Are noise tags turning into a de facto downvote?
I'm fairly new to the site as I came in from the hackernews post a fortnight ago. I enjoyed the fact that this site doesn't have downvotes. However, when I am reading through posts I am seeing the noise tag on multiple posts that don't seem to merit it, with examples linked below. The comments aren't literary masterpieces by any stretch, but they are concerning the topic on hand. The noise tag appears to be getting used as a downvote or "I disagree" button.
I know the user that was the first ban also used the noise tag this way, but this seems to be a more wide spread issue than one user. We can't prevent a de facto downvote tag from appearing organically everywhere. Eventually sub communities will form around a tilde and adopt a tag as a downvote, the same way all online communities change the meaning of some word or tool they already have. I don't think that we want this to be a standard tildes wide behavior however.
How should we go about preventing the use of tags as downvotes like this? Stricter moderation? Removing tags with negative connotations? Making tags visible only if they reach a certain threshold?
https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6kb
https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6mh
https://tildes.net/~misc/10r/furries#comment-6pq
Noise is meant for comments that don't contribute anything substantial (doc page). I'm not sure what the most appropriate tag would be for blatantly lying about the one side not being based on peer reviewed research, but 'noise' makes some sense there. The second comment you linked was clearly just a headline take. I'm not really sure how I would categorize the exchange about furries...
But I do think you're right that it's being used that way. I've made two comments referring to LGBT people on tildes and each of them were tagged as 'noise', though they were both on topic and directly contributory.
https://tildes.net/~tildes/ux/daily_tildes_discussion_time_to_slow_down_a_bit_and_figure_some_things_out#comment-4yf
https://tildes.net/~tildes/zg/who_to_invite#comment-6m5
Reddit in particular has an issue with the concept of 'contributory' comments, where there's a bit of an ideology that floats around on voting. You're supposed to downvote comments that don't contribute, not ones that you disagree with... so people frame comments they disagree with as not contributing. What we're seeing here is probably a carry over of that concept.
edit: A PM from @Deimos confirms that he intended to turn off tags until they can be better implemented, and is going to do so today.
Yeah, I've been talking about doing that for a little while now but hadn't actually flipped the switch yet. It seems like a pretty high portion of the usage of them so far was misuse, so I've disabled the ability to add/remove them for now, but left the existing ones visible so I didn't ruin the examples from posts like this one.
I'll make the daily discussion about comment tags in a few hours, and we can talk about what's needed as the bare minimum to be able to turn them back on, and some general other improvements.
Also - might it be time for a ~tildes.announcements? ~tildes itself is turning into a kind of theoryofreddit/ideasfortheadmins space (and that's awesome) but at some point, I think we're going to want to be able to find your daily discussions and official updates/news on their own, without confusing them with everyone else's conversations about the site.
Yeah, might need to do something like that very soon. I'm sure there are people that don't necessarily want to subscribe and see all the suggestions/feedback/etc. threads but still want to catch the announcements.
An announcements ~ would also alleviate the need for an FAQ.
Maybe new users could be directed to review the ~tildes.announcements before making suggestions.
Speaking of; I saw a FAQ post on here a day or two ago and it helped me get up to speed with the site/feel of the devs. But after inviting someone and wanting to get them a bit up to speed, I can't for the life of me find it in my browser history or actually remember what the title was exactly. Do you have any idea which one i'm talking about? It had like 5+ links to some other ~ threads I think, not the faq on the docs.
I can't wait for the save/search feature to be implemented because this feels awkward asking
I think this might be it.
(whisper|not really but i can pretend) That's the one, thanks a tonne!
Haha, no problem. We definitely need stickies or a link on the sidebar. Maybe Amarok will be making a new updated post for the newcomers. (I can help with that if you want, @Amarok, although I like your tone better than mine, tbh).
Only if they're not collapsed, though. I basically browse on mobile most of the time, so I never see sidebars unless I want to...
FYI, mentions are not implemented yet, so tagging a user won't make them aware at the moment.
I can confirm that I would. I would not have made this post if I had seen your comments earlier about turning off comment tags
Don't occlude the theory threads away too soon! this group of people has a lot in common, clearly, but our most fundamental point of similarity (and discussion) is still that we all want to find a new community. Let's just revel in it for a while
Theory posts wouldn't be going away, it's more that official announcements would have their own ~group (to be more easily findable)
I was under the impression that tildes is trying to have the community refute those lies rather than just 'downvoting' and have people expect that downvoted comments are wrong. That's one of the appealing aspects of the site for me. Pointing at a comment and saying "That's not true!" doesn't have nearly the impact that a reasoned and well-researched rebuttal does. It also has the propensity to sway the views of others that read the exchange.
Their lie is refuted by the post link.
Save for telling them to RTFA, I wouldn't waste my time trying to convince someone who is obviously not posting in good faith, and I would hope the people seeing the thread wouldn't believe inflammatory lies without reading the post their selves.
