Convincing the new Digg not to use downvotes
A while back I read an article about the development of a new Digg platform.
I signed up for an email list about new developments. I got invited to pay $5 USD to join a forum to see updates on their efforts and give suggestions.
I've been advocating for not implementing downvoting.
My reasoning is that having just upvotes like Tildes serves the original purpose of voting on content. It moves the better content towards the top and the poorer content towards the bottom. Downvoting at least on Reddit just becomes a middle finger for most cases.
I was surprised how many other people at this special forum were AGAINST that idea. They really want to be able to give people a middle finger.
Sadly, I saw a preview of the U.I. today and at least for new threads it had a "bury" link.
Oh well. I tried!
IMO upvotes alone are not actually a guarantee that "better" content rises to the top in a system where content is sorted purely by raw vote numbers. And unless you also proposed stricter moderation, alternate sorting systems, and/or comment labels like Tildes has, which all help address the various situations where lower-quality content regularly outperforms higher-quality content in terms of votes, all you have accomplished by removing downvotes is to make it even easier for the worst kind of low-quality content (click/rage/flame bait, hot takes, low-effort memes, etc.) to take over the site.
I wonder how much votes even matter on tildes? The default is to sort by activity so unless a lot of people are choosing to sort by votes instead it seems to act more like a karma tip jar than any kind of filter.
It matters a lot for comments, where once a topic has received a certain amount of attention, the top comments are usually fairly immovable, and most discussion typically happens as replies to those comments. This is of course recursive - for really large discussions, most of the activity happens in the first reply to the first reply to the first reply to the first comment, or something like that.
It feels like nested comments are very much here to stay, even in post-Reddit communities, but I really miss the old style of linear forum thread, where conversations could meander much more, but where there wasn't the same splitting up of threads of conversation. That and purely activity-based sorting were really nice features. But I think this is a minority opinion at this point, unfortunately.
In my experience that really isn't true here since comment labels have dramatic effects on the comment sort. Exemplary labeled comments often skyrocket up the sort. Comments that are Jokes or Offtopic drop down the sort. Comments that are "Noise" (don't add anything of substance to the discussion) drop to the very bottom of the sort and get auto-collapsed.
Perfect example:
https://tildes.net/~society/1ndj/there_must_be_nazis_in_the_white_house_eo_14188_14_88#comment-fd1f
kfwyre made their comment a full day after the topic was submitted, dozens of other comments had already been posted, and the now next highest comment was already up at the top. Yet there kfwyre's comment sits at the top now, and deservedly so, IMO.
And on many occasions I have seen top comments which were nothing more than emotionally charged hot takes, one-line jokes, or completely offtopic, plummet to the bottom thanks to the Noise label, or settle to the middle of the pack thanks to the Joke or Offtopic labels. Any time you see a comment with less votes sorted higher than one with more votes that is because of labels... and that happens pretty frequently here.
Tildes Activity Sorts, and 'Collapse old comments when I return to a topic' setting (which is enabled by default), as well as the New Comment Stripe on the left side of new comments, makes it much much more likely that new comment actually get seen and voted on days, weeks, months or even years after the topic was first submitted.
That only works if there's an exemplary comment to make, but a lot of topics are more discussion-like (e.g. "what do you think about xyz?"), where it's unlikely that any of the comments will be marked as exemplary or off-topic because they're just different people giving different opinions. The result is that conversation focuses on the comments that were made first, and everything that comes after becomes ignored. And you're right, collapse old comments helps, but not while the discussion is actively happening - in part, because it then hides all the context for a discussion which makes it difficult to follow what's happening, but also because I haven't usually read most of the "old comments" because I only skimmed the top discussions because they take up so much space.
That said, it's good to know that the labels work that way, and maybe it's worth highlighting that more in terms of how they get used. In practice, most of the exemplary comments I've made haven't felt very exemplary, but seeing them as "late comments that someone super-upvoted" makes more sense. Maybe that should be reflected in the UI?
I don't think comment labels in its current form would scale well to bigger platforms like reddit though, since the first two labels have an effect, but every subsequent duplicate label is more or less irrelevant to the comment order. So large threads with a lot of engagement could easily have every comment labelled with every label to a point where the labels would no longer have any effect.
