Suggestion for a new label: "Misinformation"
Throughout my 3-ish-year adventures on Tildes, I've sometimes noticed misinformation (or otherwise incorrect information) being spread in comments. This misinformation is not necessarily malicious in nature; often times it's very much benign due to various reasons, though I've also seen a fair share of disinformation over the years as well.
Now, disinformation very much falls within the scope of the Malice tag, as it is malicious in nature and is very much a clear rule violation, but I'm honestly really tired of all the benign kind of misinformation as well. You could argue, "well, you can just leave a comment with a correction and a source". I normally would agree, but the reality of it all is that if you leave this comment late enough in a discussion almost nobody ever reads it, because it's at the bottom of the comment chain. The comment containing inaccurate claims may be on the top of a 100-comment comment chain with, say, 30 votes, whereas a correction with a source may remain at the very bottom of the thread with 0-2 votes.
For me, this is presently the #1 thing I'm micro-annoyed about with regard to tildes's design. Therefore I am proposing the addition of a Misinformation tag, a sort of "community-managed misinformation tag" similar in nature to the Community Notes system on Twitter X and other websites.
So all the people that are misinformed will then label correct information as "misinformation"... and how does one then correct that?
This seems absolutely impossible to manage
Misinformation is such a pervasive problem in general that I am not sure regular users being given the power to tag things as such has any value because, who are we expecting to be the arbiter of what is correct and how does a misinformation tag help if it's just a tag and there's no information on why it was tagged as such?
The tags don't really work the same way "Community Notes" do so I don't think it can be applied the same way. They aren't crowdsourced/crowd-determined or verified by anyone in particular
I could potentially see a tag like "contested" (or something better worded) to indicate there is a question of something's accuracy and info in below comments but i see a lot of the same issues with such a tag. It will be misused rather quickly. I can see it becoming a plague on topics like nutrition and fitness. Same for politics and religion and social issues. It will very quickly become a signifier of differing opinions because people won't just use it on data either (and data is commonly misinterpreted). People can't even agree what is an opinion vs what is a fact anymore.
I think I'm rather implying we kind of need an at-least-somewhat-crowdsourced system, perhaps in a separate interface element rather than the pure comment chain itself, exactly to prevent abuse. And I think we should extend this to exemplary comments as well.
I agree, also because leaving a comment isn't always ideal for various reasons. In the post I linked I mentioned posts, which aren't really an issue on Tildes, but comments with misinformation I do see on a slightly more regular basis.
The biggest challenge would be that it still would need some sort of community consensus. But having that discussion elsewhere without it kicking up a post is something that might be a good idea.
There certainly are other examples to draw from on other platforms.
I don’t think it would work. The exemplary tag is often misused to mean “I strongly agree” and this would be worse. The closest thing I’ve seen that actually does seems to work is (was?) Twitter’s community notes system, and we don’t have the scale for that.
We sometimes have heated conversations that about what counts as misinformation and having a “trial” like that is no fun for anyone. The trouble is posting misinformation is easy (basically just shitposting), but to refute it, you need to research something that you probably don’t care to spend time on.
Also, a common problem is overconfident takes - that is, posting a strongly-held opinion about something as fact that nobody could really know for sure. So, then, if you argue against it, if you’re not careful then you end up seemingly taking the other side or “just asking questions.”
Our conversations aren’t important enough to be worth the angst of policing them.
I get that we're trying to keep the site fun, but the onus of fun-killing should fall on the misinformer. The fun will cease if misinformation becomes a common occurrence on this platform.
I would let people decide for themselves if they want to take the time to do this or not. Mods have existed since the dawn of forums, and modding (sometimes) can really suck. And yet people still take the time to do it.
This is not really what the post is about. Your comment is a confident take that I'm refuting within the current functions of the site, while the post in question would theoretically just need a wiki page linked and a quick "here's the correction" comment applied to the tag. The tag should have nothing to do with the subjective.
I strongly disagree. A lot of us have abandoned reddit or twitter precisely to find a place with decent conversation and community. The suggestion to add a tag like this is an attempt at protecting this site's authenticity at a time when misinformation is running wild.
I would 100% support this, but how would that work? If someone incorrectly labels something as "misinformation", how would we combat that?
Re: our (short) exchange regarding the misuse of the "exemplary" label.
I think in short "this is for the actual devs to determine", but we should draw inspiration from the Community Notes systems already existing.
One example is, it shouldn't apply automatically. The user who reports it has to provide a source and an explanation in a pop-up like malice's, and then one or more "trusted users" has/have to approve it based on what was written in the source. And to do so in a way that is not just going to end up with the correction being buried below tens or hundreds of comments.