Maybe we need a "RTFA" tag. Though with a better name.
edit: On second thought, there is a bit of pragmatism to posting an intentionally vague response, like "This isn't true. Read the article before posting.", but I feel like going the full nine yards by including an actual rebuttal would only foster that reddit-like culture of only reading the title then reading the comments for how to react.
I suppose an "RTA" tag (hey, I made the name better) might punish people who make comments without having read the article enough to prevent that culture... but if that doesn't work, and we do have people commenting without reading, the tag will probably fall to misuse and synonymous with a "WRONG" tag."Noise" on the other hand does somewhat apply, as their comment doesn't contribute in good faith, or doesn't contribute anything of actual informed value.
I think that the 'troll' tag would be appropriate if you earnestly believe that the person is not posting in good faith. At that point they are just trying to get a rise out people, which was the original definition for 'troll' (on the internet).
Yeah, something about depending on the community to respond to bad faith comments strikes me as letting the bad actors win. What should be happening, however it can be implemented, is for those kinds of comments not to receive attention or at least not dominate the discussion.
Oh look, my first controversy! I actually disagree with the tagging of both the comments in that thread except for mine having joke tags. The top level comment was, while not answering the specific question asked in the post, still directly related to the contents of the OP. My answer was the most probable region that the post was tagged that way, but if you don't spend any time exposed to furry communities what I said could have been construed as a mild insult.
I think the use of the tags highlights something slightly larger that needs to be addressed by the community going forward. Thus far, if a comment in a thread is not directly about the question asked in the thread, it ends up getting marked off-topic. This happens for both questions about the post itself and not the question posed in the post (e.g. the furry post) and also happens for secondary questions in the comments which, if answered, would help give context or expand understanding about/around the topic in question. If we keep going along the course that we are on right now, I think that this community will begin to be seen as having a regulatory/Moderation style akin to AskHistorians/StackExchange. Anything that is not strictly on topic will be shut down and it wont be seen as a place for free-flowing discussion and will instead be seen as a Q&A style site.
I'm sure that his has been discussed before, but, building on the idea of tags being visible only after a certain threshold, I feel that one possible solution would be to make comment tags something that can be voted on. As an example, it might take 5 people voting that a comment was noise in order to get it tagged as such and maybe another five to remove it.
With a system like that, you avoid the many of the downsides of downvotes being used as "I disagree" and the related issue of comment tags being used as a replacement for downvotes, and you provide a way for regular users to self-moderate comment quality tagging without requiring admin/moderator involvement, which seems to be important both for the goals of this community and because we currently only have one true admin/mod.
I've suggested making them less noisy when they have less votes before. I think even just a gradual opacity might be enough. If you see a faded noise tag then you know that some guy who had a bad day probably just read the sarcasm the wrong way, but if it's NOISE then you'll clearly know how everyone feels.
As a designer, I like this idea. Low opacity is a great way to visually de-emphasize tags.
I like changes in opacity too, although if it's rendered the same way as normal text I'm assuming you'd lose the contextual effect if using a screen reader, putting each tag back at the same "weight" (equal with each other and the rest of the content).
I had a similar idea that I shared before, so to expand on it a bit and build off of yours:
A comment with three noise tags in a thread that averages 2 votes is obviously significantly noisy, whereas a comment with three noise tags in a thread that averages 1000 votes very well may not be, therefore the number of votes on the comment, and the surrounding comments, as well as the age of the comment should all be taken into account.
The result should be that tags are displayed relative to the confidence that they are accurate. The 3x noise 2 vote comment would display the full color noise tag, whereas a comment with 3x noise and 1000 votes would softly hide the noise tags (and any other tags) behind plain-text like this, displaying the specific topic voted on on hover or tap. Comments with mixed confidence, say 5x noise and 10 votes, might show the particular tag there, but still matching the color of the vote text.
The goal of this would be to avoid having comments with tons of votes drowned out by a small number of bright tags, and in the context of this thread, tags would not be a valuable way to detract from a person's post unless there was at least the tiniest amount of consensus. It would also encourage users to tag comments that have slightly visible tags if they feel they deserve full visibility.
I think one of the biggest problems we might find when tags are shown is the snowballing effect. Once the tag appears, even if in a softer color or with transparency, more and more people will be predisposed to tag it the same way.
I think this is a problem with votes as well. Once you see a few people voted on something, you tend to see it as "good content" and is more probable that you'll end up voting as well.
I am more and more concerned about tags and votes visibility. Not sure how it should be dealt with, though.
Well, there's always the idea that none of them are visible, and it just sorts comments.
But honestly, I can admit that seeing agreement in the votes is one of the most engaging parts of tildes. Reddit has this, but not being able to see the individual upvotes and downvotes makes it far more arbitrary and weird feeling especially in the lower scores. On tildes I find myself feeling happy my voice is heard with a couple of votes, irrespective to if my comments are scoring better than the ones I'm disagreeing with.
It's easy to say that popular ideas aren't necessarily right ideas, which is why it's important we keep this community clean and, where applicable, science based. This does gamify discourse, but I don't think that is inherently a bad thing.
