In downvoting discussions, the top post will represent the consensus of the people engaged in the discussion. Note that this isn't "the truth" or "the consensus of the community" but of the people engaged on the subject. For example, if you see an otherwise-liberal community discussing gun-rights, the gun owners within that community will flood in and are highly motivated on the subject, and so the consensus will reflect their interest in the subject.

But either way, consensus.

Without the downvotes, the top post is often misinformation or just trash. Because a small, motivated group pushes it up, and the rest of the participants can only argue against it but not drive it back down... this creates the "engagement-based content" that aggregators crave.

The problem, of course, is that bots and sockpuppets are treated the same as established community members and can skew the "consensus". Realistically, the leadership of an online community needs to be able to identify who are credible voices on a subject and give them the power to steer the conversation. Yes, it's not egalitarian, but these systems never have been.

I wish I saw more consensus - things that are agreed upon by multiple sides - but in practice I tend to see a tyranny of the majority - whoever can win the upvote vs. downvote contest. The winning side rises to the top, while dissenting voices are silenced.

One sensible thing that I thought HN did but I don't see immediately in the guidelines is to suggest that downvoting isn't supposed to be a "dislike" button but is intended for comments that are spam, trolling, etc..

On HN, the first post to gather a lot of replies also seems to rise to the top.

I agree, I disagree, Noise/bullshit

The problem to me is I want to read things I don't agree with but I don't want to read bullshit.

I would especially love to read ideas with an even amount of agree / disagree but a low bullshit amount. Not just sum all this to zero and hide it. That is terrible.

You might say that HN already has this system, distinguishing between downvoting and "flagging".

If "Agree" is +1, "Disagree" is -1, "Shit take/bad faith/troll" is -2, and "report" is threats of violence or spam.

That rule actually rigs the system in favor of irresponsible voters.

These are not minority opinions, but unpopular opinions. Just because something is downvoted to hell and hidden, doesn't mean it's a minority.

A minority opinion is one which few people have, not one which is downvoted by the majority.

That doesn't necessarily mean this opinion is a minority opinion in the real world. In fact it doesn't even have to mean those who downvoted don't share your opinion, they might have downvoted you for a heap of reasons (maybe you were rude, or they saw your comment as pointless, maybe they downvoted every comment except their own, etc.)

The truth is, you can never be sure if your opinion is minority or majority within any online forum just by looking at up/downvotes of one post in isulation.

reddit says that too, as do other discussion forums, to no effect, same as here.

Another thing I have noticed is SO, that remove "karma" for each downvote you action (Note that I have seem that behaviour documented).

Everything else you said resonated, but that part strongly contradicted for me.

Saying something like you don’t agree that investment properties should be illegal is enough to get you banned in many parts of reddit.

Likewise, threads on covid policy were generally supportive of the scientific consensus... Until the subject of keeping gyms closed comes up, where the bro-science faithful would appear to declare all covid restrictions a crime against humanity.

It's not astriturfing or anything malicious, just the natural result of a subject being a disproportionate interest to a highly motivated subset of the community.

Even non-gun-owners are entitled an opinion on guns as they can be used against them too.

Because the latter is easily identifiable. You basically complain that people upvote the wrong opinions, which I would not disagree with.

Credible sources have also spread misinformation. I think the current system is fine and heavy handed approaches and information hierarchies are counter productive. There are great communities without a leadership and hands off approaches. You idea would lead to "Influencers" getting more control on content because those would be the "leaders". Can be good, can be bad. I think the latter would be the more common occurrence.

But people too invested in online communities also tend to do a large amount of damage. An example would be the people at the top of Reddit karma.

If we had "credible" leaders, there would be less room for objections, which I would like to see more often.

There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes).

Unless you are taking the negative possibilities into account, an all-beneficial 'marketplace' of ideas' does not and will not work.

Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad, then you either improve your product or start losing money. But if you could go a small market with a big sound system and a team of marketing people to loudly insist that your products are the best you would quickly wreck the whole market.

It is more than an idea being ahead of time or stupid.

People need to take a lot of cognitive shortcuts in their model of the world to be able to compute it, which is evidently imperfect. But getting poked holes in one's model is nonetheless painful. Being told you might be wrong, and the realizing you were wrong is painful and scary.