Agreed, these labels work because Tildes is a fairly small community, so there is little abuse and when people do get a bit too enthusiastic about certain labels they might be corrected by Deimos.
On a larger platform they would just turn into super upvotes and de facto downvotes. Some of that might be mitigated by some algorithmic monitoring of how individuals use labels and disabling them if abuse is detected. But that will only catch blatant abuse or have a lot of false positives.
Having a good and reliable voting system is incredibly difficult to pull off. To the point that I am not even sure it is possible to really do at scale.
Yeah nesting is a mixed bag for me, it can make it hard to see the order comments are made in but on the other hand coming into a thread late looking for answers to questions is so much nicer. Trying to find a technical answer in a long Steam discussion forum is just awful for example.
Tildes' system can easily have a comment kicked down to the bottom (if appropriate) if more people label it, since the labels can halve the amount of votes. I wonder if there's a way to provide more feedback, if not exactly about the content of the labels, at least about whether there has been "labeling activity" on the comment. Just some kind of small dot or color code might increase engagement with the labeling system.
I was about to say this. I pretty much never look at the votes, even if it's my posts lol
Tildes is small enough that even 24 hours later, you'll see posts up top. I have had some of my posts get replies up to four days later.
...so I'm not sure using Tildes as an example that votes only work is a good point. Votes on posts don't matter here.
I'd say that, unless a website goes the Tildes route, it might be sensible to remove downvotes from comments while keeping them on posts. That is because a downvote on a post feels like it's about the content while downvotes for comments feel very personal and aggressive.
That could be a decent middle-ground so long as the site has solid moderation, and a zero tolerance policy when it comes to hate speech. Because without those, and no way for sensible users to downvote hateful/bigoted comments and misinformation, that community will likely go to shit pretty quickly.
Yes, I can see how that might be a problem. As a user I am very mindful of user experience, and I find downvotes for comments toxic. But I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes to moderate a community.
As a conversation-oriented person I didn't give enough thought to the difference between content and discussion. I don't necessarily disagree with downvotes for linked content, I guess.
That said, I'm not sure I believe that any fully automated moderation system can prevent those issues. It seems to me these systems can always be gamed (especialy with a big enough accumulation of bad elements). Reddit is certainly filled with people who deliberately upvote bigoted comments and misinformation, right? Over there, I was always a defender of human moderators. The mere requirement that a human has to manually assign a subreddit's moderators is a big help.
I've found over the years that downvotes are more likely to be misused than used in an ideal manner. Most people won't use them for curation. They'll use them emotionally, as revenge, censorship, a manifestation of bias, etc. There are no barriers on their use (or only very mild ones - Hacker News and Stack Exchange are examples of platforms with mild barriers) so just like you might see popular low-quality content float to the top, what's stopping a symmetrical system from pushing high-quality content to the bottom, only because it's unpopular?
The advantage of a positive-only system is that interactions must be positive. There isn't a one click generic "attack this post" button, so it fosters a positive culture where you are a little more likely to explain yourself when you disagree.
Any simple voting system is inherently a measure of popularity and not quality though. I'm not convinced a lack of ability to downvote stuff can change that.
It's not suposed to solve that problem (or at least I don't think it does and I don't know how to solve it myself). My point was only that if it makes no difference I'd rather have a community primed to focus on the good rather than the bad!
It's not that simple though. cfabbro already did touch on it, there is also another factor and that is scale. It works for Tildes as the community is fairly small. But even on Tildes you can see instances where something gets a lot of upvotes based on vibes and not merit. Imagine how that would look like on a much larger platform.
I am not saying that introducing downvotes solves that, but you can't just have upvotes either.
What's the ideology behind this group ? If they want to be a hit new social media hub phenom they will need a downvote to drive engagement and collect reactionary outrage. A
I downvoted you because you couldn't even be bothered to finish your po
She's just Canadian. Voice to text error
Indeed. My E and H keys were gummed up when I spilled maple syrup all over the keyboard this morning, in my excitement and childish cackling about politician fortunes.
Did you actually spill maple syrup on the keyboard because that's the most adorable Canadian thing ever.
