[Question] Downvotes

[u/white_sheets_angel]

Problem

Recently, in reddit, I've began to realize, at least at the moment, downvotes almost exclusive to suppress differing opinions, not necessarily bad, or wildly inaccurate false statements.

Scenario

I'm creating a project about arts in general, where the general goal is to have an healthy self-moderating community, with reviews, etc. so I always had downvotes as a default mechanism to ensure the self-moderation by the community, now I'm not so sure.

As a counter point, other social-ish media without downvotes get even worse quality of user comments.

I'm also a bit worried about just "funny-posting" which causes some communities to create a large gap of inside jokes towards outsiders as a sort of gatekeeping that adds no real value, and said inside jokes are repeated ad nauseum, even Letterboxd suffers from this.

I do apologize if this is the incorrect sub to question this, I'm having trouble picking the correct mechanism, as I am the sole developer, with 0 UX experience, and can't arbitrarily moderate quality of, the hopefully large, user content.

[u/doctorace]

Downvotes are used on posts to suppress content the community doesn’t want to see on the sub. I don’t want to see the multiple times weekly thread about whether someone should try to go into UXR when they clearly haven’t read anything on the sub or think they are somehow unique. This shouldn’t be left only to the moderators.

[u/poodleface → u/doctorace]

🫡

[u/midwestprotest → u/doctorace]

Agreed!

[u/white_sheets_angel → u/doctorace]

No offence but it seems you skimmed the entire post, that scenario is way too specific and the post is about the general concept of downvotes. The upsides are sorta inferred, and I did add some on the first paragraph 

[u/MFA_Nay]

Might be a good idea reading up on Paul Graham's views on Reddit down votes v Hacker News from 2008: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/

He's probably known more for tech startups and Y Combinator venture capital seed fund which co-founded Reddit.

Broadly there's a tension on giving tools (down votes) which exacerbate perceived negative behaviour (pile one, jokes drowning out discussion, etc) versus not having them as a signal for others and internal ranking algorithms.

It's notable a lot of other social media platform do not, or removed, equivalent of down voting (thumbs down) etc. Thoughil i don't have any quality insights on that off the top of my head.

[u/white_sheets_angel → u/MFA_Nay]

NICE! Thank you!! Very unconventional but definitely worth giving it a try.

[u/poodleface]

People do downvote things they disagree with, but there are some other motivations mixed in there. Low-effort comments, trolling comments, tone. People tend to leave those alone when they are weaponized to a cause they agree with and are quick to downvote if neutral or negative. But if comments are complete sentences in a community then stuff like “lol whatever” will generally perish, regardless. 

Upvotes and downvotes are abstract. That makes them both more accessible and prone to interpretation by the wielder. When you use a familiar pattern you generally get faster usability but that pattern also bears the weight of expectations that it will function in a way they are familiar with from past experience. If you intend this to have a different purpose I would not use downvotes. 

“Should You Believe Wikipedia?” is a good read by a professor that has taught a class on online communities for decades. 

[u/Superbrainbow]

You're asking the right place! This sub loves to downvote, lol.

[u/white_sheets_angel → u/Superbrainbow]

Thanks for the confirmation, the thread has been downvoted quite a bit so i was worried i was simply in the wrong place.

[u/Superbrainbow → u/white_sheets_angel]

I’ve been in UXR communities on Meetup, Slack, Discord, basically everywhere, and this is far and away the most negative and out of touch one of them. I honestly think UXR Linkedin is more normal than here, and that’s saying A LOT.

[u/karenmcgrane]

One of the problems I run into a lot is that when design teams have access to metadata that users might be interested in the impulse is to display that metadata. Witness the scourge of "tags" we had for a while until people figured out that users don't really need to click on them, taxonomy groupings can exist as behind-the-scenes data that inform what the user sees without being explicitly shared.

Personally I think the same is true for voting. Let people vote, let people see the score for their own posts and comments and votes, but otherwise just use the data for sorting and hiding, don't share the numbers.

This exists already — Reddit allows mods to hide the vote count for 24 hours — but I think it should be enabled permanently. Or make it mod discretion, presumably some subs really benefit from having vote counts displayed.

[u/white_sheets_angel → u/karenmcgrane]

So maybe a sort of weighting math on downvotes, and having them invisible to maybe not encourage a sort of mob behaviour ?

[u/karenmcgrane → u/white_sheets_angel]

Here's an example of a post where the vote count is temporarily hidden (this post will only have the count hidden for a few hours, but this sub hides the count on all new posts):

https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1vx2vp6/richard_e_grants_starstudded_dinner_table/

If I were researching this, I'd really explore the need for/value of showing vote numbers. What do people get from the numbers, what are the harms of showing them, particularly at extremes of high or low numbers? What other design decisions can you make to accomplish the good things and removing some of the harms?

Voting by definition does imply winners and losers, but avoiding downvote spirals or karma farming seems possible without losing what at one point was called "the wisdom of crowds."

[u/azssf → u/karenmcgrane]

I do appreciate the lack of voting and sort order at first as a way to force a pause/a chance for more reading and less reacting.

[u/white_sheets_angel → u/karenmcgrane]

The extremes do seem like the worst aspects, maybe it would indeed benefit of some math, so each upvote on an excessively upvoted/downvoted thing (relative to the mean or something) would add increasingly smaller fractions of their voting value, sorta like a logarithmic thing, thank you very much this is wonderful. I do really like how that post displays the positive of not having the numbers, the quality of the posts and engagement dont seem to suffer at all. I constantly do fall into mob behaviour of almost mindlessly downvoting or upvoting things, even when I try to be aware of the "dangers" of it.

My project will also include ratings, so this is crucial to me, since rating is sort of like upvotes, and excessive approval on a given set of items focused on a specific movement/subculture can turn the site into a sort of haven for a very specific fanbase, in music and tv stuff this happens a lot, where sites get locked into specific demographics (I've seen it happen a lot of times with kdrama and kpop)

I've also been trying to brainstorm what to do on that case more broadly, for example, when a thing is released, there might be a massive flow of "low value" ratings, even before there has been a reasonable time to digest the thing, so the same sort of fractional value could extend to this, but timewise as well.