Most people do not use up/down votes, blocks, bans this heavy-handedly because of the expected truthiness of the ideas in question; they primarily do it based on the idea's conformity to their sense of identity and to protect themselves from the anxiety of having been wrong.

And this is not their fault. Polarization is ultimately a failure in integration and having a complex model of the world. But it is work, and it is painful. The more that work is postponed, the more the drift between our models and the reality, making it even more painful to catch up. The tools of discourse we have been given give us the perfect mechanisms for facilitating this avoidance, because they feed on engagement and not the truth. It is like saying "I'll keep telling you sweet lies as long as you don't leave me, doesn't matter how much that hurts you on the long run".

> Consider a farmer's market or flea market. If you go there with a bad product and it fails to sell, or previous customers tell you it turned out to be bad

Or they could be diverting you from mere hard truths. When it comes to ideas, "comfort" is the wrong metric to optimize for.

That's where moderation comes in. Honestly, I think good moderation is better for weeding out trolls and terrible ideas than downvotes. All sorts of idiocy makes it to the top of Reddit, for example.

> There are potential benefits to considering any given idea (you learn something useful or get smarter), and there are also costs (time to evaluate, possible bad outcomes).

You don't have to evaluate every comment. You just let it stand and let others that want to invest the time come to their own conclusions. Perhaps you misunderstood the comment, have a different perspective or fail to get the context. This can be true for any comment you read.

At some point you have to cut your losses; you stay open to persuasion by people who consistently exploit your willingness to listen, you're being played. Downvotes do serve the excellent purpose of saying 'I disagree with this and am not willing to waste further time on it.'

Downvotes can also be abused. But an easy way to get around that is to make the system fully transparent and then do cluster analysis. If a downvoter or group thereof only ever puts out negative votes or habitually downvotes everything fromeone they don't like, that will show up after a while and people can weight away those negative opinions. Absent transparency, then the incentives to game the system go way up, and system operators usually wildly overestimate their own ability to guard against that.

I mean, it would be super-biased but at this point I'm all about systems that are biased in favor of scientific consensus and human rights.

Yes, you could reverse the "credibility" of those paragon users and make a system where the people surrounding the neo-nazi conspiracy theorists are the ones who hold all the power but we already get sites like that without any moderation or voting at all so that would be redundant anyways.

I think this is still better, than just one bubble, even if the intention is a "pro-science" bubble. Because there are not many people claiming to be opposed science. Allmost everyone claims to be "pro-science", even flat earthers. So it still comes down to what the specific mod thinks.

I think platform operators to some extent have to eschew moral judgements and let things play out, eg if a variety of distinct and persistent clusters emerge naturally, and 98% of people in a community make nazis' lives miserable for being in the 'nazi cluster' then it doesn't need any additional help from the platform operator. Of course the nazis will whine 'so much for the tolerant left' but honestly, who cares. The key is that if enough people in a community tag individuals participants in a particular negative way, those individuals can either accept it (and then be habitually ignored) or change their ways.

This isn't always a moralistic dichotomy. For example I post a lot of environmental stories to HN, which are not-interesting to some readers who prefer to focus on pure technology. I'm OK with them ignoring such posts or even downvoting them/flagging if I make too many in a row. Likewise there are many technical topics of wide interest on HN which I find deathly boring, but which I am happy to ignore.

Researchers at Stanford have come up with some results on clustering and conflict in online spaces, which you might find interesting: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/

Really sorry to hear that. I hope it is a hobby and not your job.

I remember when Nazis where a joke on the internet. That they are not quite that anymore is not completely their own making as there are some people obsessed with them and even start to mirror them. Or others that want to build a profile about standing against the obvious.

Suddenly there is a significant group that denies civil liberties like free speech or freedom of association. Free speech in interesting here, because it seem to trigger those that fear that Nazis are overtaking the internet. To me this is very indicative of reactionary behavior towards a vastly overestimated threat.

Maybe they would be hard to distinguish from regular user clustered because of group thinking , but even in that case I wouldn’t consider it a completely bad thing… :-)

"Upvote only communities" are more prone to brigading by hyper-motivated cliques or sub-groups.