No -..- I call fake news on myself. As compensation I give you two true Canadian tiny tales.
Shamefully, years ago I've purchased some abomination called Map-O Spread. It was packaged in a tradition looking brown container with maple leaves on it but contains no maple syrup!! The villainy!!!! >:E I thought it was maple butter, which is a completely different kind of product and utterly delicious.
This morning I was very careful eating leftover Hawaiian pizza and Donair pizza so they don't drip into the keyboard. I actually forgot that they're Canadian flavours until just now.
In exchange for your honesty, a Tiktok about how we're all talking down here
But, uh, while we do have Hawaiian pizza here, what's Donair?
Not Canadian, but I've come across this one.
Donair is the Canadian take on a doner kebab, adjusted to suit the local tastes.
I think the main distinction is that the sauce they typically use has condensed milk in it.
ಠ _｣ಠ
I don't know how I feel about it
It's nice! Here in Atlantic Canada it's also a legit fries "flavour" choice as well :/
It's sweet, it's got a bunch of meat, it's hot and cheesy. It's good pizza :<
My conjecture is that it's got such strong flavours and added sweetness because folks would come in from a hard day fishing or coal mining or steel working and needed that quick jolt. Actually no idea why Donair is popular here. Wasn't a known food in Vancouver
I'm not a big sweet/savory combination fan - I don't love fruit + meat for example, so I'm just not sure I'd vibe. I also grew up with gyros rather than doner or kebab or shwarma and while they're all related afaik gyros taste "Right" to me. (Sort of how I like the Indian food of the region most represented in the area I was living in when I started eating it)
But hey, you never know
Hmmm I sort of know what you mean. here's definitely a sort of uncanny valley when it comes to food and especially spices/flavouring: too close but different is worse than way different
Interesting username. Any relations to our Mod and Saviour, Deimos?
Deimos sempai is Canadian though, I think, so probably not the same person hmmm
Haha, no relation
Maple syrup is crack, and maple butter is also crack. I've always been a complete and utter whore for anything maple. lol
Have you ever been to a maple syrup forest / sugar shack? When I lived in Ontario, there was a demo sugar shack set up on public grounds, and every spring they have a pancake day where they invite the community to eat freshly made maple syrup on hot pancakes, and do a little walk through of how it all works. Seems like you'd like that.
I've never been to maple syrup territory. And it's best for my diabetes that I never do. ;-)
I hope you rinsed it with some Molson
I was waiting till you finished your Glenn Beck story,
AEh.Just kidding I remember it from the other time you told it two years ago during the Reddit refugee migration summer :)
I think that's the last time I told it anywhere, except once to IRL people here in Wiliamsburg. lol
I'm just glad to know you're still alive. I thought a sniper might've gotten you ;-)
I saw the same news about Digg as OP and signed up. Months later I get an email saying “if you pay some money, you can see the preview!” Definitely they are looking for a big payday and I expect they will pursue it with the standard engagement bait strategy.
Here's my online community-building hot take: sites should have only downvotes.
Consider. The value in a social network past any irrelevantly-niche scale is derived by its moderation. Moderation, practically by definition, is "removing" "bad" content (both words construed broadly) from the community. Moderators do not directly incentivize high-quality content; they make a space for it by pulling the weeds. And user voting is distributed moderation. (Reddit actually used to refer to it as "user moderation", though I have my doubts that's still anywhere.)
Furthermore, promoting upvoted content creates a vicious cycle. Upvoted content becomes more visible, which results in more upvotes, which increases visibility, etc.
And finally, no offense to all us users out there, but users are shit at picking good content. You can see it on Reddit easily: the top comment on nearly every popular thread is a dumb joke riffing off or clowning on the parent. Jokes, memes, pun threads; "easy to consume" trumps every other metric of "good" every time. (This is, of course, reinforced by the visibility vicious cycle.) It's hit the point where lots of adjacent sites develop a cadre of "no fun police" users who object to jokes, memes, and pun threads on their site out of fear of it turning into Reddit (when I would argue that having some fun is, in fact, essential to building a healthy community).
You're not wrong, but if users can't pick good content from bad, how are they any more qualified at choosing what to downvote?
I don't totally disagree with you, but it causes me to rethink some of my ideas a bit.
