leads to a Vicious Circle of Negative Feedback - denismars
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/data-mining-reveals-how-the-down-vote-leads-to-a-vicious-circle-of-negative-feedback-aad9d49da238
======
aaron-lebo
> Curiously, authors that receive no feedback, are more likely to leave the
> community entirely.

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.

~~~
balls187
Why go to a different site? You can see the "hivemind, circle jerk
communities" phenomenon right here. I'm not trying to be cynical but HN
certainly displays the same criticism you levy on reddit (as does apparently
any community that allows voting).

~~~
jnbiche
Can you point out some "hive mind" ideologies here on HN?

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.

~~~
o2sd98
Your description of balance illustrates the problem.

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.

~~~
prettymuchthis
Exactly. I spent a couple weeks building up my little HN points once. Then I
made a comment like "That was a very interesting article!" and was downvoted
to hell. I asked why, and that was downvoted to hell. Negative karma after
working on positive for two weeks.

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.

~~~
jnbiche
I'm sorry you were downvoted with no explanation, I'm sure that sucked after
gaining positive karma.

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.

------
legohead
I work for a gaming website that lets people vote on the games and comment.
It's mostly a younger audience (under 18) but there's still a good amount of
all ages.

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.

~~~
hayksaakian
As much as the other comments here might disagree, HN is subject to the same
situation.

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.

~~~
JasonFruit
I have frequently seen a thread begin with ill-informed, substanceless
dismissal, and then turn around and produce a well-reasoned and informative
discussion. That's one of the reasons I visit HN regularly, but not any other
discussion site.

~~~
Retra
Whenever I comment here, I usually consider a bunch of different factors:

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.

------
tokenadult
From the article: "Cheng and co began by compiling a dataset of the comments
associated with news articles on four online communities: CNN.com, a general
news site; Breitbart.com, a political new site; IGN.com, a computer gaming
news site; and Allkpop.com, a Korean entertainment site. The data includes 1.2
million threads with 42 million comments and 114 million votes from 1.8
million different users." I would respectfully suggest that the comments from
news readers on news sites may not be a dataset that generalizes to discussion
and news aggregation sites like Hacker News, especially because Hacker News
starts us out with a set of user guidelines[1] particularly geared to
encouraging sustained user participation in thoughtful discussion. There is
also a welcome message for new users here[2] (I forget how it is implemented,
as I am such an old user that I think I joined HN before it was implemented)
that packages the rules in a slightly different format.

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.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

~~~
caf
_And I don 't keep an enemies list._

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.

~~~
hollerith
I definitely notice that forums that have avatars have much higher rates of
ego-driven commenting than forums that do not.

Parenthetically, I'd go even farther than HN has gone and make the reader
navigate to another page to see the username.

------
Portan
I'm a math teacher and I saw a weird hivemind effect recently. A student was
showing a proof, but I felt one of the steps seemed wrong (I wasn't sure). So
I asked everyone else if it was right. They responded with a chorus of "yes"
"of course" and a little laughing. Eventually the proof ended up showing
something that was not true. So I went back to that step and again asked for
confirmation. Again most of them agreed. I wrote the formula to be sure:
log(A+B) = log(A) * log(B). Eventually one student with a different text book
had looked it up and found it's wrong after all. How had most of the others
been so confident that it was right? Surely they hadn't actually learnt it
wrong. They must have been making their decision on some other factor, perhaps
the fact that all their vocal classmates agreed.

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.

~~~
anindyabd
The students were conforming. As this paper [1] explains, people -- especially
young people -- will often answer incorrectly in order to gain social
acceptance:

"...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](http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed)

------
stormbrew
I think the reason this behaviour disagrees with traditional ideas about
negative reinforcement and punishment is because those theories were built on
hierarchical relationships (someone's in charge and doles out conditioning
action). If the person receiving the punishment accepts the right of the
person doling it out to do so, even if they resent it, they will accept its
validity more readily. Also, if they feel unjustly punished, they will focus
their ire on the authority rather than the community as a whole. This kind of
thing can easily be seen in forums where there is a hard line between
moderators and moderated.

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.

------
shittyanalogy
I think the concept of being able to see your "points" at all is non-
constructive for communication. Why should it matter to you if other people up
or down vote your comments and submissions? So through a knee-jerk feedback
mechanism you can best mold your future communication to fit with what will
get you the most points?

If the purpose of commenting and submitting is not to amass the most "points"
possible then they shouldn't be displayed.