"Upvote+downvote communities" are more resistant to the above, but also more prone to hivemind.

It's not clear to me that one is better than the other. It is clear to me that both have significant flaws.

Ideally what you really want to promote would be well-reasoned/well-sourced posts from a variety of viewpoints. In practice I simply don't think this can be achieved solely by community voting. It is simply too easy to click an upvote or downvote button for random community members that don't have the incentive to take a more thoughtful approach.

Every successful community I've seen has had some level of strong moderator involvement, including HN.

(The HN mods kill a lot of low-value posts. Because they do their job well, and they do it with a low profile, many folks are unaware of how much moderation they do...)

The hope is both to increase friction and to allow each person to decide which downvote reasons they want to respect. It also forces people to foreground why they are downvoting and gets rid of "why the downvotes" and changes it into "why is this unproductive?"

This is exactly what reddit told its users to do (only downvote due to one of these reasons) - and exactly nobody does it.

People will figure out to downvote for whatever "reason" that maximizes the impact of the downvote real fast; groups of people will make sure to weaponize it too even without coordination.

E.g.: "the comment I hate doesn't have enough 'inaccurate' downvotes to sink into the abyss, so I'll do my job and add one".

The only reason why things are downvoted is "I don't like what I feel when I read it", which most of the time is "I disagree with what this says" or "I hate people who say things like that" (the latter more commonly).

You want people to dislike things for the "right" reasons — but the only way to do this is to filter the people, not the content.

(I've been a mod of a decently-sized subreddit, and a user since 2008)

I'm not on reddit much these days but when I opened it just now I was able to downvote without choosing a reason? So I do not think it is using the system I described.

The ability of each user to chose what downvote categories they want to respect would be an important part of making the system harder to "game" (to the degree that one is "gaming" a voting system by voting).

So downvoting is an implicit choice of only "good" reasons.

Putting a drop-down list with "good" reasons is as good as displaying a pop-up: "Are you sure you are downvoting for <good reasons>?" - which will be promptly ignored.

Users will just be frustrated for a bit until they train themselves to pick the category that maximizes the effect of their downvote.

The only thing you can do with categories is display the distribution / most prevailing category alongside the score (like Slashdot has been doing for decades).

In all of this, you seem to want to control why people downvote.

Instead, examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that.

It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it?

Unless you add categories like "I think the author of this comment is a moron and I hate them", people will shoehorn your categories for this use case.

And if you do that, I'm not convinced the result will be necessarily positive.

If each other user can choose what downvote categories they want reflected on their site, this dynamic doesn't work the way you are describing.

> examine why people downvote. Because categories won't change that.

It seems to me like forcing people to label why they are downvoting would be very helpful to examining why people downvote.

> It would be like the emoji committee not including an emoji for penis. That worked well, didn't it?

I think it worked really well? Like, I wouldn't mind a penis emoji, but it turns out we've got an informal penis emoji and it works great? What do you feel did not work well about it?

It seems like you are thinking that I am thinking that this system would...prevent bad downvotes or make people think twice or...I dunno, be better? I was not thinking that.

The idea is more about forcing people to contextualize their downvotes in a way that can be observed and reacted to by the community at large. It would be a way of talking about why people downvote without making a particular person defend themselves. It would, hopefully, add another layer to the communal sense of why people are engaging in the way they are.

If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes. If I'm reading it correctly, this suggestion would just add more signal to downvotes (even if irt karma they were all the same.)

>If you're intentionally trying to restrict expression by eliminating options you don't like, you might as well just remove downvotes.

My point essentially.

To this day, I prefer Slashdot's summaries over headline-only aggregators, and I wish other sites would adopt features like the mod-with-reason and karma caps per comment. But they designed the system to limit the power of moderators, and those limits didn't scale with the imbalance between trolls and good-faith posters

Considering the amount of fuckery people engaged on during the site's heyday its moderation system handled things amazingly well. If you read at a threshold of +1 you'd barely see all the garbage posted there.