I think I would still have upvotes. To me, that's the way people show appreciation for posts.
I don't mind jokes. But I do think I'd keep the Tildes labels. And instead of forcing those down, I'd have a "joke score" type thing and allow a user preference on how much to push those down. Like on reddit, you can auto-hide posts under a certain score. Or maybe that's RES. So for those for whom jokes are an issue, either a raw score or probably a ratio of joke labels to votes would push them down farther, but for those like me who are fine with them, it wouldn't.
And I think I might compromise on downvotes with those that don't like them: Hide the downvotes, but definitely allow them. Highlight "controversial" posts to mods who can prune if needed. Or perhaps it can affect the display of the comment. A poor enough ratio and your content is hidden unless a mod approves or something like that. If not exactly that, it could be leveraged.
Definitely a way to hide trolls so they stop getting attention would be great.
A way to highlight thoughtful content while still allowing joke replies is perfect to me.
That is what I think would be most likely to work. The big problem with voting in content is that a vote means different things to different people, and no system attempts to solve that.
Someone might upvote because they agree, because they think it's worthy of discussion, because they like the poster, because they like the music in the video, because it's funny, because it's mean.
If there were a way to motivate people to vote in a categorized way - (+1 funny, -1 kindness, -1 relevance), you'd get more useful information and would make it easier for consumers to find the kind of content they want.
Before I abandoned reddit, I would go there in different moods. Sometimes I consumed news cynically and was only in the mood for "well what did we expect?" type non-comments. Other times I went to understand everything about a situation that was unfolding, and all I wanted is a thoughtful opinion from an expert.
Reddit doesn't try to solve that. Usually top comments are funny because most people come to reddit in the mood for funny. I remember the first time someone used "bro it's just reddit" as part of a debate, and I realized that the place I came for news was the same place others came to for low info quips.
If users had a way of saying "show me all of these comments without the jokes" or "block any comments that are overly rude/argumentative", I might find that effective.
But I think the biggest problem is getting users to do that. As much as I lean against AI for anything important that doesn't pass human eyes, I think it could be okay for this. It may not be able to judge an informed comment from a mis/disinformed comment, but it's pretty good at identifying bad faith arguments, unkind tones, jokes vs legit commentary.
Maybe some functionality based on AI that also goes through humans? Give every X users the ability to vote on what AI thinks about the content.
I also think voting on content should be transparent. We're not selecting a new president (unless...?), we're nodding along or shaking or heads to content. In my mind, who votes for what in social media should be public. Not in some attempt to unveil bad voters, but because these systems should encourage people to behave the way they would in a public discussion by not casting votes they wouldn't want others to know about.
Reddit absolutely only cares about eyeballs and engagement, not the community. It was a good community 15 years ago.
Now that I've stared getting 429s when I visit using old reddit, when I visit, I have to use new reddit, and because of that, see all the subreddits I've filtered out from /r/all using RES, and that mix of crap is cancer. Reddit is still decent, but you have to filter out so much to make it so…
Of course, votes were always largely about "I like this" / "I agree", but it has certainly gotten worse over time.
I didn't leave reddit because I didn't think it had anything left to give, but for the reasons you mentioned: the signal to noise ratio was way too low for me. But worse, it had become that years ago and I just failed to notice. I continued on using a platform that I'd grown very bitter about and it wasn't enriching me in any way (other than the odd post here and there -- I found some pretty cool entries in the backrooms genre with which I'm mildly obsessed).
When the election happened, I also realized I'd echo chambered myself. I knew reddit was an echo chamber, but I think I lost track of how bad it had gotten and how far from reality it had gotten.
I'm really happy since leaving reddit. I replaced it with tildes, which isn't nearly the volume reddit was, but with some effort I've overcome the desire for high volume, low signal content.
I also don't like the runners of reddit and don't want to contribute to their success any more. The reddit that I fell in love with years ago also died years ago.
I appreciate your hot take, however, I think you know that this button would be used for things you don’t like and not things you think are “killing the community”.