If you aren't aware, there are plans for a trust system related to tagging, where users must earn the right to use the system in the first place, and will lose the right if they misuse it. That, and/or the visiblity systems mentioned above, should hopefully fix the problem of people dog-piling.
Yes, I understand. Feeling people are paying attention to you is certainly satisfactory, and one of the good things about upvoting is that people don't need to reply to just say "I agree" or "This", so it's probably a good a idea to keep them visible. I argued in another thread that they should be moved down to the bottom of the comment though, to avoid the snowballing effect to some extent. At least your wouldn't be prejudiced before starting reading.
I'm more concerned with the negative tags in that respect, however. Maybe they should only be visible to high-tier trusted users (higher than the tier when they are able to tag in the first place).
Yeah I definitely think this is a good idea. Right now the system is just a bit too.... absolute, even if it's just one person tagging as noise, or as anything else really.
I thought that was the point. There is no general downvote button, the tag button is where the downvote would be, and the five tags are reasons one would downvote. They're basically "descriptive downvotes."
Yeah, I think the idea needs to be more refined and made clear to users for whatever direction they go with it. In some places it seems like they want it to be this and in others it seems more like a public report option.
Personally I just hadn't used tags much because I've seen pretty reasonable tagging (in my eyes) get called out as abuse. I've been afraid to use them, honestly.
Yeah, apparently using the tags wrong is a bannable offense? I guess it's good they've been disabled, then.
It's less that using tags wrong in particular is a bannable offense and more that acting in a malicious manner is some thing that has been established as unacceptable. I do agree that disabling tags for the time being is a good idea because the implementation and usage isn't really fleshed out yet.
Yeah the thing I'm still trying to wrap my head around here is that using tags wrong is malicious while claiming that Charlottesville was a hoax apparently isn't.
As much as I vehemently disagree with how he seems to be implicitly implying that both sides were somehow equally in the wrong, he's not saying that Charlottesville itself is a hoax, he's implying that there was some kind of "media conspiracy" to make Trump look bad in the aftermath.
Now personally I think this is asinine. You can look up the full quotes online and he says that there are good people on both sides of the march, which is wrong. But he's not arguing that it never happened.
Again I think this is both wrong and asinine, but lets not put words in his mouth when what he's already saying is enough to destroy credibility in the first place.
"Charlottesville hoax" are his exact words from the comment I linked, and writing things in a way which invites misinterpretation is an old and reliable tactic. The end result is that posters who "vehemently disagree" with him end up defending him anyway, further muddying the waters.
You're right about the wording, I hadn't quite considered that if you didn't read the full context of the post and others around it you end up de facto assuming what makes most sense based on wording. I think we're on the same page in that we don't really want that on the site. We want people acting and discussing in good faith, but at some point if they're being stubborn and also spreading falsehoods something needs to be done.
The question then becomes at what point do you start banning people for this. It's fairly cut and dry when there's something really obvious to point to (e.g. anti-vaxxers, flat earthers), but where do you draw the line? Say later on, a subset of the community feels a user is spreading lies, but its on a topic where there either isn't a true consensus based in fact or there is a difference in priorities (e.g. gun control, economics).
This does need to be fleshed out because something does need to be done, but there also needs to be very clear rules and lots of transparency.
I have a question for everyone - what do you think would happen if the site had some sort of agree/disagree metric? Something that was cosmetic only and had no actual effect on anything - just a way to allow people to get this Facebook/Reddit-induced 'fuck your opinion' kneejerk reaction out of their systems somehow? Do you think this would provide anything of value, or just make things worse? Would people confine themselves to these agree/disagree mechanics and stop using the tags as if they were downvotes? Have you ever seen any other online forums that have used something like this before, and if so, how did it work out for them?
You and I have talked about this before but I just want to post this here for posterity.
I think it's a terrible idea. "cosmetic only" is not cosmetic only on a social site... it still exerts peer pressure on people and when that comes to expression of controversial opinions is not a good thing. Especially when it comes to political discourse this is going to inevitably turn this place in to an echo chamber since the conservatives/libertarians here are greatly outnumbered and will be less and less likely to comment at all when every comment of theirs is consistently tagged with massive numbers of "I disagree".
Right now the comment "noise" tag is being misused in that manner and look at the discord it has caused. But once action auditing is in place, that comment tag abuse is unlikely to happen all that often since abusers can be suitably punished. However with an "I disagree" tag (even just cosmetic) you can't really accuse people of abusing it even if they technically are (e.g. going around to a user they disagree with on one subject and disagreeing with all their comments elsewhere no matter how innocuous).
What about a "downvote" that does literally nothing in-code (and doesn't display anything on the parent comment), but provides a release mechanism for redditors and other users used to this kind of behaviour. It could even be used to discount the weight of other applied tags from that user (since we know that they're voting "I disagree")
It's a neat idea, but the problem with that is what about when the tags are actually being applied appropriately? An obvious comment attempting to start a flamewar is also going to likely have a ton of those downvotes + flame tags but that doesn't necessarily mean the tags were applied inappropriately.