Which is not to say that just adding complexity is the right fix. Sure, you can add dislike + disagree + ijusthateyourguts buttons, or force votes to be justified (funny/incorrect/disagree/...), or whatever. But it's not obvious what's worth the overhead (UX-wise), and if it ends up boiling down to just finding more nuanced reasons to toss things into one bucket or another (or even a single score), I'm not sure if we're any further ahead.

Perhaps clustering is a better model than polarized buckets? As in, this comment belongs to the set of things that left-leaning people seem to support. This other comment belongs to the conspiracy theory #1 cluster. (The system would likely not know or care what the clusters mean.) If you choose to engage with the idiots who love cluster A, you can do so, and if you want their noise out of your feed then you can do that too.

You'd still need to decide what input signals will enable this -- you could do it with just upvotes and correlating users' activity across a site, but you would need to evaluate that in terms of what best supports the model (clusters instead of buckets).

And clusters aren't the end-all be-all either. A racist, misogynistic comment that also says something that group X strongly agrees with isn't going to be fully described by being in the "jerk comment" cluster. But we have to deal with a low-dimensional approximation in order for any mechanism to be worthwhile.

That's how I feel with YouTube's aggressive recommendation system -- I watch a funny Bill Burr comedy clip, and YouTube knows there is some overlap between "Bill Burr fans" and "men's rights advocates", and now I get a bunch of recommendations for Jordan Peterson stuff and if I click one of those then its next recommendations want to take me down the MRA/incel rabbit hole. It's a radicalization pipeline where I touch some innocent surface-level stuff and YouTube goes, "hmm, well, of the people who liked that, our most highly-engaged users who click through videos all day long REALLY like THIS" and wants me to become that person.

I definitely feel some nostalgia for those days.

To be clear, it's not like VR Chat or even the early internet were completely bubbleless. But without an algorithm dividing people, it was just the path of least resistance to ... explore. Click on links and see where they go. Would you end up on some neo-nazi forum sometimes? Sure. But you were just as likely to end up on a Pokemon fan page. It was far more random and diverse. As you point out, that's different today with these algorithms driving people directly towards radical content.

Anyway, back on the social media thing, I fear there is no reason for it to change. Success, for a recommendation algorithm, will always be defined as what keeps you on the site, scrolling and clicking. Success for a person, we can be fairly sure, is not that. So we will always be fighting the algorithms to try to keep our own "engagement" at the level that is good for us, not good for them.

So many of today's "bubbles" don't even involve subjective ideas; they involve willful distortions of facts such as anti-vaccine propaganda, flat Earth theories, and the like.

     how VR Chat is much more like the earlier internet [...] a 
     much healthier environment where people are exposed to and 
     more understanding of those outside of what would otherwise 
     be their bubble

The internet population itself was kind of... a single bubble back then. It was way less diverse than the general population.

Early internet discourse was dominated by tech-savvy folks at universities, and folks working in the tech/engineering sectors. Therefore users tended to be male, white, college educated, young, technologically savvy, and economically upper/middle class.

We were less likely to see the walls between bubbles because we were in a single bubble.

I do not think it is productive to a healthly discussion to link wanting to end discrimination against men with incels or Jordan Peterson

But if I were to watch a few of their videos I suspect I would be swamped with recommendations for other videos which are more in line with what I was referring to. Stuff made by and for men who are bitter and resentful of women and spend a lot of time online seething about it.

I mentally lump it all together because it all appears together. That's admittedly unfair.

and another example of how such algorithms can influence collective thought.

I'm sure there are people who do the same with other equality measures as more divisive content of the same vein like "you're a fucking white male" is gonna be more likely to show up until the viewer links it with social justice entirely.

But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid, and it's worse when multiple people decide they want to play that game and then the site software decides you get less rights than everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would I participate in that?

It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.

If downvotes don't matter, if I should ignore them, then they should not exist. I'm tired of sites that build in pathological behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The world is not binary.

I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it’s just not a common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an extremely high ratio of ups to downs.

> Why would I participate in that?

This is a good question, but you’ve constructed a straw man version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on how to start and run a business, for the threads where world experts and relatively famous people participate and comment, for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full side of things. Good luck friend!

But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They perceive a difficulty in contributing to the conversation because they're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still a legitimate concern for them and for many other people who lurk and don't participate in the conversation directly. And there are plenty of lurkers. In my limited experience of receiving visitors from HN on my website, the number of clicks is 100x the number of comments on the thread.

