Rethinking votes

I think that votes encourage activity. Personally I'd feel less interested in participating if votes didn't exist, or weren't visible. I understand that they have negative effects, but unless we can find a suitable replacement, I don't think we should remove them. I think this conversation would be more interesting, and productive, if there was an interesting alternative to discuss.

Furthermore, I think most communities will arrive at a 'de-facto' truth, no matter how you decide to sort the comments. Voting just makes the social pressures more obvious.

Here's something a bit different than how other sites have done it:

Allow voting only for top comments and for comments replying to you.

This discourages contentious back and forths and encourages more top-level responses. The community can still 'filter' the top level responses and because the only person who can upvote your response is the person you are replying to you're more likely to aim for constructive discussion.

Copy-paste of my comment from last time (that thread is probably worth reading through too):

To try to head off a little bit of the arguing that I'm sure this will turn into: keep in mind that this is a decision that doesn't have a correct answer. Everything works fine and can be used for great communities:

• having vote scores visible with only upvotes works (Tildes)
• visible with up and down votes works (Reddit)
• vote scores only visible to the poster works (Hacker News)
• individual up and down vote counts works, even if the numbers barely resemble reality (Reddit until 2014 with RES)
• no voting at all works (newsgroups, forums, etc.)

Everything works, but none of them are "correct"—there are different effects (both positive and negative) from each of them, and it's difficult or even impossible to get a good understanding of how those effects influence people using the site. Different people are going to have different preferences because they put a different value on the benefits and drawbacks of each one.

There's no right answer, and there's no way to prove that any of them are better or worse than any of the others. In the end it's just a choice that will have some good aspects and some bad ones.

While most of your critiques aren't wrong, the downside of no votes was that during the brief experiment where votes were hidden there was a general sense that the site was empty. Most things don't merit a comment so that lack of feedback often made it seem like nobody was reading anything you did so what's the point? Maybe that's fine. Maybe a button that is more explicitly "I read this and found it interesting" rather than "Have an upvote!" could address that. Maybe not.

There may be some merit to not showing votes in the comments but leaving them on the content though. Or, perhaps, only having votes on the parent comments but not on any children to discourage engagement on contentious back-and-forths. I do think there are cases where people see 3 or 4 votes for a comment they don't like and it prompts them to respond or respond more aggressively than if it was just a single comment by itself. It can make individual comments and commenters seem more like stand-ins for a tribe of people who think alike rather than an individual with a dumb view if you know what I mean.

Since this conversation comes up so often I am beginning to think I simply don't understand the key issues. I like votes on Tildes because the site is relatively small and low activity, and they are a low effort way to both let others know I read their comment, and for me to know there are people out there reading mine. I absolutely hated the no votes experiment on Tildes because it made me feel like no one was reading my stuff, and that made me less inclined to bother commenting. The site felt empty.

As Deimos correctly points out, there's no right answer to which voting mechanism is the best. I think that's largely because all of the benefits as well as the detriments are largely "community" issues rather than technical ones. Voting is good when the community sees it as a simple way to express enjoyment or engagement. Voting is bad when the community views it as some marker of validity or truth. All of the complaints and issues with voting on Tildes seem to me to be lingering issues people have with how voting has turned out on other sites and applied to how voting works on Tildes. Does voting actually measure popularity? Does getting outvoted in an exchange make people less likely to share their ideas? Maybe that's the case for some, it's certainly not for me. I'm happy to (and have in the past) shared my thoughts or debated things I disagreed with even when it was clear the other commenters had the "popular" view. Part of the appeal of Tildes to me is that it is possible to do that without the comments themselves devolving into a disaster.

As a community we have the ability to change how votes are perceived and used on this site even without any tinkering or refactoring of their technical functionality. It may be the case that voting on other sites ended up being a quick way to please the crowd. It doesn't have to be that way on Tildes, and already the biggest features that resulted in that (e.g. karma that accumulates on your use page) are absent here. I think at this point I am just missing what is fundamentally the problem since this discussion comes up so often. If you are unhappy with how votes appear to influence things, I think it is better to change how you interpret votes on the site rather than obscure their functionality or make them harder to use. If people are coming to conversations in order to get validation from the community rather than to have a discussion or ask a question, that will continue regardless of how votes work.

This ended up being a bit of a rant and I didn't intend that, but I do think fundamentally that if people cared less about votes we'd all be better off.

Personally I was a fan of the week-long experiment we ran. I already disable votes on reddit as I find I focus less on how well a comment is received, and don't find myself influenced as easily by other's opinions. I have to pay attention more to the words and less to the scores.