From what I could see, no new features have been developed for a long time now. I think we should come to term that what we've got is all there is for the foreseeable time, and instead think about how to make use of the current feature set to achieve the effect we need. What can't be done with a technical solution could still be approximated with community agreement, like a form of social contract so to speak.
In the spirit of throwing ideas out there, what if whenever we see a comment that we think is misinformation, we reply something along the line of 'I will label this comment as 'Noise' because I think it's misinformation'.
I'd wager what you really want the 'misinformation' label to achieve is not to simply have it displayed as such, but that the misinformed comment could be minimized somehow, yeah? Currently there's one label that can already achieve this effect. I would argue misinformation qualifies as noise as well so it's an appropriate use of the label.
The reason to announce it instead of doing so quitely is because I think most of the time people just don't remember the option exists tbh. Even when you do, sometimes you'd feel like the OG comment is already so popular that it's pointless. Publicly stating your action gives others something to rally around. It being public also has the same effect as the original comment having a public label attached. From a personal point of view, this is also a chance for you to decide if you believe in your judgement strong enough to stand by it. The neat part is that this arrangement is fair, if others agree with you, the parent comment will be collapsed, if they don't then only this comment of yours will be. Ultimately it's still a collective judgement.
This is not a perfect solution. It has a high chance to backfire into a larger argument. I'm wagering that such larger arguments would likely be under the original announcement comment which would have already been collapsed either way so the larger discussion wouldn't be affected.
I also understand that being the one to make the accusation can be scary. If there's not too much pushback here I'll test it in the wild next time there's a chance (and be ready to get eggs on my face).
In any case this is just one idea which may not work out, we could always discuss to find better solutions. As long as we start moving away from the paradigm of proposing hypothetical features and hoping the dev would someday implement it.
I imagine that, sadly, due to the exact reason you mentioned, this is the only thing we'll realistically end up doing. I'll give it a try the next time, but I also have zero faith it'll consistently do anything.
It's not totally worthless, I try to call out falsehoods and I do use the noise label that way, just not necessarily announcing I'm using the label vs "this is false information"
Haha yeah, at least we could then say we tried :)
I don't like it, sorry. (Personal opinion).
Too easy to misuse.
Generally I believe it's enough to leave a comment with corrections and then move to another topic.
I don’t think this is a problem. Unlike in Reddit, tildes automatically highlights new replies, so a post on a weeks dead thread will pop up in activities and show any reader who clicks on it exactly what’s new. Additionally, there are generally few enough comments that it’s not a stretch to read all of them. That’s unlike Reddit where threads can have 1000s if 10,000s of replies.
Additionally, there’s only two ways this could work: either the admins need to make the call on whether it’s misinformation or not, or it needs to be crowd sourced.
For option A), that’s a tremendous burden given there’s all of one admin. And they’re definitely not omnipotent.
For option B), this has all the same trappings of the reply option. Let’s say a thread is dead and you post a reply and no one really cares at this point. Why would the misinformation tag not to be the same? No one will care enough to crowdsource enough misinformation votes to make one stick. And if people do care enough to do some kind of misinformation tag vote, why wouldn’t they also just vote on a reply?
It is and I've been there many times.
See above
Do you have an example? I have not really seen any circumstances where replies did not suffice.
I did have several in my own post history in the past, but sadly not anymore. Back in winter I deleted my entire post/comment history up to a certain cutoff point, and I think around a week ago I cleared out almost everything from my profile altogether.
I'm preparing for leaving this website when @teaearlgraycold's current tildes minecraft server shuts down for the season, which kind of appears to be "possibly soon".
You will be missed, and I hope you come back at some point should the math on decision ever work out in that direction.
I imagine that entirely depends on how the misinformation mechanism works. We have people who are very diligent with applying tags to topics. I don't see why a misinformation mechanism can't have people keep an eye out as well.
In that since it actually could be a pretty neat extension to the sort of community moderation Tildes already has through labels. Meaning that it wouldn't be down to a static mod team but the entire community.
I think it is important to try and look at the broader picture here. And not work from preconceived narrow cases to argue why it wouldn't work.
I mean I don't even think the current set of tags is used particularly well. Probably only noise gets actual value. Exemplary is already mostly used as "super-vote". There's many times that a low effort post that someone somewhere really approves of in a directional fashion gets it.
This just seems like adding more in that inflammatory sense. The nice thing about noise is that it's somewhat easily to make an objective gut call about - someone just responding LOL is noise no matter what. What is misinformation is, on the other hand, is a billion dollar question. No easy answers there. Even to make an answer you have be knowledgable in the area.