Reddit went through this evolution itself. Originally up and downvotes were, broadly speaking, “does this contribute to the conversation?” Not, “do I agree or disagree with X” X being a comment or a post. However, I think it’s very clear that Reddit now has no ground rules of what a down or upvote means. Each community had to decide what those meant, and even when you explicitly say that — people do it incorrectly. And I mean truly incorrectly, in a place like “r/unpopularopinion” you have to constantly remind people to not downvote the unpopular opinion ! Same with questions like, “people who have committed SA, do you feel guilt ?” And then allllll the downvotes. Amitheasshole, same thing. The site cannot separate user visceral feelings, from function.
I always felt you’d need to have a way to get users to demonstrate they understood the rules to participate. But I realize that would not work either, so, I go back and forth with “extreme moderation” like r/science vs free for all lol.
Again, appreciate the idea.
Interesting concept! I'd love to see a social media site try it.
Maybe sort posts and comments by both downvotes and age, so you'd see the ones with no downvotes at the top, ranked oldest to newest. That way quality flows upwards.
One problem would be lots of duplicates, since it would be hard to see if someone has already posted something similar to your thoughts. For links a duplicate post could maybe count as an upvote to the first post with that link? For comments, maybe a LLM could check if someone has already posted a very similar comment.
I get the resistance. Having no downvotes works on a side like Tildes, but if you go into the comments of a site like Facebook or Instagram that don't have downvotes, you'll probably very quickly be able to find comments near the top of a post that you wish you could bury because they're so heinous.
Has the idea of a limited number of downvotes been suggested anywhere? It could be limited to a certain amount per day or something along those lines so users can have some power to reduce visibility of posts they feel strongly against, but it might help with the (frankly natural, imo) desire to downvote every single thing you don't like.
Slashdot used to have max 5 points for a great post, and min -5 for a very terrible one. Points are given out to frequent users randomly, not unlimited and not inherent to accounts. I quite liked that system
I agree with this. I think that having downvotes is what
makesmade Reddit such a great platform at that scale. Tildes has the ability to moderate its community fairly well by setting the correct tone, the way it moderates things, and through being invite only. Those things don't work at scale.Having downvotes on Tildes would make this place worse. Not being able to downvote heinous comments on Reddit or another similarly large site would make them worse.
I, uh, might need a cheat code to get more downvotes please. :)
What about a system like private torrent trackers have, where you have to maintain a good upload-to-download ratio, except it would be upvotes-to-downvotes? You'd probably have to make it a rolling window so people couldn't bank up a ton of upvotes to go in downvote sprees later, but it would seem to democratize downvotes by giving more to those who are more active.
I feel like that might just create a new problem or moves it elsewhere. Moderating on reddit I had to deal with power users a lot, who would post an insane amount of content caring more about their karma and not subreddit rules. They cared enough about the rules to not blatantly break them and would game the system to be as much in their favor as possible and still be problematic in many ways. We also had to deal with spammers a ton, obviously, they also got smarter and smarter. Padding accounts with real looking comments and all that.
The power users would probably game the system to always have up and downvotes on hand. Spammers likely also would automate the shit out keeping that ratio just right so they can use their votes to skew whatever they are spamming.
Having said that, your suggestion does remind me of another system that might help a little bit. Which I think might also be in place on Tildes somewhat (not quite sure). Which is at least limiting what newer users can do and gradually giving them more voting/label power over time.
An implementation where this is done with active education when certain mechanics are unlocked might be beneficial. That way waves of new people don't have this immediate (often negative) impact on community, and it will create more awareness of how the system is supposed to function.
The ratio you suggest might still play a role here as well. But more as an indicator to be used as a signal towards the user and possibly moderator/admin team about users.
Specifically towards the user I am leaning towards something that really is "in their face" so to speak about how things are supposed to function and something that gives clear visible feedback.
As somebody who is nearly terminally online, I'm not sure giving all the filtering power to people like me is ever a good idea ;)
As somebody who is nearly terminally online, and confident that everything I think is correct and people who disagree with me are stupid morons… I think this is a BRILLIANT idea. ;-)
Here's the thing, I do wish I could downvote on Tildes. There are conversations where all I wish is that I could give a middle finger. I'd probably have said the same - let me keep the middle finger option. But I think generally it's better for myself and the conversation that I don't have it. I agree with others though there's a size and moderation difference here that makes things work in a way that they wouldn't on a reddit sized project.
