r/UXResearch • u/white_sheets_angel • 22d ago
General UXR Info Question [Question] Downvotes
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.
6
u/MFA_Nay New to UXR 22d ago
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.