It wasn't better because verified accounts were locked out; it was better because accounts with large amounts of social capital were locked out. It temporarily reset a social network to a more egalitarian state, before the winner-take-all feedback loops take hold. But left to its own devices, even if those accounts (and their owners) were locked out entirely, the same dynamics would re-assert themselves and new dominating accounts would emerge, absent some ongoing active effort to break the feedback loops that create them.
this is why i think visible voting (likes, hearts, etc) ruined the internet. It creates teams, draws lines in the sand. Then teams with the most votes thinks that means it's in the right.
Otherwise, you have to actually read each comment and think about whether you agree with it instead of lazily appealing to votes.
Unfortunately I think intentionally or not the mental stimulus of "winning" - getting lots of likes and retweets, is baked into how these companies have very profitable business models. People feel like they are playing a game for social status, maybe one of the most primal human instincts and they tap into that to drive profit.
When the net was young, it was programmers who put counters in front of content - the urge and obviousness to do so, is so banal and basic that the lack of a counter is comment worthy, not its presence.
Imagine a pristine social network without any counter - how many seconds before one of us posts "I made a small change to the site, which looks like this".
Metrics are such a basic extension of the programming mindset that without a corporations will being imposed to remove them, I cant imagine a site without a like counter of some sort. (Not that firms will remove them, but their absence can only be achieved by a force from above imposing its will on normal human nature.)
Since you mention the early internet, some of the earliest websites I remember would have a 'number of visitors' counter usually in the footer. Which in and of itself is an early form of that validation you speak of. When you found a site with lots of visitors, it validated the site, made it seem more legitimate. And lots of early web site owners would react the same way to a new visitor to their page as a user reacts to a like today.
Validation culture has always been in some ways a part of the internet. Even before the things I spoke of. But I agree though, today it's taken over too much of culture in general. Whereas back in the day, someone may be happy or excited, chances were it didn't affect their life much. Now people's entire lives and fortunes exist because of those validating likes.
It's also keeping people from rebelling against the companies (elites) gaining all the profits (I say this as a business owner).
It's like not collaborating with another skateboarder or ecologist because they don't share the same political team as me. "Internet teams" is a complete mental construct, taking advantage of xenophobic, tribal tendencies we have innately to protect us in the physical world.
I tend to lean towards low-tech anarchist and I have a lot in common with socialists, fascists, and jeffersonian-democrats (anti-federal govt, pro-working man), and even muslims where I'm against central banking or charging interest. But nobody could ever talk about it because "teams".
I agree, the ranking algorithms should be based off genuine engagement in a discussion, not opaque votes or likes. I'm working on a new discussion site https://sqwok.im, with the intent to foster open, frictionless, and accessible conversations with anyone, where the relevance is determined by other signals including activity. There are different issues to work around with that model but it more closely resembles how we interact irl (real world "vote" is usually just walking away).
I'm interested. When you mention activity do you mean something like "total active engagement on a post" or "how active is one particular user relative to others". Also is it your intention to maintain fully anonymous participation with or without moderation? Also one thing I think could be a cool feature would be a reddit style "subreddits" but created by users who then collectively decide what it's going to be about by their participation. Good work.
By activity I mean chat activity in a given post. Right now the ranking algo for "hot" is based on how many people are chatting + decay time function. It's somewhat simplistic for now (still mvp), but I have ideas for other signals that could be used to determine how relevant a particular conversation is. It's certainly vulnerable to being gamed, but I think there are ways we could try to limit that, and filter out noise etc.
One of my goals is to focus as much as possible on the conversation and build features around that. For instance instead of a "like" button, it could require a user to _write_ something relevant (just idea). I think the key is that we try new things, hopefully learn from ideas that have been tried elsewhere, and build a place for high-quality realtime conversations.