I do wish for labels between Noise, Off Topic, and Joke (which all feel similar) and "Malice" because there are definitely things that don't rise to the level of Malice but are a problem. I'd also love more positive labels. They don't all have to impact post sorting but I prefer more granularity in my ability to communicate, and I don't always want to write a reply saying "you're absolutely on point, cosign" which an up vote doesn't quite convey.
Exactly. We all "want" the middle finger button, but there is no communication when it's used, only bafflement. The target won't understand why you disagree, and even others who disagree might disagree for completely unrelated reasons. In that, Hacker News, where you're supposed to downvote if you disagree, is even worse than reddit, where "in theory" downvotes were supposed to be for curation (though they both have each other's UIs...)
I'm not much of a labels person but I thought that was supposed to be what Noise is for? I see Noise as having a definite negative connotation while Off-Topic and Joke are welcome but irrelevant (Off-Topic) or not strictly useful (Joke) conversation.
Maybe? It may just be that it feels more of an "off-topic" than a "bad vibes" to me.
🖕
please don't hurt me someone had to do it please label as 'joke'
Thanks for fighting the good fight. I also don't like downvotes as a feature. If I had to summarize why, it would be this:
No random user should be able to come along and apply an arbitrary downrank penalty to another user's post, without significant consequences for misuse.
So yeah, sure, here on Tildes we have labels. Users can technically apply a downrank penalty to any comment. The difference between labels on Tildes and downvotes on Reddit, Lemmy, and probably-maybe-soon-to-be-Digg is that misusing labels on Tildes will have consequences. You might get a talkin' to by the Big Man, or you might just straight up lose the ability to apply whatever label you were misusing, etc.
Downvotes have no such penalty for misuse. They're just a "the community will figure it out" feature. Time and time again social media sites have demonstrated that approach does not work.
Beyond that, I think the Tildes docs do a good job of explaining why downvotes are a sub-optimal solution to what is ultimately a content moderation problem:
https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-design#lack-of-downvoting
I feel like that is the biggest issue to be honest, however that also applies to a system with just upvotes. I just posted this comment, then came across your comment. It might sound odd to people, but voting systems are often made too simple. They seem intuitive, but they only are simple in functionality not impact. A system where people have to think about how they vote, why they vote and possible get feedback on their voting habits works much better.
Another silly thought I had, just get rid of "votes" and move to a labels only system with a twist. The twist being that the labels are not color coded, appear in a random order and each label has multiple variants (exemplary could show up as "commendable", "excellent" or of course "exemplary"). It would likely annoy people, but it would also remove the muscle memory for voting making it, so people have to actively seek out the label they want to apply and having them think about it. In practice, you probably would have people creating browser extensions to fixate the labels, hence it being a silly idea.
If all of this sounds very complex and like a participation barrier, that is correct on both counts. Participating in the conversation should be relatively low effort, participating in judging the participation of others probably should be something you have to give thought and consideration.
I love the idea of 'no downvotes' in principle, but there are a few things I expect work well on a small side (tildes scale) and the larger side (expected Digg, reddit, side).
On the smaller side its great, and inspires a community of free-love and positivity. On the larger side, it's a negative to not have it, the algorithm, the appeasement of 'the people' is much harder when sorting with only positive metrics. Sure, Digg will likely be able to present data based on things such as 'views vs interactions (comments and votes)', but I don't think that is beneficial.
Have a negative metric is beneficial to quickly classify content, and organize it. One of the things I hate about new YouTube is the removal of the public downvote metrics. Makes it harder to decide what might be my taste or not, how the community at large is feeling, and the similar.
I could see that public downvotes on a social aggregator like reddit being hidden (except to the author) as potentially better to remove the inclination to 'brigade' rivals, but that's about it.
tl;dr: Downvotes are good for larger platforms, worse for smaller. Public downvote counts are better on an individual (grok'ing) level, but bad for the community at large.