I personally think that people needing some petty outlet for expressing their disagreement is not something that should be encouraged here. The current misusing of the tags is only a temporary thing and once trust and action auditing (for accountability) are in place will come to an abrupt end, or people will quickly find themselves not able to tag anything at all, being banned or having their trust reset (or permanently set) to 0. So get it in your abuse while you can, people, because it's likely not going to last much longer.
My worry is that it's not going to be possible to re-train tens of millions of users. They've been doing this for several decades on every social site, so this is now instinctive, ingrained behavior. It's a reflex, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also has addictive elements for a majority of the users behaving this way. No system we build here, no matter how good it is, can go against that level of ingrained behavior. That means that the majority of users are going to use whatever mechanics we provide as a downvote no matter how much we punish them, no matter how much we try to talk them out of it. That means we're going to have a shit-ton of noise in the tagging systems and it's going to get exponentially worse once we're out of invite-only.
I'm looking for a solution to that problem. Setting 80% of the users to a trust of zero is not a solution. In fact that's just going to piss them off and make them worse. The only way to herd cats is to cater to their laziness. I don't have a solution for this, but I don't think you do either. I think we need to find one... something that just absorbs their negativity without damaging the site, and if we're very very clever, perhaps something that'll slowly, over time, erode this ingrained behavior and change it into something better.
Whatever it is, I'm thinking it's multi-tier. Give them the cosmetic stuff to mash on early for a while and get it out of their systems. After they earn some more trust (and maybe stop hammering this cosmetic-sponge system so hard, whatever it might be) they can graduate to a broader, more serious system that has some real power. That's when we hit them with consequences for abuse, dropping them back down to the training wheels if they use it improperly.
I personally think people can be held to a higher standard through completely transparent accountability of actions (which no other site has really attempted) and convinced to rethink their poor behavior (through reasonably applied public punishment, which also no site has really tried).
If all ~ does is allow the basest of petty human emotions to continue to thrive here (even through neutered means) then what is the point since users are still the same petty people they were when they arrived here?
I disagree. That gives the 20% who can control their petty emotional reflexes that much more influence on the site and if any of the 80% want to have a more significant say in what goes on here they will have to learn to control themselves too.
That means you want 20% of the users to do all of the moderation and tagging. Seems like a recipe for burnout to me. That's a hell of a lot of work once we're getting millions of comments per day like reddit. I'd argue that 20% of the users isn't even enough to get eyes on half of that volume. I'd much rather have 80% of the users doing it, not 20%. The question is, how do we reform that missing 60%?
Huh? 20% of trusted users capable of “mod” actions here is still significantly more mods than on even the most well run subreddit.
/r/science is 18M subs and 1500 mods. Here that same ratio could potentially be 360,000 trusted users to 18M subscribers.
/r/changemyview is 500k subs to about 30 mods. Here it would potentially be 10,000 trusted users.
You don’t want to give everyone access to trusted user tools, only those who can control themselves and show themselves capable of not abusing the system (which will be even less likely with good public action accountability, which reddit also lacks). Even if that ultimately ends up being 5% of users you can trust that is still orders of magnitude more than the mod to user ratio on reddit and burnout won’t be an issue... especially since the trusted users aren’t static/manually assigned positions like mods on reddit.
Just because it's 'more' does not mean it's going to be 'enough.' I firmly believe that most people can and will behave well once they are out of environments like reddit that promote rampant negativity. If only 20% of the userbase has 'mod'-like powers I think we're sending a bad message - exclusivity and elitism. I honestly think you're sticking your head in the sand on this one. It's not a problem we're going to really suffer from during invite-only, but I'd think long and hard about going open-registration without something basic in place to help train people to be better versions of themselves. Otherwise tildes is just going to become that 'elitist site' that nobody wants to use beyond basic reading of the content. I'd rather it had a reputation as something more exciting and inclusive.
The 'negativity' problem reddit and facebook create through bad feedback can be reversed and produce the opposite effect. It's basic group psychology. I want to find ways to do that - rewards, not punishment. Inclusive, not exclusive. Get people excited to post, instead of worrying about being judged unfairly. Build a system that grabs people by the cockles and turns them into a better community member.
What’s wrong with that if the “elitism” here simply means “behave your damn self and don’t act like a petty asshole like you do on every other site” and “focus on contributing quality posts and comments” instead of whatever provides you with instant gratification? Tildes only needs to be self-sustaining not become the next reddit in terms of user (nor should it attempt to be IMO) so why should it lower itself and undermine its own stated goals by catering to the majority of users base and petty instincts?
Trusting everyone means you’re effectively trusting no one and it’s anarchy. You can still be “inclusive” while only allowing the most trustworthy, most well behaved 5-20% of users access to “mod” actions.
