this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Get rid of the votes.
How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?
You read it and when it’s good you respond with a contribution or expansion on the ideas presented.
Maybe you quote the post but write nothing, or put an emoji nodding and smiling and pointing at the quoted text.
When something’s spam you either ignore it or tell that person to fuck off. Maybe you report their posts, then a mod drops in and confirms that they should fuck off and either gently corrects them or bans them with whatever level of granularity is appropriate.
Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e.., high effort posts)?
If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let's one person's time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.
No, that assumption is wrong. That phenomenon didn’t become common and problematic until systems to remove the human element were put in place. Like voting.
Think of the forum you go to for your niche hobby. No, not the subreddit or lemmy !, the forum with all those old guys (they are guys for my hobby) with signatures that have pictures of their pets and Miata and a proud listing of the equipment they use to do their thing. Do those places have problems with spam, advertising, trolling or low effort posts?
Of course not! Spam gets removed, advertising is relegated to the buy/sell/trade subforum, trolling is accepted or moderated out based on the community’s preference and ditto for posting effort.
Votes are very important if you’re trying to create a system that encourages a parasocial relationship between users. If you don’t want to encourage a parasocial interaction then there’s not much reason for votes.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for genuinely engaging, by the way.
I worry that the mechanisms you describe might not work as the number of users gets large. Check out "Eternal September" if you don't know about it already. Niche forums might be able to run like that just because they will never have too many members. For forums which many people are interested in (e.g., cat memes), this might not be possible. They may need a mechanism for high-grading content.
forgive me for swinging at the low hanging fruit, but:
if only there were some system that allowed users to switch to different servers when they get tired of the one theyre on.
september was a problem on usenet because it was a huge platform everybody was on. the structure of federated systems is inherently secure from septembers of yore and behaves like old forum splits. look at whats happening on world right now, it's having problems and people are leaving for other servers.
if all of facebook for example suddenly got sprayed onto a federated system, people who didn't want to be around that would just move to servers that enforced their norms or didn't federate with the newbies.
there is no need for content grading unless we just want to have that particular "internet as tv" parasocial relationship.
Fair enough, but that still doesn't address the problem for people who do want to be on a large server---full of many people who share their cat meme interests---and see mostly high quality content.
Wanting to be in a forum with thousands or millions of other enthusiasts is a legitimate use case for this kind of social media platform. In that use case, I don't know of any other way but voting to efficiently filter low quality content. "Just leave" avoids the problem rather than solving it, by denying people the opportunity to do the thing that most people go to Reddit for: to be part of huge communities and just see the good threads and comments.
Well now that’s a horse of a different phenotype. A person who wants to be in a giant platform shouldn’t leave when the aol users come barging in.
But voting isn’t required for that size of system to work. Consider a big forum: the cat memes thread might be a hundred thousand pages long and might have an images only button so you only ever see the memes, none of the commentary. Do you need a voting system to keep the quality up? No! When someone posts bad memes they’re told to get it right by all the other people.
I think one of the parts of Reddit (and most social media tbh) that you’re not really engaging with is that most users don’t post. Most users don’t put up pictures of themselves or share the most recent thing they ate or comment on someone else’s. Most users don’t fire off a two sentence missive when someone cuts them off in traffic or repost someone else’s so all their friends will see it. Most people using social media don’t post. And that’s fine.
So when you have a platform with that situation and you’re making money off of ads you want technologies that push engagement. For some platforms it was bigger more aggregated front pages (digg, slashdot, Reddit) and some more subtle ones used the conflict algorithm. That’s why we never saw votes before the age of social media, there wasn’t a reason to have them.
But when you’re not trying to sell ads and go public and get acquired and retire at 30 a multi-millionaire, that’s a “solution” (it messes up more stuff than it fixes) in search of a “problem” (there was never a dearth of good posts and everyone could find them).
We don’t need to extensive metrics to have a good, big, high quality community.
I like this...upvote! 😁
Hell yeah!
Hey everybody, come prove electoralism works!
IMHO, It's fine as long as there's no account wide Reddit-style karma.
Is it fine the way it’s implemented, with no vote anonymity?
No, I don't think so, but that's a different aspect.
Do you think the issues with voting (Samey content, lowkey groupthink, manipulation, etc) are acceptable if there was some technical solution to vote anonymity?
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 with 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.
Also, Boosts in Kbin are more effective than upvotes but it's not obvious to a person who isn't aware of that