The site does follow the twitter/IG/twitch model where it's a flat user(nest) hierarchy, but I have considered later enhancing it to allow multiple users to manage a single nest which would allow both community-led or single-entity led. Right now the goal is just to get mvp features and start getting feedback! So thank you :)
Interesting. I wonder if you could factor in “views” for measuring activity, like how many people have visited a thread and for how long. It’s my understanding that most big websites are extremely interested in minutia like where someone spends most of their time on the page, where their cursor is etc. that may be a useful metric for determining engagement.
yes! I think there are a few potentially interesting data points along this thread, such as time spent viewing, conversion from viewer -> active participant, and more. I like measuring the view bounce rate because I envision someone listening to others speak, and then either walk away or step closer to engage further. Cursor position could be interesting, maybe to see if they scrolled and read the content description?
I think it even encourages reading the content. “Six hundred other morons ‘liked’ this comment so I might enjoy reading it.” Without that social proof, how do I figure out which comments are worthwhile and which are kooky bullshit?
I’m being only partly sarcastic here, the social proof is real. But I find it interesting because on Reddit I’ll deliberately read downvoted comments, on YouTube I will not bother with anything below the top 10 presented to me, here I’ll read almost everything (obviously if the thread interests me).
Social media has become a whole lot better for me thanks to Ben Grosser's demetricator extensions. They even work on Firefox mobile. I use the Twitter and Facebook extensions. With the you can see that something has been liked/retweeted/shared, but no longer by how many people.
While you're right, I really do like 4chan. It doing away with any voting really creates a wholly different culture. It requires a completely different approach to reading it. Now, the people there are outcasts in one form or another, in real life or digitally. That can get you mixed results and tainted content, but the principle of how that 'forum' is set up I like a lot.
4chan somehow has this reputation for being savants despite being just as vulnerable as Twitter in getting swept up into a mob with lazily research facts being dressed up as genuine when someone uses complete sentences. * chans only work largely because of moderation (That doesn't mean the moderation has to operate in a way you like). Likewise the for HN.
IMO, no single feature ruins online social platforms more than size. The best subreddits are the small ones, the best * chans are the small ones, the best forums are the small ones. "Features" don't ruin platforms, users do.
i chuckled that this comment was grayed out. I was analyzing my feelings and voting indicators really do make an impact. I can feel the emotional charge from all the people who downvote as I'm reading.
> Well, there's always 4chan, which is exactly what you just said.
I disagree. 4chan isn’t Twitter without visible voting, it also has anonymity baked in, you can’t register an account, and old threads are automatically deleted.
A more apt example of (my understanding of) the argument you’re replying to is HN: you can see your own points on a discussion, but not anyone else’s. Posts are given more prominence due to their score, but due to their invisibility you only get a rough idea of how popular they are inside their own discussion, not how much more popular they are in relation to other posts.
Does anybody actually look at other users points on a regular basis? I think it’s rare which is why it’s not really relevant.
Besides, it’s not even a measure of popularity but more of a lifetime scoreboard. If HN reported something like average points per post or per day, that would be closer to a popularity metric (eg more inline with “number of followers”)
That's the thing about trying eliminate voting. If comments essentially serve as votes, you actually get the worse kind of filter - the way the filth rises to the top on Youtube comments for example (Youtube sorts by most commented even though it allows voting - so hateful stuff remains even when downvoted).
The best solution I've seen for this is to have a separate subforum for highly contentious discussions, and anything with more than a threshold number of comments per hour gets automatically moved there and flagged for moderator review. Then the moderator can move it back, delete it entirely or just leave it in the separate subforum so that interested parties can flame each other in the fire pit instead of out where everybody else hangs out.
it is precisely because 4chan one of the last popular "free" sites that it is more extreme. if the entire internet were more like it, there would be more mild sites with more PC discussion that you could join.
A site could still allow accounts and banning and have guidelines around discussion topics, it doesn't have to be completely anonymous like 4chan.
FWIW 4chan has accounts, banning and guidelines. It's not totally lawless and anonymous. It just has the option of anonymity.
Probably the best, deepest LGBT+ issues discussions I've ever had have been on their /lgbt/ board. They were filled with people yelling obscenities too, but that doesn't bother me. I guess it's the culture I grew up with, it's natural to engage in discussion while people are yelling around me.