Every other site has already turned most people into those petty assholes by punishing them every time they contribute anything online. You want to lock them out of the process - I want to reform as many as possible. That's what's wrong with the 'elitism' in a nutshell. Locking them out of the process is easy. Helping them all get better, that's going to be far more of a challenge.
No, IMO every other site has allowed people to act like assholes by catering to their base and petty instincts (because all they care about is user growth and not caring about what those users actually do once they arrive) and having virtually no public accountability for their actions built into the system.
~ is ideally only going to lock people out who show they cannot be trusted with the tools at hand... but that doesn’t have to be permanent, if they can prove they can reform themselves and be trusted again, eventually they can gain access to the tools again. And vice versa, if someone who was trusted with the tools shows they have a habit of abusing them, they will lose access until they can prove they can use them responsibly again. That’s the best kind of encouragement for reforming people there is... allow them to build up trust, gain access to tools as a result but punish them when they abuse them.
We'll talk some more about this once we're at 100k users and the warm honeymoon phase is over. ;)
What does that even mean? If you disagree with my assertions, explain why please. I may very well be wrong but your comment there isn’t going to help me understand your point of view. You have more mod experience than I do and I value your opinion... so I would appreciate the correction if something I have said rings false to you.
I disagree that the systems we've been talking about are going to be enough to combat chantropy. They are a start, surely, but only that - a start. I can't offer you any proof and you can't offer me any. By the time this site is in the 50k-250k user block, we'll know who is right by looking at the state of the tags. If the tags are sparsely used, they are failing. If the tags are a noisy mess of inaccurate downvote-placebos, they are failing. Only if they are widely used and widely correct in their application are we succeeding. I honestly hope you are right about this, but after being on usenet, fark, slashdot, reddit, and voat... my gut says we need more, and we need to focus on reform as well as gated access. As far as I know, no one has ever focused on reform before, but people have done gated access.
I don't know how to build in the reform aspects. That's why I posted in this thread - to see if anyone out there is smarter than I am. :D
I agree that is a good metric, but you have to keep in mind that not all tools need to be locked to a set % of users. If the tags are being underused you lower the threshold of trust required to gain access to them so way more people can contribute them. If they are being abused en masse, you can raise the threshold of trust. The same applies to all mod actions. That’s why I liked your tiered levels of trust idea so much.
But I think no matter what you do, the % of users with access to the most powerful tools, e.g. banning users from a community, will be a small one where 5-20% is not unreasonable or unexpected... but still a damn sight better than on reddit where mods account for only around 0.5% of the user base of a subreddit.
That’s not elitism or discouraging inclusivity though, that’s just the nature of it... only a small percentage of people can be trusted with that much power. Although, once again, with public accountability we may find that’s not true and far more people might be able to handle it if they know they can be easily called out by the users at large and are then punished for abusing the power they have been given.
I don't view comment tagging as a top-tier trust system - it's an everyman system. There might be some aspects of it - certain tags, like [AMA] and I'm sure we'll discover others - that do merit the highest levels of trust to use. In fact by gating which tags are available at which trust levels we might be able to do some of that 'reforming' I'm so interested in.
I view comment tagging as the kind of thing that anyone who has been here a year ought to be using all the time, almost as much as voting. By then they will know the why of the tags having seen them used, and will probably be delighted to get a chance to use them. I'd even like to give them something to use after just a couple of months and/or some solid contributions - to entice them in.
I'm far more elitist about actual mod powers than tagging. I'm fine with the 20% metric for moderators. I'd be less fine with it for curators - I'd like that space to be larger than the moderators, though probably only another 10-20% larger. The tagging, though - that's got to be the biggest group. That's the way 'in' to the other systems where we judge trust and try to get people to become better.
It’s clearly not an everyman system as evidenced by the abuse of it that’s going on here already. Although once public accountability is in place, so users who are misusing them can be identified, and trust is in place so they can lose trust for having abused the system, that will hopefully change.
I do like your idea of potentially having a tiered access to tags though, almost like a ladder people can climb to slowly gain trust by showing they don’t abuse the system as they gain access to more and more “powerful” tags like “AMA” or “breaking news” that might have a vote weight multiplier attached to them to help with visibility, or “noise/troll/flame” that are being used to express disagreement rather than for their original intent etc... whereas the more neutral tags like “Joke/Off-topic” are probably the best “gateway” tags for everyone to start with for just that reason, IMO.
It's funny how we look at this and see the exact opposite things. I look at this and say it clearly is an everyman system because we only have a couple misuses out of almost 1300 people - that's less than one percent of users causing problems. I'd also bet that the people who misused it only did it out of either a lack of understanding of the tags and their purpose, or out of a deep, ingrained need to express disapproval that's been hammered into them by the entire internet's obsession with like/dislike buttons on every page.
Sure, a couple of misuses so far but ones that are having a tremendous systemic effect already and potentially causing a negative feedback loop. One person gets mis-tagged so they get angry and lash out (maybe even at the wrong person who they assumed tagged them in the first place), potentially causing them to start misusing the tag system in retribution, and/or even editing their comment from what was originally a neutrally stated comment to now a 100% inflammatory one that further causes even more people to react more emotionally, etc. etc. etc.