I actually kind of like how HN does it, where only after X (changing, never known) scale of positive points on your activity (comments/posts) or up/down percentage unlocks the ability to downvote, meaning only power-users and those who make attempts to be part of the community in the positive can have the ability to affect negatively, until their actions deem their ratio to lessen. This reduces brigading, encourages positive community-by-default, and allows for easier grok'ing for the user (if they are made public, which HN does not allow, sadly).
I see groundbreakers has closed, damn, I even had an email invite to join
Edit: Another opportunity is to enhance on the way Tildes and their labels function is where if you are able to downvote, you should be required to select or, preferably, write-in exactly why you downvote (with a say, 120 character count). This forces people to not instantly downvote everything, and requires a second (or third step). Second-step downvotes require more effort, and would be more valuable than a downrage spree user.
Digg needs to do the following to compete with Reddit and Lemmy.
Embrace third party apps and make their site's API freely available to developers, in an opposite move to what Reddit did almost two years prior.
Immediately establish simple and clear-to-understand ground rules to curb hate speech, gore, extremist content, medical disinformation, CSAM, incestposting and all the other stuff Reddit has become controversial for. The Reddit approach of waiting for press scandal and then using "vote manipulation" rules to ban or merely quarantine a problematic community is bad.
Outside of the aforementioned ground rules, Digg needs to be an open discussion platform first and foremost, as Reddit is rife with censorship. Don't shadowban posts or entire users because they used words like "incel", "Trump", "toxic", "snowflake", etc regardless of context. The only isolated words you actually should be censoring are slurs because you don't want that place to become Stormfront, Voat or Poal 2.0.
Ensure the user interface on desktop is actually better than New Reddit. Old Reddit is the ideal standard. The mock-up they've shown is kinda bad and needs to be more compressed.
Ditch the AI bullshit, unless it's being used in an innovative way to optimize server performance or implement a content recommendation algorithm that is somehow on-par with the likes of YouTube and TikTok.
User created communities, or actively create new communities based on user demand. This was an edge that Reddit had early in its lifespan.
Scrap leaderboards. Digg had a massive problem with power users (and so does Reddit.) Diggs and Gems are absolutely something you don't want to gamify.
This is meant as a general question and not one about Digg.
Do upvotes and downvotes need to exist at all if the scale of the community is small enough ?
When did engagement metrics become part of our internet experience ? It feels like there is a yearn to return to old school forums, but an equal desire for rapid engagement like up or down voting something.
I’m wondering also if there are sites that require you read the article/watch the video/ etc. as a preclusion to commenting or otherwise engaging. I have no idea how it would be enforced. But am curious if it exists.
Karma, to me, is the measure of how valuable others found my posts. It's a way to say "thanks" without replying "thanks".
So just like the way votes are shown on your own comments vs. everyone else's, I'd make two other changes:
For the author of a comment, there would be up to three vote numbers: Votes by the op of a thread, and the person to whom they replied would be show - then all other votes. That way, OP and the person who was replied to could "thank" a reply.
The downside is that this deanoymizes - so I would further break that into OP/replyee could choose to say "thanks" or could just upvote. So they could remain anonymous. Or not. Their choice.
What you’re saying lines up with a brief experiment Tildes tried where all votes were hidden. The general feedback was that activity went down, and it wasn’t even because people were tempted to post due to karma but because there was just no indication that anyone was seeing what you were posting. Only a small minority of people comment on posts so without votes it made the place just feel empty.
So it ends up not even really being a “thank you.” It’s sort of like if you’re talking to a group of people you sort of expect them to at least nod their heads or make eye contact or do something to indicate they’re listening whether they agree or disagree or whatever. Without anything like that it feels like you’re talking to yourself.
I guess that's why I almost always vote on people who reply to me and to whom I reply. I think of it more like a head nod. And to withhold that typically only in cases where I think someone has an actively bad opinion or comment. heh
Yeah I tend to vote if I paid any special attention or not. Like, if you’re a busker the vote means I stopped in front of you and listened for a bit. If I didn’t vote then I just walked past. In neither case did I leave any money in your hat. I guess I’d need a comment or an exemplary label for that.
I like your idea to somehow make the relationship between OP and others different.
It’d be interesting to have a “thanks” button or even a “agree” or “disagree” button. It’s weird how “words mean things”, since I’m sure someone will say. That’s just renaming the up and down vote buttons. But I think there is power in labeling something what it is, instead of allowing for vague interpretations.