And this is exactly why Facebook doesn't have a downvote button. It's trivial to add it. I've even seen it implemented in internal versions. But it only takes a couple of bad experiences of being downvoted for a user to get turned off from the platform. TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.

What's more, this experiment of having downvotes does exist. It's called reddit. Plenty of people use it. If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great. Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?

I don't see that this follows. Limiting participation is not just compatible with democratic systems, it's crucial. Democracy-the-system (the thing being "saved") has long built in safeguards against untempered application of democracy-the-concept. Constitutions, "upper houses", multi-branch government, representative democracy itself: the idea that the untempered whims of the masses are not a stable basis for govt is practically foundational to democratic systems.

Downvotes are even more egalitarian than the proxies that eg govt uses to temper pure democracy. This can make them a double-edged sword: they deter bad actors from causing disproportionate damage to a community (eg a troll starting a flamewar has a sizable blast radius), but they do so by the standards of the community. If the community's norms are "bad" by your definition, then deterring deviation from them is a bad thing. But there's no axiomatic basis for defining what "good" norms are, and the community's views (via downvotes) is a principled mechanism (again, the principle behind democracy).

IMO, the lack of any accountability feedback loop in downvotes alone means that it's a tough sole basis for a healthy community. The best fora I've been on have been on Reddit[1], combining the presence of downvotes with the "constitutional" approach of clearly-defined conversational norms (primarily civility and intellectual charity) and rigorous enforcement.

[1] I have a rule of not naming this family of subreddits on HN or other fora, because maintaining the community quality is a delicate balance and the average HNer would both find it attractive and utterly ruin it in large enough numbers.

OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one person like you was prevented from ending up on that forum, it's worth it 1000x over.

Your comment says:

> If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great

My comment did the exact thing you had already complained about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the reason for this gap.

It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly because you can't follow the conversation well enough to remember what you wrote in your previous comment.

For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access to the downvote button. The result is that I think more carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases over the years where the downvote button did good things to a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time and some downvotes.

Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy and using the downvote button every once in a while, because over time I can see some of the upside to the downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other people do it so I don't ever have to.

That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more likely.

That's only one time I definitely know I was getting downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now how do I know it hasn't happened several times since except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough ego that they need to PM me proof of it.

And my own innocuous comments tend to be “1” rather than anything negative. If downvotes rings were more common you’d expect more negative karma comments.

But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting privileges to accounts in good standing but even then it's not easy.

That being said, for all its faults, I would expect that reddit does indeed have more productive discourse than most other (non-HN) social media platforms, particularly Twitter with its enforcement of shallow/short-form comments. /r/the_donald is obviously an extreme example of an alt-right cesspool, but it's not obvious that it was less polite or constructive than the equivalent communities on other platforms.

I have never visited that subreddit, but since the rest of the world, downvote button or not, was also not really involved in a constructive exchange of ideas on that topic - I do not see the point here. Emotional topics are hard to discuss, if the people involved use it to vent out emotions and to evangelize.

This site is every bit as echo chamber, “curated”, and intentionally suppressive to anything but a specific viewpoint.

If anyone doesn’t think so, go make steel man arguments against climate tax policy and let’s see how that goes for you.

The up/down vote system is the tool to implement ideological purity. And here the gray/fade system is a bandwagon signal.

This is all known, to people on the outside of the “target audience”.

I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can tell the responder did not even read your full comment... Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating on it.

Should I care less? Definitely. But that's not so easy for me. So more than half the time on HN I'll write a full comment, read it back, and then decide not to post it because it's not worth whatever incorrect response it will get. I don't comment on Reddit at all anymore because it's not worth it.

I've been waffling on whether or not it's even worth posting this comment, haha.

The political threads were a special beast, where any comment that revealed your political leanings would get a deluge of downvotes from the opposition. The Tesla and Apple threads sometimes get a bit of this too. But the vast majority of my experience is that the downvotes I've received were well-deserved. Maybe I was just misinformed and propagating misinformation. Maybe I was trying and failing to be funny - and thus didn't contribute to the conversation or cultivate curiosity.