E.g. https://tildes.net/~tildes/ux/daily_tildes_discussion_time_to_slow_down_a_bit_and_figure_some_things_out#comment-6ob
That's a problem. A huge one.
That whisper discussion in the other thread got me wondering... what if early on the tags a user is assigning to threads are shown only to them, and possibly to some other higher-level users who are tag veterans, so those people can try to provide feedback on that user's use of the tags? In theory that would stop new users who are using tags as 'downvotes' from being able to harass people with them - all they'd be doing is highlighting themselves for using tags improperly.
That's a decent compromise IMO. Basically have them as a half-step "report" type function to start, only visible to more trusted users who can then verify whether or not they were applied correctly. If they were applied correctly, show them to everyone so the comments can be filtered out by users at large, or removed by higher trust users if they're particularly bad.
This solves the abuse cases impacting people negatively I think... but how to handle the reform? I still got nothing. :/
I think you're struggling to see the forest through the trees a bit, my friend. How to encourage people to reform is already built directly into system:
Allow people to slowly build trust through basic actions, which has real, tangible value tied directly to their account in the form of powerful tools they can gain access to in order to assist and influence their community
+
Public, transparent accountability for all actions so when/if abuse happens it can be easily noticed and the culprit identified
+
Other trusted users/admins punishing those culprits caught abusing their powers with reduction or zeroing out of trust... or even community/sitewide timeouts or permanent bans in egregious cases
+
Allowing them to potentially earn that trust back if they can prove over time they won't abuse their powers again... and if they do risk an escalation in the severity of the punishment
=
A very effective means of reforming user behavior.
Yes, all punishment-disincentive based. Not one drop of rewarding experience there, to entice people to change their behaviors. This goes back to those discussions we've had about gamification. You've got a game here, but it's a game that isn't very much fun to play, imo.
Getting more power to help shape the community you love is not rewarding?
I can see how maybe we should work on figuring out more reward mechanisms for good behavior though... more carrots is better than more sticks... even if they are just cosmetic carrots. E.g. "bug hunter" profile tag for people who point out legitimate bugs in gitlab, "code contributor" for people who do that, etc. Basically like reddit trophies but not so meaningless and shit. ;)
Here's some light reading for you on the topic. ;)
Those are examples of the weaker sort of gamification, as are the punishment-based aspects of the trust system. It's not enough. We need more than extrinsic motivators. There have to be intrinsic ones to help balance out the system.
We start partly in a good place here because some of the intrinsic motivation we offer is giving people a voice and more power over what happens in their favorite communities - and I'd say that's a stronger intrinsic motivator than most can offer. The problem is that motivation is esoteric, long-term, and nearly invisible to a new user - especially if they only bump into it when they make a mistake, even if that mistake is just doing what they've always done on every forum they've ever used. We need to make sure it's right in their laps with positive feedback as well - rather than some abstract, long-term multi-year process.
As I've said before elsewhere (part of this was included when I asked @deimos for an invite);
I'd like to see topical tags, with weighting based on how trusted each user is within that topic.
And it doesn't need to be global trust - it can be based on perspective, clustered.
For example: a comment with a claim about particle physics could be voted accurate by quantum theorists and inaccurate by string theorists. And this could be made visible, where the user accounts are tagged as knowledgeable in the field that a topical tag is related to.
So you'd see what kind of people thinks what about it.
Essentially the votes would look like a demographic poll.
Tags and votes from people with less trust in the related fields would have less weight than the trusted users.
I know there's a risk of polarization involved with this, but I do think it has a chance of working.
What about a downvote button that does absolutely nothing? Meaning it doesn't show the downvotes count or anything...
Probably people wouldn't fall for it though and would resort back to tagging as noise or whatever.
I tend to agree with @cfabbro on this one though, I think people can be better by holding them accountable.
Also, Facebook didn't have an alternative to like buttons for a while, although admittedly they added other reactions maybe to circumvent it...
EDIT: I misread @arghdos' comment and didn't realize it was the same idea, sorry. So yeah, what he said!
This is an uphill battle against human nature that you almost certainly can't win. You've got to give users some way to silently and anonymously express disdain with bad faith participants and contributions, because bad faith participants are rampant on the internet and they aren't here to have a constructive discussion with you.
If you don't find a way to harness this impulse then users will find a way to express it anyway. I thought the tag system was a pretty clever outlet for this kind of impulse and I'm sad to see it disabled so quickly.
That's what the report feature and trusted user actions based on community standards/policy will eventually be for (once it's implemented). Reports are a substantial, meaningful and legitimately helpful way to "harness" users impulses and will make the community a better place overall by letting the trusted users know something needs to be looked into... and one that doesn't cater to and further encourage base pettiness unlike an "I disagree" button.
That won't scale. You'll need volunteer mods to make that work.
That could work. So basically, only users who have proven themselves constructive and level-headed can "downvote?"