I find it interesting that we (humans) are so obsessed with measurable recognition, that it’s not satisfying enough for us to know that someone has at least read what we wrote, we want distinct accolades lol. I myself am extremely guilty of this, so it’s not a dig at you.
I try to train myself to not look at up or downvotes, and instead focus on the interaction.
I really do think both (interaction and votes) are valuable feedback.
Sure, maybe fewer vote if you're late to a topic rather than early, but it's still a measure of how much it was appreciated :)
That said, also not focusing too much on the votes I think is also healthy.
I wonder if behaviors would be different if such buttons were labeled differently. For example, if rather than arrows or thumbs or anything anyone could use to indicate liking vs disliking it was just some carefully chosen words. For example, "Constructive" and "Irrelevant" or something. There's probably a better set of words, but I wonder if people would be less inclined to down vote things they disagree with if they didn't have a "disagree" button and instead had to call it "noise" or "off topic" or "irrelevant" or something.
Didn’t digg have curated content like slashdot? Is that what they’re restarting?
People who wrote "no downvoting" would not work on a larger scale: please give examples of where "no downvoting" on a large scale would not work. Thank you.
Not sure if this fits your request, but YouTube removing the dislike button is considered controversial. No downvote buttons seem to mess up areas where you have lack of control to exposure or there is a lot of information to sift through. While researching this, I saw a good example, “if I search YouTube for how to treat a snake bite, and it has 50k upvotes but it kills me because it’s wrong and I didn’t know that because I can’t see the 100k downvotes — how would I vet material that can only have upvotes ?” — ofc we should independently vet any material we come across, but that is exhausting.
I have never ventured to 2 or 4chan, so disregard if not applicable, but I believe they have no up or downvote functions ? I’m not sure if it’s that or the abundant anonymity that make those cesspools.
Do either of those fit your criteria ?
Footnote- it seems like no amount of downvoting can replace active and diverse moderation. So I’m wondering if the question really — is obscuring that we are at a point of internet society that we should require moderation.
I think you missed a there ;) Also, what sort of examples are you looking for? Like real world examples of it not working, or more concretely why it doesn't work?
If it is the former, it makes me wonder are there examples of communities working with just upvotes at scale? What I am trying to get at is that it is a complex issue and for most "simple" mechanics we have around 30 years of to work with on the internet alone.
To be frank, this question is so broad that it can be aimed at a number of people who each all made different arguments. So I am really not sure what you are looking for as you keep your thoughts close to your chest with this follow-up comment.
Can you share a screenshot of the new Digg?
They've updated slightly since this, but basically this without the top larger content boxes:
https://ieh.im/s/msedge_kWFW7zCAi1.jpg
Thanks! It’s basically the new (awful) Reddit 🫠
I think it depends on how the community there evolves.
I've got an open mind AND few preconceived notions, just because while I had a Digg account back in the day, I never got into it. I'd imagine old Diggers have a lot of expectations and most will be disappointed to some degree, small or large.
Hopefully it turns into a good community. Like tildes started as basically a copy of old reddit with some tweaks, but the community that has developed here is fantastc.
I think the design of a site - how it looks and operates - is important, but much more important is the community.
I tried to get into.... I'm spacing on the name, but one of the reddit alternatives that is a federated thing with many servers. Not Mastodon, which is federated "twitter" but the one that operates like reddit. But the culture was a bit meh for me. edit: lemme edit my post to add "lemmy"
Tildes feels grown up and mature. The one I can't remember (edit: Lemmy) felt young - and that's fine. But I'm not young anymore. While I struggle to not post little joke replies here that probably irritate some, I think most of us here do accept that some joking replies are gonna happen, and for me… I have trouble not making them. but I do appreciate that there are good in-depth discussions here, too, and I'm very glad to participate in those. I personally think the mix of conversation here is pretty close to optimal. And I sorely appreciate that when I go on a verbose babble like this one, I don't get replies of "wow, tl;dr" and "why do u care so much" and all the other things less literate people bitch about because reading is scary. lol
Not that I'm better than anyone else including them, it's just a different culture. Although I am better than them. ;-)