I'm really glad there's still a place out there that believes in free speech as a foundational principle not to be infringed upon except as an absolute last resort. I'm glad not everywhere is 4chan, but 4chan is a gem of discourse in today's world if you ignore like 90% of it. I'm increasingly convinced that that 90% is the inevitable cost of the wonderful 10% that represents the sharing of intelligent thought without fear of reprisal.
> I'm increasingly convinced that that 90% is the inevitable cost of the wonderful 10% that represents the sharing of intelligent thought without fear of reprisal.
high IQ post. that seems to be a pattern in many facets of life. (raising children, starting companies, dieting, traveling)
4chan technically does have accounts in the form of '4chan pass', but it's not linked to your posts at all[1] and just removes the ads, and lets you bypass the captcha and some kinds of subnet level posting bans.
There is also the concept of a tripcode, which is basically an HMAC with a key that the server has a user provided code that is shown next to your post. You can use this to prove knowledge of the code. Usage depends a lot on which board you're on, but is generally frowned upon.
Some boards (such as the infamous /pol/) also have IDs on posts (IIRC derived from your IP address and the thread id), so that posts by the same user in the same thread can be correlated.
Other than that, everything is anonymous.
[1] minor exception is the "since4pass" option which just adds a little icon to your post indicating how long you've had your pass. This is basically never used (perhaps because even 4chan posters don't want to advertise that they're paying for 4chan)
Using a tripcode would be the closest thing 4chan has to an "account" that I'm aware of, but it doesn't require registration, it just adds a (theoretically) unique identifier to posts.
I'd argue that the anonymous nature of it is actually what allows it to maintain it's status as "free". By disconnecting everyone from any sort of permanent identity, it totally eliminates the possibility of a user or group of users collecting enough social capital to change things.
i disagree there. sure you have to wade thru a lot of garbage, but the amount of truly insightful posts still make it worth going to for me. on some of the less popular, more focused boards, the general discussion quality is pretty high.
It seems that the most harm is done when the voting system is used to accumulate clout/fame/social capital both on and off platform.
Democratized voting systems on pseudonymous platforms can have a content curation effect while limiting this accumulation of social capital, as seen on Hacker News and Reddit. You don't see quite the same level of brands and people building their clout on say Reddit the way they do on Twitter. Conventional cultural leaders like politicians and celebrities don't dominate discourse on these platforms to the degree they do on Facebook and Twitter.
no, but reddit has the same problem (but amplified IMO) where you self-censor out of fear of saying something unpopular and getting downvoted. It's even more conformist than twitter.
Twitter doesn't have downvotes so its a little better in that regard.
The common "EDIT: <<apology or excuse here>>" I saw on reddit screamed of insecurity instead of people standing their ground. That mentality is bad for young minds.
I do agree that downvoting sometimes has a chilling effect on Reddit, but that doesn't seem relevant to the discussion on social capital accumulation and the domination of a platform by these traditionally socially powerful users, at least in the same way that other platforms are.
The point was to discuss how Reddit, Hacker News, and other message boards utilizing pseudonymous voting are not monopolized by brands, celebrities, and businesses in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are. The discourse is still more egalitarian than the alternatives, and it isn't these traditional cultural leaders that dominate discussion on Reddit.
This isn't to speak on issues of astroturfing, echo chambering, or misinformation, but these aren't relevant to the discussion, and aren't unique issues to Reddit.
> The point was to discuss how Reddit, Hacker News, and other message boards utilizing pseudonymous voting are not monopolized by brands, celebrities, and businesses in the same way that Twitter and Facebook are.
How much of that is simply due to the nature of the product?
Reddit would very much like to have the brands, celebrities, and businesses, and influenced their change to allow users to post to their own profile pages.
I think its relevant. a consolidation of opinion (via self-censorship) also leads to a consolidation of products and choice, since alternative product and companies die due to unpopularity.
For example I think reddit played a MASSIVE role in the rise of PC gaming in the last 5 years. It's more indirect, admittedly.
Voting certainly has its problems, but the alternative is given trolls and spammers free reign.
Not having any kind of selection mechanism may have worked in the past when the Internet was much smaller, and when the majority of people still cared about making quality posts. But those days are long gone. Even in its current state, I find Twitter borderline unusable, because > 95% of posts are worthless noise.