In the end, this is a text discussion website. Solving issues by discussing in text form should be prioritized if at all possible. I have not seen times where have a misinformation tag would make things better. If anything, theyd just make it worse.
That's fair and could be entirely the case. I view exemplary as a bit of a 50/50 thing, in some cases where I got it I agree people used it as a super upvote. In other cases it genuinely was novel message in the label and clearly because someone thought it was a good comment that really added something to the discussion. Which you can argue is also a super upvote but also aligns with the description in the tildes documentation
I guess what I am saying is that it is not not a super-vote in a sense.
That entirely depends on the implementation though. The exemplary label is there straight away shouting for attention. I agree that it might be too powerful. All the more reason imho to consider other ways to improve on labels in a different ways.
There is no reason (other than the slow development of this website) that it couldn't be a mechanism separate from the thread. One where a quorum needs be reached before it has any effect on the comment that has been flagged. Reducing the inflammatory impact it might otherwise have if it was something happening right on the thread.
To be clear, I am not pretending to have the right answers or right implementation. But I do think it is worth considering, again, from a broad perspective how something might look like.
The end result could be that a comment is hidden or even removed. Which, in a lot of cases would actually improve things. As I have seen cases of misinformation where people kept responding to it which also in turn brought attention to it.
Even if the label does not remove anything, it is worth considering that if it is flagged with misinformation less people might be inclined to reply as they don't feel the need. Which in turn might actually allow discussion to be more on-topic elsewhere.
I'm in favour of it, at least. Would also be OK with a "Citation Needed" label, or something, with largely similar behaviour.
"citation needed" or "source needed" would be my answer to that, people should post sources of their claims anyway, it's just good habit
I think "I'd like a source" is a better solution than "minsinformation", if adding something is appropriate at all.
If I'm invested in something someone else is saying, or think it's worth engaging with their comment, I personally like to look things up.
I don't think it's reasonable to demand others do my work for me in that setting; most of the time it's extremely easy finding stuff with a single AI-powered search.
Most claims people make are already established in the field and not controversial except for us laypeople.
If making very specific claims where there's only one source for a factoid or whatever, that's probably not a major use case for a "citation"-label. Or?
Perhaps, one could suggest a citation along with the label? Same way that the "Exemplary" sends an anonymous message to the user, that way posters can avoid most of the work necessary to shore up their positions.
It could absolutely still be abused (e.g. slamming people with "citation needed" when you disagree with them as a downvote, effectively), but in principle so can the Noise/Malice tags. And I don't know if that's being done too often?
Afaik malice just goes straight to The Elevated One for judgement, so that's a no. However I've seen many cases of "Noise" label abuse, I think particularly due to the lack of transparency behind it. I've called it out a few times, but overriding the vote can be tough. And I don't have a clue how the override works either tbh. The only Noise override I can recall seeing in the wild was @creesch's comment listing hundreds of tildos in pings, in one of the first "season 3" minecraft posts for the tildes mc server.
Huh, TIL that it can be overridden! Looks like it's 1/5 of the vote count?
Also good lord I'm realizing I spent forty minutes on a reply in another thread XD augh time to sign off for the day.
I think it really depends on what people want. If the idea is that consensus opinion always wins then it's a good feature to implement because the consensus believes its "misinformation". Note as many people pointed out consensus isn't always correct and when one is in the heat of an argument its pretty easy to slap that label on.
It is my opinion that negative labels like that are too charged and basically suggests to people that hey this entire comment is worthless to read. I don't think that encourages discussion and respectful debate which is why I like Tildes
I'm not super comfortable with the idea, for reasons others have explained, but I do see value in at least exploring possible implementations of similar concepts.
My only suggestion at the moment is that, if something like this is in fact appropriate, maybe it could function like this:
This seems like a gentler interruption of the thread presentation, since it still requires new viewers to go down to your correction (and then potentially vote for it to more organically increase its visibility), rather than hijacking the sort order to force them to see it. It also seems like less work to develop than a whole separate viewer for "community notes", since it utilizes the existing comment threading structure.
It also might be good to limit the number of times a formal correction can be posted? Perhaps even to just a single time. That could keep the refutation organized, as well as contained to prevent it feeling like a dogpile if it really catches on. Though I suppose you can still effect a dogpile by simply replying as normal without utilizing the feature.
And maybe only top-level comments could be disputed? Idk, just spitballing at this point.
To some extent, though, this still feels to me like an unnecessary formalization of dissent when "just post a corrective reply" is an available course of action. I guess my experience of this issue's severity differs from yours.