I think a good compromise would be adding a user preference to hide vote totals. Not to disable the vote functionality altogether, but just to remove the gamification aspect of it. I don't normally argue for adding a preference, but I think this is a good candidate for one.

I basically never touch reddit on mobile because I can't apply my userstyle, and the site just feels noisy and boisterous with votes turned back on. Tildes has a great mobile experience (unlike reddit), but should somebody decide to make a client, this adds a standard feature for them to implement as well.

I'm going to advocate again for removing the window on voting. Maybe I'm in the minority but I regularly visit/post in older threads, read valuable older comments and posts, want to link to those older discussions, etc. If we're really not discouraging people from posting in older threads as opposed to reposting or making new threads, there should be some way to leave positive feedback that doesn't add to noise.

I don’t even know if this is data that’s gathered by Tildes, but I sometimes feel privately embarrassed by the idea that, should someone look at Tildes’ logs, they would see probably hundreds of entries for my user page daily. This isn’t because of eager interested community members clicking through to my profile to see what else I have to say in other areas: it’s because I’m vain and I like refreshing that page frequently and checking in on my numbers — especially when they go up.

This is not a good thing, and I think it speaks to the addiction that you’ve identified that I continue to do this despite being fully aware of it, and that it’s a detriment to me. I do it enough that it sometimes happens out of idle habit or muscle memory, a sort of compulsion absent intention. I’ll find myself tapping my name in the corner without ever meaning to do it.

That part of me says that getting rid of displaying vote counts altogether is a good thing. I spent years in the 90s and 00s participating in various forums that had no voting mechanisms whatsoever, and those still worked just fine. It’s only now that I think it’s normal to put every single contribution of mine up to a vote, and is that normal or healthy? Should it be that way? These are genuine questions. I honestly don’t know.

After all, there’s another part of me, a directly contradictory one, that thinks that this kind of feedback is still a good thing. I don’t treat my commenting here as disposable, throwaway posting. Many of my contributions here are products of significant time and effort. Knowing that they have found an audience matters to me, and the votes often validate the time and effort I spend on my writing. I don’t think this is as hollow as it’s often made out to be in discussions of internet points. The complete absence of that kind of feedback would make me feel like I’m busying myself sending thoughtful letters to a mailbox that is never even being checked.

I believe that visible community and connection are valuable, especially in online platforms that don’t humanize posters in other ways. I think that wanting to know one’s efforts have impact is a positive aspect of vanity — a way of affirming that we, individually, mean something in a social context. Wanting to not be ignored is universally human.

Voting gives us a low-barrier, time efficient method of validating others’ efforts. In that way it’s good, and I have a hard time disentangling where it exactly turns bad — where it turns into me refreshing my profile page hundreds of times a day. I have contradictory beliefs inhabiting my thoughts on this topic because I genuinely don’t know what the best solution is.

If I had to propose something, I think that privatizing vote totals would be a net good. I haven’t talked about social comparison a lot here, but I think that’s a significant issue. I also think that having scores on everything helps to implicitly create a competitive or adversarial system, where certain comments are “winning” on account of their higher scores. Having vote totals visible only to the people who made them allows people to still know that they are being seen, heard, and appreciated, but they aren’t able to extrapolate anything beyond data on their own posts.

This doesn’t eliminate the me-refreshing-my-profile issue though, which is why I also think it would be beneficial to implement some sort of vote pooling/tiering/level system. I talked about this a bit more at length here, but the basic idea is that I think it’s valuable to know if something I posted was voted on by, say, 20+ people, but I don’t particularly need to know it’s at 23, then 24, then 25, and so on. If my comment continued to display >20 (or whatever the tier/level is), refreshing my page doesn’t deliver anything new except when voting crosses specific thresholds. It doesn’t eliminate the addictive quality, but it reduces its frequency significantly. A post that rises to +50 in our current system can deliver 50 individual “hits” since each is observable. If instead we had say, three tiers, the same comment would only deliver a maximum of 3 hits. My other comment talks about some other benefits I believe this kind of thing has, but really I think its greatest value would be in reducing the drip feed of validation on offer without compromising the benefits that communal validation can bring to the table.

Since this has been covered multiple times, I'll just copy/paste what I said then:

I made a previous comment on this in a thread about color coding comments and having a "best of" page; which I'll copy here as it applies.

It would also be nice to have a “best of Tildes” page for exemplary comments.

