Do you think the issues with voting (Samey content, lowkey groupthink, manipulation, etc) are acceptable if there was some technical solution to vote anonymity?
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).
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.
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?
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 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?