this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Are you sure the issues you mentioned are caused by voting? I'm not certain, so I cannot answer your question.
I without a doubt am.
its not the only cause but its absolutley why reddit ended up so uniquely bad in those ways. the problems were systemic and voting was a big part of that system.
think on it, you got slashdot, then digg, then reddit. they all try to run with this new method of handling both content and discussion: ranked instead of threaded. slashdot falls apart because digg does it better. digg falls apart because it has the method right, but it's trying to be legitimate news. reddit gets huge because it recognizes the ranked model is for social media as opposed to news and leans into it with all the bells and whistles. idk if reddit falls apart.
the canaries leave reddit for the fediverse and start lemmy. but why keep the things that made reddit bad?
In my opinion, the problems you mentioned are not caused by the voting system.
Groupthink is caused by a lack of discipline. Obvious hot takes or otherwise poorly formulated comments should be downvoted. Well presented contrarian opinions should be upvoted. Perhaps educating users on using the system in its intended way – promoting healthy debate or interesting insight – is better than removing the system completely.
Manipulation is caused by poor bot control, so while removing voting might help somewhat, this would be a band-aid at most. Unless you mean some sort of psyop manipulation that doesn't involve automation, which voting can, in theory at least, help against by refuting attempts at manipulation.
Duplicated content I have only seen in connection to the nature of the fediverse so far (i.e., same topic communities spread across multiple large instances). I guess some people would try to farm internet points by posting low quality content, but if people like that content and vote for it, what's there to be done apart from blocking the community you don't like?
Also Lemmy's popularity would suffer if it was missing one of the key features of Reddit ("Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit." is listed as one of the main features on the official website).
You’re wrong.
If there’s a system in place that ensures more people see what you wrote for longer when it has a higher score you’re gonna write something that gets a higher score. The three websites I listed before (and myriad others) all had that exact problem and they had it not because of user discipline, a person could argue slashdot held the line on this up to the end, but because the system encouraged it. Voting is part of the websites system that encourages groupthink.
Botting is always the specter people bring up when talking about manipulation but all the real famous examples from those three websites were actual people all clicking the same button. We are also afraid of the sort of top down manipulation you described as being psyops but that has gotten so subtle that something as ambiguous as a user vote count that requires all kinds of anonymity and obfuscation ought to be just taken out of the picture. They can’t psyop you with the metrics if you’re not looking at the metrics.
Duplicate posts and comments weren’t even what I was talking about when I said samey content, but you’re right: it’s a problem. To the question of “what can you do aside from just unsubbing?” I say “get rid of the incentive to make the same posts and comments over and over again”, get rid of the votes.
I do think you’re right about the last part though, the popularity of lemmy would suffer if it wasn’t a drop in replacement for Reddit. I had this discussion with another person in another thread and they finally threw up their hands and said “fine, here’s the activitypub git, make your commit and let’s see how it goes”. I didn’t make any suggested change of course because it’s a wildly unpopular idea and people would need to actually ask for it on a wide scale for developers to change things. Once enough people believe the website can be more than a slop trough there’ll be a chance to push something but for now it’s hearts and minds.
You present very fair points.
A good demonstration of how the voting system is counterproductive is the Steam reviews that are ruined to the point that they're barely usable as it's nearly impossible to find a coherent actual review of a game and not a poor attempt at humor, or worse, a copy-pasted award farming sob story.
But Steam reviews are functional and have a narrow task of helping you make a buying decision, so it doesn't compare directly to a general purpose social network like Lemmy.
I understand how upvotes may promote groupthink and how downvotes may encourage unhealthy self-censorship but I don't agree that the problem is on the scale of being existential. The general consensus is that voting helps promote quality content and my personal experience with Lemmy so far makes me agree with it.
One of the maintainers has a similar argument against removing voting, but maybe they're right about the benefits of hiding the counts.
Also I think it would be good if there were fine-grained control for casting and displaying votes.
An even better example of metrics turned bad that follows the same trajectory as Reddit is Newegg. That site used to be great not just because of the very fine grained search tools but because of the reviews. You could know that by drilling down for socket, ram slot, peripherals and expansions that the motherboard with top ratings would be great. Now it’s as much of a mess as amazons reviews. The only way these sites could save their business model was to fall back on customer service under the eBay model (we will act as a proxy for your pig in a poke purchases).
Why did Amazon, Newegg and steam go so bad so much faster than Reddit, digg and slashdot? The level of incentivization present! Every user on a shopping site engages directly with the metrics, while the majority of users on aggregators engage indirectly with them through passive reading.
With all that pressure to conform to the expectations of metrics, shopping sites became a race to the bottom (or top, since they all wanted to get to the majority 5-star rank).
If it hasn’t become clear, I’m arguing that in the past, metrics were an existential problem for aggregator sites and this is evidenced by the fact that among other things the metrics were to fractious and incentivized antisocial behavior to the point that those sites either closed up shop or lost the user base. Successive aggregators responded not by trying to fix the problem but by accepting their role as antisocial non-communities.
I’m arguing that all the experiences we’ve told each other about are examples of the metrics still being existential problems although certainly not acute. And of course that the consensus is wrong.
You brought up earlier the idea of educating users when to up/downvote and I’m interested in hearing more about that. Do you think it’s reasonable to expect people to apply whatever decision rubric the particular instance proscribes in choosing to press the green or red button?
Wasn’t there a British tv show like that?
I admit, it's probably idealistic of me to expect all people to follow the guideline of "downvote is not a disagree button". But I assume most users are already acting in good faith and those who disrupt the intended use (promote quality content, discourage uninteresting content) are a minority.
There is no data that the algorithm is not doing its job on Lemmy. My personal experience show that it does an okay job at least, so I inclined to believe that voting is still more of a good thing than a bad thing. If the problems you mention become significant, then they should be addressed, but only if and when. It's unlikely that voting on Lemmy is going anywhere, so arguing about it is not productive.
Dessalines puts it pretty well here.
i know we're winding up this chat, but for the next few days, scroll to the bottom of some threads and see if the barbara pit comments are uninteresting or just unpopular. Just take a look.
hot and active sort are useless and every instance now has temporal sort to get around it. the algorithm isn't doing its job on lemmy. that's a totally different issue and as a person whos actively opposing metrics i'm not interested in it as much.
and arguing about it isn't productive for you. youre never gonna convince me the metrics that have done nothing but damage social interactions my whole life are actually good, so you don't get anything out of it.
i'm winning.mpg when i argue about it because clearly and thoughtfully engaging with people about my fringe viewpoint exposes more people to it and makes it less likely to get downvoted to oblivion whenever its brought up.
never wrestle with a pig, you both get muddy and the pig enjoys it. 🐷
I'll take a look. I haven't really examined the bottom comments before. Also I just learned about the Barbara pit massacre.
I meant the debate is not productive in the sense that we only have our opinions and opposing anecdotes to back up our arguments. I may change my mind after I make the observations you suggested.
And after all, Nutomic said they'd never remove the slur filter, and yet here we are, they caved in after all and effectively fully removed it by making it fully customizable.
yeah, who knows what will happen tbh.
it would be nice to get a bottom sort. just to know what people don't like.