I disagree entirely. Discussion here is and should remain generally high quality purely on the basis of keeping the site at a high level. Unless someone specifically goes looking for a reason behind the colors and memorizes them (orange is obvious the first time anyone enters a thread they were in prior) they mostly go unnoticed. The statements given when exemplary is labeled should be the extent of the recognition a commentor receives and I am of the opinion that vote counts shouldn't be displayed either. A vote count or any other award/point/recognition system is inherently flawed and leads to little more than pandering to an audience to fit in (comparison is the thief of joy) for that minute dopamine rush when someone "likes" your response. These things are what has made reddit little more than an echo chamber with comment sections filled with jokes. Even here I've witnessed dissenting opinions be labeled as noise because people just can't give up on having a downvote button for anything they disagree with or doesn't match the status quo.

I'm also of the opinion that vote counts should be hidden to everyone but the person that made the comment (and possibly only visible to that person on their own user page) either permanently or for a period of 3-7 days. Another idea is a modified version of reddit's "contest mode" in which the order of top level comments is randomized for a period of time before settling back into a set comment sort order. If done here I would prefer the replies to the top level comments not be hidden by default as they are in "contest mode" as that mode, as evidenced by the name, is meant specifically for subs that hold contests.

Publicly declared voting systems are flawed, people will vote with the crowd to fit in, this has been readily apparent on reddit (and here) especially where up and down votes pile on without any actual thought being placed on the content, context, or factualness of the comment. I've watched comments swing wildly from negative to positive when presenting contrary information (leading to negatives) that is followed by someone else backing up the statement with something as simple as "You know, he's right..." making it rocket back into positives. If you want a more "real world" scenario, remember this: Every single election cycle is met with warnings about how X party is going to declare themselves the winner early to discourage people from getting out to vote and how exit polls discourage or rally voters depending on who's winning.

As for this:

Personally speaking, I think that we would be a much more robust community if we had more conservative voices speaking up. After all, the left does not have a monopoly on the objective truth.

Good luck. Every time it's brought up there is backlash because somehow all of the right is grouped into a single neonazi/conspiracy theorist/climate denying/(insert whatever idiotic group you want here) population and it is therefore vehemently opposed. The same would occur if we were a right leaning website and people asked for more leftist viewpoints they'd be met with grouping all liberals into communism/Marixism/anarchist/censorship/conspiracy theorist/(insert whatever idiotic group you want here) population. Each side has this nasty little habit of viewing the other as a single groupthink mass with zero nuance or ability to adequately express their opinions and reasons for them. Of course, they're both wrong.

I know that voting provides value to Tildes as a social platform; it acts almost like a social currency; you know that if you have a lot of votes, people appreciate what you have to say. That provides incentive for people to write more comments and participate with the community.

This is how I feel. Seeing votes on my comments gives me an understanding of the level of conversation Tildes is looking for. The "dopamine hit" also makes me put more effort into my comments.

Voting is addictive. I'm sure most of us are familiar with the process of clicking on our usernames to see how many votes our last few comments have gathered. We do this because it's a dopamine hit; they act like tiny digital love letters telling us how awesome we are.

This is true. I'm not so sure if it's a negative effect, though.

Voting is a measurement of popularity. Those love letters aren't actually how good you are, they measure how popular your ideas are. In other words, votes encourage group-think and creates an echo chamber that will prevent you from taking competing ideas seriously.

I disagree with this. It is true to some degree - without anything else considered, a comment on a popular idea is going to get more votes than a comment of the same caliber spouting an unpopular idea. But from what I've seen on Tildes, vote score correlates far more strongly with the quality and depth of the comment.

Because of number 2, we alienate people with other ideas and reduce the richness and quality of discussion on this platform. Also as a result of number 2, the information that gets put into those popular threads becomes the de facto truth - whether or not it's actually true. This can prevent us from seeing the "bigger picture" or from understanding problems others might have with how we think. The end result...

I agree. This is probably the strongest argument against public vote scores.

With that being said, I would like to hear back from everyone what they think we should do about voting. Should we go back to hiding vote totals again? Should we get rid of them entirely? Or maybe you think things are good as they are? Please let us know your reasoning.

I'd be strongly against getting rid of votes as a whole. A label-based system isn't a replacement either. My suggestion would be the following, in order:

• Wait half a year until the dust from 2020 settles down.
• Try hiding vote scores publicly, again.
• Randomize comment order on threads and hide public vote scores.

I have a simple idea for voting I'd like to share. And I'll admit I didn't read this entire thread, so if it's been talked about already... sorry!