I don't think the problem is with trolls and spammers necessarily, I think the problem is with scaling the community out. 4chan is the best example of this: the less populated, hobby-based boards are wonderfully useful resources and generally of much higher quality than similar communities on Reddit. Reddit is just too big and the clout-chasing inevitably infects smaller subs.
The larger 4chan communities like /b/ and /pol/, on the other hand, are irredeemable cesspits compared to Reddit's default subs.
I second this, I frequent the /lit/ (literature) board on 4chan and its really good. It's still quite irreverent but its good when studying philosophy, where it was always rebellious (e.g. Nietzsche's "God is Dead").
> Voting certainly has its problems, but the alternative is [giving] trolls and spammers free reign.
I would replace "voting" with "moderation." Voting mechanisms on conversational sites are a form of moderation; so are actual moderators. And, of they're not mutually exclusive.
> Even in its current state, I find Twitter borderline unusable, because > 95% of posts are worthless noise.
I think Twitter tried to replace moderation with curation -- in theory, you're only going to see posts from people you follow, giving you direct control (and responsibility) over the amount of noise on your timeline. In practice, of course, Twitter goes back on that implicit promise in the name of engagement. Twitter itself injects things you don't have direct control of onto your timeline -- not just promoted tweets, but "people you follow liked this" and "someone you follow replied to this tweet" and other such dubious nonsense -- and also lets people you follow inject things onto your timeline through retweets and quote tweets. But, I think the original idea of "give you the tools to curate what you see" was relatively sound, although it should have implemented LiveJournal-esque "only allow replies from people I follow and/or who follow me" type filters very early.
IMHO, that was more a result of the very high barrier to entry to get access to the internet, than its size. I still fantasize about creating a community with such a high barrier to entry today, but where it is done better than just making it depend on your technical chops and internet connections in the mid-nineteens.
You can have voting mechanisms without their results being visible. It isn't very transparent but social media is still curated and moderated by platforms regardless of "voting".
Vote-piling is so obvious on Reddit but it's more than that.
On a personal level, even when the numbers are hidden from the public like on HN, it has a weird effect on me. It's nice to post something and get a bunch of upvotes, but (even though it doesn't really matter) just getting that single point drop to zero hurts so much more. I don't know if it's loss aversion or the idea that some random internet person dislikes me. I don't dwell on it, I'm notice it and move on, but I still get that little sinking feeling for some reason.
Over time, just like a dog being trained we'll learn to conform to the consensus.
Yeah I don’t really understand downvoting on HN. If I see a grey post that looks well written and making reasonable arguments, I like to upvote. If people want to disagree they should reply rather than downvote.
Edit: I don’t mean all down voting is bad - It’s good when people start making personal attacks - but just as often it seems to be used to suppress an unpopular viewpoint.
It's pretty funny that I will a huge number of votes for a trivial factual correction and get no votes for what I'd consider insightful points. Not showing votes makes it easy for everyone to upvote these trivial factual corrections.
I think one reason for a vote is when someone was going to say something, but someone else already did so it's redundant to say it again - vote instead to show approval to the poster, or add weight to it where votes are public. It makes sense that simple corrections would so often fall into this category.
Twitter is the worst with this as it ONLY has a heart. Even if you disagree, you click the heart to save it. There is no way to show another emotion and it desperately needs something like this, similar to Facebook.
And Facebook needs one more too - DISAGREE. "Like" basically means I agree, but "mad" doesn't always mean I disagree.
I can disagree with something and not have it make me "mad". I'm not sure what this emoji is, maybe it's just a thumbs down, but I think it's necessary.
The like button isn't for saving things. It's for liking them. If you want to save a tweet, Twitter has both Bookmarks and Stories you can use to file it away. If you're liking tweets to save them for later, you're just using Twitter incorrectly.
And a "Disagree" button is just a terrible idea. It immediately invites conflict into every post. Imagine writing a post about your experiences with sexual assault or something and you start getting Disagrees from people...
If social media feels like it's limiting your social expression, you might want to step away from social media.
