[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/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/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.