~~~
aaron-lebo
On that topic, I wonder how difficult it would be to make a bot which used
machine learning to scan through comments to pick up phrases or words which
were highly voted, then have it put together comments based on those.

I'm sure you could be very successful.

~~~
detaro
I can't find it right now, but there was a link a few months back that did
some kind of text analysis for the most-"popular" HN users or so. Anybody else
a clue what I'm thinking about?

~~~
thret
Yes, the one that also rated their posts by emotion and other criteria? I
can't find it either but you are not crazy, it did exist.

------
anigbrowl
_Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more_

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.

------
minimaxir
This was posted last year.

Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857)

------
codezero
Although downvotes don't help provide feedback to the users, allowing them can
provide an immense amount of feedback for the operators of the community.

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio)
In my opinion this ratio applies equally as well in social networks and online
communities.

------
mattmanser
I wonder if they looked at if you automatically hide replies to 0 or less
score comments. Combine the downvote with the ignore.

------
wbillingsley
Online arguments tend to be long, degenerate, and quickly form opposing camps
that will war in other threads too. I think that's (informally) very well
known. And a down-vote is a potentially significant indicator that an argument
is taking place.

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.

------
abdias
If only voting represented quality and usefulness. Unfortunately, it's most of
the time emotional. Throw in conformity and political correctness, and you
have a powerful tool serving both.

~~~
elihu
Slashdot's metamoderation system is a pretty good approach to preventing users
from mis-using their upvotes and downvotes. (Unfortunately, Slashdot's comment
moderation system is flawed in other ways, so the benefits of metamod are hard
to evaluate objectively. Also, metamod probably won't help for any site where
trolling is the dominant culture, which describes most "comment sections"
you'll find on the Internet.)

------
fragsworth
> “We find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioural changes
> that are detrimental to the community,”

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.

------
joncp
I've seen this in the "social network" of code reviews where I work. A
"downvote", i.e. a negative comment, often has the opposite effect of the one
intended by the reviewer. The code author will dig in their heels and over
time contribute lower quality code. Alas, I don't have the luxury of simply
ignoring lurking bugs.

------
ChuckMcM
This was fascinating. One of the interesting challenges with feedback that I
have observed is that often separating feedback on the comment/post/idea vs
feedback on the author is hard to distinguish.

I have this thought that instead of 'up' or 'down' a less directed 'agree or
disagree' might be less painful on the poster.

------
Houshalter
I don't buy it. They just found a correlation that users with a downvoted
comment happened to also make other bad comments (what a surprise.) They
didn't actually downvote or upvote comments on randomly picked users and see
what effect it had, which would have been way easier than the machine learning
approach they used.

------
blackoil
Zuckerberg seems to know something, dislike is most requested and ignored
feature on Facebook.

------
samatman
It is as strange to read Burrhus Skinner as it would be to read John Tolkien.
B.F. Skinner has always been so stylized.

------
RunningWild
Just remove voting altogether and let the strength of the argument/statement
prevail rather than allow a mechanism that rewards groupthink.

~~~
stormbrew
Unfortunately, that just leads to 5 pages of "FIRST!!!" before you get real
content.

~~~
TillE
Forums with good moderation solve those problems. A nice example is rpg.net.

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.

~~~
mwfunk
It felt like there was an inflection point around '96 or '97 when Usenet
really dried up and web-based forums became the most common way to discuss
things on the Internet. I blamed it on Slashdot at the time but I think it was
inevitable as more and more people got on the Internet.

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.

------
paulhauggis
Voting is basically used as a form of censorship in almost every community on
the Internet, including HN. If you go against the grain, you will be removed
and ignored.

I guess it's a mirror of real life: people generally only want to be around
people that think like they do.

