this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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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.