Yeah, that's the idea. ~ is going to have "mods" in the form of trusted users who are given access to "mod-like" tools, potentially locked behind tiers of trust depending on how powerful they are. See: Trust/Reputation system.
Part of the mod tools available to trusted users will likely include the ability to remove inappropriate comments. And @deimos has talked about potentially adding "supervotes", a limited number of votes per day that add a significant vote weight modifier to the vote of trusted users. So while it's not a downvote, per se, it can greatly increase the visibility of comments that are exemplary ones and drown out the less appropriate ones.
It might be worth considering giving highly trusted users access to a downvote though... Hacker News has a similar system but unless you publicly show those downvotes so users can make sure they're not being abused it's not a good idea IMO.
Have you ever used Stack Exchange? I was active there for a while, a few years ago. This "trust" system with escalating abilities to report and tag posts as your trust increases borrows a lot from the system they use at Stack Exchange (whether deliberately or coincidentally). It has precedent.
Yeah I'm familiar with it, but StackExchange has plenty of its own power user issues.
I'm sure it does. Any system which allows people to accrue permissions will be gamed by some people trying to gain the most permissions.
Most of your solutions suffer from the same initial problem I pointed out or are even worse than reddit's systems and will further exacerbate the problems, IMO.
An "alt-right" tag can be seen as just as derogatory, if not more, than "noise" and will have the same effect on speech and echo chamber creation as misused tags here have been so far. Just as "liberal/socialist" and "conservative/libertarian" are now seen as "insults" by the opposite side of the political spectrum now in the US.
If the recent explosion of political dog whistles has taught me anything it's that even the most innocuous words like "merit" can be coopted and used in ways you had no intention of them being used for in the first place. Never underestimate people's ability to subvert meaning and turn even the most "neutral" of words into political weapons and tools for exerting peer pressure or suppression of controversial opinions.
Adding more weight to downvotes make them an even more powerful "I disagree" button. IMO that's even worse than on reddit since now you're making it even more likely downvotes will be used to suppress controversial opinions and are giving people even more power to accomplish that task.
you mean just a button that does nothing but toggle to red only for the person who clicked it? interesting.
Edit: could even have it so they can click it to increment a value in case they're really frustrated with the comment. :P
Sometimes I wonder if that's all it would take. How, though, to bridge from that new-user placebo to something better? Does that placebo help solve the problem, or just further exacerbate it? I don't know, and I can't even see how to figure it out. I did some digging on this stuff and I couldn't find any relevant studies or science to point the way. Hopefully someone out there who has will see this thread and help fill in the blanks for us.
hmm. I wonder if it might be a worthwhile investment of time/energy to talk to some cognitive psychologists on the phone or via email - like maybe university professors or something. If the issue is something that is important, then having a direct line to an expert might be extremely valuable at least for guidance on finding relevant studies.
I know Scott Adams has been working on his whenhub interface service that lets you get in touch with experts for X amount of minutes for Y amount of dollars, but I haven't tried it out myself. https://interface.whenhub.com
edit: I will say, one person i have interacted with who might be worthwhile to ask is https://www.reddit.com/user/natematias - he works for microsoft (unless i am misremembering) and has been conducting research on related topics regarding social media shtuff (interviewed me for one of this projects after the reddit blackout). Might not have the answers you need directly, but might know someone who does.
Nate Matias is a friend of mine, we work on reddit things fairly often. He doesn't work at Microsoft, but instead runs a non-profit geared at researching internet interactions and culture.
My mistake! It's been a while since he and i spoke.
I have always attested that people already do have an agree/disagree metric, and it's comments. It takes far more effort and actual conversation to say "I disagree, and here's why," than just clicking a "fuck you" button. The sort of behind-the-scenes, close-minded downvoting is something that devalues the website as a whole, because it drowns out content and discussion.
I agree. I am not sure just how useful comment voting (up or down) is in the end. I understand post voting can help other tell "good" content from "bad" content. But I'm not so sure for comments.
EDIT: On second thought, upvoting is definitely useful as positive feedback for the poster and avoiding multiple users stating the same for lack of an agreement mechanism.
Voat had some similar mechanics early on (and might still have it) - you couldn't give out more downvotes than you'd given out upvotes. It doesn't seem to have helped them in the long run. I also worry that this sort of karma-currency would create power users - the people who acquired the most of it would have a much stronger influence on the content than regular users. I think that might be straying too far away from the democratic aspects of tildes' goals.
That wouldn't really work here, as your votes aren't piled together into karma. There'd be nothing to pull from.
StackOverflow does something like this - downvoting answers "costs" you 1 reputation (but you get 10 for each upvote on your own answers).
I don't think it's a very good solution, why are you effectively being "punished" (even if it's a very trivial level of punishment) for helping to improve the quality of the site?
I disagree that RTs are Twitter's downvote. It's more about the ratio.
I still disagree. If I hate what someone tweeted, why would I broadcast that out to all of my followers?