I maybe check HN a couple times a day, have never added a new item, but have posted comments.
Due to this after however many years (Edit: almost 8 years) I don't have enough points to down vote.
Like SO was at the beginning I think graduated access like this can definitely help a community.
However, like any other gated community it's easy for the ones with high rep to form a bubble.
I think what's prevented HN from turning into SO, Twitter, etcetera is that
a) there are no real profile pages. The reason for coming here is to see what tech news has been shared. Sort of like subreddits, the driving content is a shared interest, not a personality.
b) there's no profit motives at work. We're not customers (or data to sell), we're people with a shared interest. This is a sort of hobby project, with the 'benevolent dictator' coming by as needed, fixing titles and links, and letting us know about technical issues with the platform.
c) anyone can upvote and see buried comments. I have the option enabled to see people who have been downvoted to gray text. Rarely do I think it's undeserved. If for some reason someone is getting buried for a legit comment usually there's a comment reply questioning the votes, by someone else, and clarifications are worked out.
d) (I assume) a lot of lurkers who can't downvote, but can, and do, upvote.
And there's probably other reasons. Which I guess means it's a combination of things, one of which is how downvoted are handled.
> There are downvotes on HN. Do they really make this community better?
For others, maybe not, but for the downvote-ees, I think that they can. There's a tendency to bridle at a downvote, but I know that, especially in my early days here, downvotes were very helpful for figuring out what posts were appropriate and welcome in this community. The downvotes were an unobtrusive way for me to get the message without a huge thread in which many people individually would have been forced to make exactly the same point.
(I do notice that, in contentious discussions, downvotes are often used to express disagreement, rather than the idea that a post is not a valuable contribution, and I think that's a shame.)
Visible voting might have had some bad effects but I'd say you are basically wrong about it being any kind of fundamental problem.
The early Internet had plenty of poison ("flame wars" of that era were the precursor to what we have now). The Internet hadn't solved it's how-to-get-along problem and it just expanded that situation as it became dominant and the "craziness from the Internet" managed to have more real world consequences.
As other have mentioned, sorting by active thread turns comments into votes and make the least liked and most disagreeable comment stay visible. So the division between voted and not-voted systems isn't as great as one might imagine.
The thing is; then and now, actual moderation is the situation that can solve this. Leadership in humans is sort of divided between attention-focusing behavior and rules-membership-enforcing behavior, both are fine as parts of society. We can see both things at play in online activity but most online forum create a unbalanced in favor of attention-focusing behavior and a certain ideology can this imbalance is great. It's not, it's a part of a rather sick society that America has wound up with, we wind-up literally on the verge of catastrophe from this.
We do have visible voting and accolades in real life - I wonder if the issue here is that visible voting and accolades along with a history of conduct perform aberrantly when coupled with (seemingly) anonymous identities. In real life people may be reluctant to try and gain fame by taking extreme viewpoints due to their concern over impacting their day-to-day well being - leaving only those fervent believers to tote the flag. Compare that to the internet where you can roll up a new handle and give something a go - maybe getting a lot of encouragement and accolades in a mostly risk-free manner.
Whether what I stated above is an indication of a problem of the internet or a problem with the suppression of opinion in the real world is probably open to debate. But I do wonder if that's the reason we see such a rift in the tenor of discussion on the internet.
Even semi-visible voting such as HN has creates bad incentives.
The retweets/likes culture of twitter is orders of magnitude worse, though. People start chasing the likes, tailoring them to what people want to hear rather than genuine expression of thought.
Which raises a related issue of whether the number of likes/hearts can even be trusted. Given the positive feedback loop they create (posts with many likes are more likely to receive further likes), manipulation of these numbers can be used for influencing opinion and drawing the battle lines. I am highly suspicious of both Twitter and Reddit in this regard.
Exactly. Inconvenient facts or even just minority views get downvotes. Especially here on hn. If you are going to say something that disagrees with the general hn monoculture, you have to dress it up in the inimitable pseudo-intellectual rational style favored here. Only then do you stand a chance of making yourself heard.