Make it similar to reddit, but with two axes. One is for agree and disagree, and the other is for contributes and doesn't contribute. The caveat will be that if you downvote on the agree/disagree axis, you can't vote on the contribute/doesn't contribute axis; it will be assumed that if you felt the need the disagree, there was a discussion. However, I think you could say "yeah, I agree, but that's off topic." So you could vote up on agree/disagree and down on contributes/off topic.

Reddit voting is largely for consensus building, but the problem is that it buries conflicting opinions. This gives us an easy way to say "yeah, that's right" or "no that's wrong" without also hiding conflicting opinions.

Ideally, people should explain why they disagree, or why they think that something doesn't contribute. But people won't do that most of the time.

Instead of a vote, I wouldn't mind testing something more like an "acknowledgement" or "ack" for short. Which would be something you could give if you read the comment. It doesn't mean you agree or disagree with it.

With that, you'll still get an incentive to comment since others can now give you an acknowledgement and you'll know what you wrote had some sort of impact. Perhaps it can be automatically given if someone responds. Or if a response gets an ack, the parent chain also gets it.

(Personally, it's already the way that I use the voting system.)

A good cure to the problems 2 to 5 (basically everything related to voting as a measure of popularity) is the ability to sort chronologically. For groups, this has been available from (more or less) the beginning of Tildes. For topics, I would strongly suggest that there is an option to set the default comment sort, though the ability to highlight the new comments and to collapse the seen ones significantly mitigates the problem.

Right now the sort-algorithm that's used by default on comments is "relevance." I think labels like "best" and "relevance" silently hide systemic sorting and deceptively make users think that whatever's at the top is actually what they (personally) want or would choose to be the best or relevant. I would rename "relevance" to a made-up word (call it a tilde or something) rather than one that people already associate with a bunch of other stuff. I also think that "vote" does this same thing.

I would also look into UX changes that make the "mode of conversation/forum" chosen much more prominent. Sorting by order posted/votes/activity already exists - it's just not obvious or built into the default way of approaching these forums. This is how all the forums on the internet work right now. They don't ask you first what type of conversation you're interested in having - they just dump you straight into a mode and try to steer everyone into that mode too.

Here are a couple other modes I was thinking about:

1. "Attention" - Give higher rankings to posts where most users are spending their time in a thread. If a browser window sits over a particular posts for a longer time that post "accrues" a higher score than its surrounding posts.

2. "Effort" - Sort posts by those that took the longest time for a user to compose

3. "User newness" - Posters who are posting for the first time or who have posted rarely have their contributions highlighted (useful as long as user account creation is restricted).

4. Primary Content type filter (img, link, video, text)

5. "anti-viral"/"help this conversation" - sort by threads that haven't been commented on or engaged in

I think voting is good for the order of threads, but for me personally, I don't need to see the actual totals. I chose to hide them because I don't really care if a comment has a lot of votes or not and I'm always trying to vote good content over agreeable content.

I'm thankful that Tildes isn't linear and I'm also thankful that there is a fairly transparent voting system in place. I love that we don't have overall vote totals attached to our profiles, too. Of the main boards, I think Tildes has the best balance.

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I support removing votes. Metafilter (another well-moderated community that has existed for over 2 decades at this point) doesn't have them, and that site is doing fine.

Personally speaking, I think that we would be a much more robust community if we had more conservative voices speaking up. After all, the left does not have a monopoly on the objective truth.

While I'm not debating the larger sentiment here (even though I respectfully disagree with the conclusion,) on a growing list of the absolutely most important matters the left does have a "monopoly on objective truth."

• Anthropogenic climate change is real. It isn't a conspiracy. There is a clear, undeniable consensus on experts on this issue. "Alternative" viewpoints are not only not worthwhile, they are actively harmful.
• COVID-19 exists. It's deadly; the death toll is real. Masks work. There is a clear, undeniable consensus on experts on this issue. "Alternative" viewpoints are not only not worthwhile, they are actively harmful.
• Joseph Biden won Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. This is a fact; there was no grand conspiracy. The election was not stolen. "Alternative" viewpoints are not only not worthwhile, they are actively harmful.

Now social issues aren't necessarily the realm of objective fact. LGBTQ rights, racial justice, and access to healthcare are often either sociological or moral questions, not necessarily that of objective fact. Depending on who you are, you may objectively benefit from preventing LGBTQ or racial justice reforms from passing. It's up to the reader to decide whether that's a valuable insight; I'll leave that discussion for another thread.

Sometimes a society needs to stop treating "neutrality" and "bipartisanship" as virtues. Neutrality has historically been a reactionary force, whether that be during the Civil Rights Movement, the abolition of slavery, the labor movement, or countless other periods of our history.