Yes, sometimes people quote tweets and then voice their disagreement - but that's (generally) what you want! You want people to explain their reasoning. The overall discussion here is about people lazily tagging noise without a good reason.
I mean, does it 100% mean anger? a noise tag or two is more than fine, and imo I haven't seen them used too flagrantly, I've always been able to see how something could come across like noise, or flame, or offtopic. Although it does feel strange when it happened to me.
It'll take a while for everyone to get accustomed with feedback on their posts instead of a "how popular was this thought? oh it was 50 popular" measure. But I don't think this is necessarily an issue (aside from that 7x flame tag link perhaps) as untagging things/tag curation will be implemented later to help stop abuse of it.
Forgive me, I mostly only see twitter in (mostly faked, I assume) screenshots. Are retweets used as a "personal army" kind of thing? Bc if so that's an interesting thing I hadn't thought about before.
Oh I honestly thought those were counted as replies since they're effectively just doing that. That's a bit of backwards/unintended design there. Thanks for the clarification!
Noise and Flame are the new downvote, I've already gotten tagged as well. I'm not sure I'm a fan of comment tags as they currently exist.
Check out this reply.
It's been said already several time but with new user joining recently you could have been missing it:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/116/are_noise_tags_turning_into_a_de_facto_downvote#comment-6wi
I think the comments that you linked are bad examples of the misuse of tags because the comments you linked are noisy and inflammatory comments that add nothing to the conversation. The tags appear to, in those situations, be used correctly.
I have seen a misuse of tags, and I am a fan of there being a threshold for when they are displayed. Maybe there should be an algorithm that decides when the tag is displayed based on the activity of any particular thread. If it's just a hard number like 5 or 10, that number won't be hard to reach when thousands of users are reading the comment.
I like the tags, but I agree they need work. I'm not a fan of the Vote button. It's mindless. One of my least favorite things about Reddit is the fluffiness of all of the top comments in every thread. Go to any popular thread on Reddit, and the top five comments will often be a joke, or maybe one will say something useful followed by a joke. I hate that. The vote button enables this type of content to reach the top because I think some users just don't want to use the tags. I often see jokes just with votes and not tagged at all. And I'm no better than anyone else because I don't want to be the first person to tag something with Joke.
That's why I'm a fan of the threshold so I can feel alone without everyone else knowing I'm a humorless curmudgeon, and I think we should get rid of the vote button and replace it with a tag.
I think it's pretty clear that this is happening, at least in some cases.
The tags are also slated to be disabled or made less visible for the moment (until they're actually hooked up to something)
I'm not sure how I feel about tags in their current form (they're way too prominent) but I clearly see their potential.
I'm not sure what's the current plan, will they ever be hooked up to an actual ranking system? IMO it would make sense to apply weights to each tag and genuinely do treat them as (more descriptive) downvotes with actual +1/-1 scores, etc. In fact, together with "positive" tags, they could replace the binary "upvote" system completely.
I would like to get away from 'voting' as a mechanic if for no other reason than using 'voting' makes people think it works here the same way it does everywhere else - basic like/dislike with no real thought involved. At least with tags, we're expressing a reason for the action.
I'm sure there's tons of technical and/or practical limitations to it, but it has always been a pipe dream of mine that reddit would replace upvotes/downvotes with something very close to tags like "funny", "informative", etc, so people could show their appreciation for a good pun without it affecting ranking for people who genuinely look for information/discussion.
I like this idea but it seems like they don't want to design tags in a way that lets you skip out on a discussion.
Personally, I think it's lopsided. "Vote" is inevitably going to work as an agree button, but there's no negative equivalent that you're allowed to use. It's not like you're threatened with mod action for voting for something because you agree.
I could see the descriptive up and down votes having different weights and they could do a lot to encourage what gets pushed up and down the page just by changing those. "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons could be in there but weighted super lightly compared to the ones about being on/off topic or being a particularly worthwhile contribution or whatever. Not gonna happen though, looking at the current attitude.
Out of the loop, what hackernews post?
I assume OP means this one which is where I think a lot of users who have joined recently learned of ~.
That is indeed the post where I learned about Tildes. I've been looking for a new forum to use since reddit has become a playground for corporations and politics to push their opinion, hackernews has become like reddit, voat became storefront central due to the people filtered out of Reddit, and lobste.rs never really did it for me
I contributed my opinions/theories and got some noise marks in a topic about meritocracy. I know not everything in the world is as it seems and picked a darker interpretation of the topic. I also really dislike hegemony being used like a hammer to the head when it comes to conversations on or offline.
I think tags are like little hammers for the brain, easy and impactful, and they're not really fair when we're trying to use words.
I intended to tag pun chains as noise. If there's an interesting gif or story, and you know how Reddit goes, there is a chain of people trying to out-wit each other, rephrasing the same jokes, making cliche and overused word play, posting copy-pasts -- all that shit would be getting the noise tag from me.
Even the stuff that's upvoted,
even the stuff that's gilded,
that stuff is noise to me.
How does one decide what's appropriate or not?