Does anyone know of or have ideas on how to restrain winner-take-all feedback loops? I'm rather tired of the lack of fat tailed distribution in the tech world
I think it would be interesting to use a market based mechanism for voting, where placing an upvote costs a small fee. The fee price increases as more upvotes are placed, and you can always un-place your upvote to get a refund at the current market price.
This means accounts that identify popular content before others do can make a profit by buying upvotes at a low price, and selling them high.
This doesn’t stop content from popular accounts from being upvoted a lot, but it does encourage people to search for otherwise overlooked high quality content - to your point, the fat tail.
Very similar! The difference is that Quadratic Voting scales the expense independently for each user, while this system scales it for everyone (and you can subsequently sell your vote)
Would this fee be based on money or "karma"? I feel like if one had to earn upvotes to spend on Reddit, regular users will engage in more karma-farming reposts. At least now it's only the weirdos and people looking to sell accounts.
Has anyone tried a logarithmic or similar scale for voting? Show the 'tier' they are at (A B C D or some rating number) and it gets progressively harder to go up or down a level as you deviate from the starting point.
I'd imagine that fee would be literal money, as this nullifies concerns about people creating fake accounts to get more Karma, and means people are fully incentivised to place votes carefully. It does introduce a "pay to influence" aspect that I don't love, but one would hope that at sufficient scale the Efficient Market Hypothesis would kick in, and trying to pay to influence would just result in you burning your money.
> Has anyone tried a logarithmic or similar scale for voting?
Hmmm good question. I don't think this would make a huge difference, as visibility is generally a function of a post's current rank rather than its actual score, so any monotonic transform isn't going to have a large effect.
I have in mind a post reddit social site (in the save way reddit is post digg), and one of the key issues that I see is that that site has to have distinct karma for each community.
Basically a social network based more upon Slate Star Codex concept of Archipelagoes (communities next to communities) than a traditional communities within communities. I think one of the key original sins of reddit is that it had site wide karma, rather than distinct karma within each community.
That’s a very interesting idea. Is that how the stackexchange/stackoverflow/etc sites operate? They seem siloed but I don’t have much experience with them.
I also saw an interesting point here recently that the reason Instagram seems to be better than FB/Twitter is that there’s no built in way to signal boost with shares or retweets. And really, you can’t even have hyperlinks. Would that be a consideration?
You get 200 basic karma when you go to a new stackoverflow community with an existing account (or you did the last time I did) but other than that you start over from scratch.
However Stackoverflow is also not really a community, so I don't think what they do necessarily applies.
I don't use Instagram much (don't need more addictive stuff in my life), but I seem to remember that you could still like stuff. No hyperlinks would ruin a community in opinion, since it means you can't back a point with facts.
Yes. Remove the incentive to grow social capital by making users anonymous and posts temporary. It exists and it’s called 4chan. It turns out that when you remove the incentive to grow social capital, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in participating.
According to their ad page, 4chan has 22 million monthly visitors, which is not as large as Twitter’s 300 million, but I would argue is also not insignificant: https://4chan.org/advertise
But is 4chan an inevitable product of its structure, or of its originating culture? Back when it was the next big thing, I worked with a social bookmarking startup. Weirdly, our site was colonized by a sizable group of Harry Potter fan fiction writers, and they became the dominant group on the site. If 4chan had started out with a different seed group of contributors, it might well be a very, very different place.
> If 4chan had started out with a different seed group of contributors, it might well be a very, very different place.
Hoping that's the case as I'm working on a new chat-based discussion site with no voting and goal of open, rigorous, reverent discussions (sqwok.im). I think there's merit in using signals like activity and others to determine relevance, and agree that part of the problem with 4chan is simply the ethos set in the beginning.
Don't have the web be four sites full of screenshots of each other. I.e. go back to the blog and forums era. Outlaw social media with more than X users. Make content recommendation algorithms illegal. Personalised advertising should be punishable by public flogging for first offenders and death for repeat offenders or particularly large-scale operations.
It wasnt better because verified accounts couldnt tweet, it was "good" because everyone was just memeing and making jokes bout verified accounts being locked out.