Low effort / incorrect comments don't bother me a great deal. Usually someone else comes along and downvotes those. If it's a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, I'll attempt to engage, if I think there's some value in putting the effort in.

With experience, you do get a feel for when comments just are not worth bothering with. If they are low effort / failing to contribute, downvote and move on with your life.

A community is very much the sum of the contributors, with spirit that stems from the guidelines and moderation. Without individuals putting something in, something more than what detractors try to take away, it couldn't exist and thrive.

(Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value of time has become very ruthless.)

In larger scoped things you will have much more content than anyone could possibly consume and most of it is bad. Keeping score is a way of avoiding everyone having to go through the same pile of drek. Keeping score is only half as effective if you can only up vote. Consider two tallies of several contributions. First two bad contribution neither sufficiently bad to be worthy of being banned.

Contribution A: Imagine 100 people viewed, 10 people liked it, 70 people hated it 20 were indifferent.

With down votes: -60 Without: 10

Contribution B: 10 people liked it, 10 hated it, 80 indifferent.

With down votes: 0 Without: 10

Now consider a positive contribution C with fewer votes 10 for and 1 against.

With down votes: 9 Without: 10

Now something outrageous that attracted a ton of engagement based on how bad it is. Maybe they said we should raise corgis and kitties as meat animals! 980 votes to the negative and 20 to the positive.

With down votes: -960 without: 20

Without down votes A B and C are identically scored despite B being worse than C and A being much worse. Even worse D despite being horrible is scored the highest!

Not applying the karma of a comment to the commenter has similar downsides. You would be throwing away good useful information your users have given you.

For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for agrees/disagrees, then the comment sections can get ugly.

I believe HN thrives despite the upvote/downvote system because this website is a little more mature than others.

Currently their main problem (which is unsolvable) is just that everyone uses it and so there's new teenagers to ask trivial gender war questions on AskReddit every week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them.

Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.

[-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also unvote if you change your mind on your vote.

When logged in, I have upvote buttons on all comments, and I believe downvote buttons are enabled at over a certain amount of karma.

Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the opponent is not interested in productive conversation, so I move on.

And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this is not the place where I'd like to participate in discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful dispute and the extending each other world view.

A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.

If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.

edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is automatically dropped from the front page.

Someone can disagree with you without you being wrong. If you think they are wrong in their response...what good is being done? If you both have intractable positions then more discussion on the topic is just lengthening scroll bars.

Additionally if I disagree with you or just think you're wrong I don't owe you any explanation of that. You don't have a right to my time because we disagree. It's not my job to convince you. I may choose to reply to you (as I obviously just have) but it's my choice entirely. You may reply back to me and I may never ever read it, I don't have any requirement to do so.

Just to be clear, you expect to get downvotes when mentioning LTSB? This does not match my experience, and I also made several LTSB mentions.

...and jokes are generally not treated well either, unless it's Friday.

But discussions on health, religion and culture that is where the downvotes are used.

If you can accept that premise, then HN is a great place to be. Reddit is just not in the same league when it comes to thoughtful, well-articulated discussions where you get some great insights.

Unless it is a topic about Rust and how it is better or worse than C++.

Try to make a claim C++ is better, and nobody is going to read your bullet point explanations, you just get tons of downvotes.

(I'm not claiming anything is better or worse in this comment, I only present an example.)

If you write a comment that is against what the majority of the site beliefs you will be downvoted. If you agree with the majority you probably won't have experienced this.

I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.

I don't know that it is a specific group of people who do that, but it is consistent enough that I can pretty much count on it happening every time, and clearly since it earned more upvotes than downvotes the community did consider the comment somewhat valuable.

Granted you get hammered much harder on r/politics or r/news, but the problem is the same.

The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure they understand the community[0].

[0]: No democracy permits people to move there and vote right away. For native born citizens they have to wait 18 years to get the vote.

Even if you could objectively review that, HN doesn't have a rule against downvoting for disagreement, pg decided it was acceptable very early on and it hasn't been changed. (although plenty people think it should)

This down-then-up pattern happens on all sorts of topics here. Almost everything I post gets a few downvotes within two minutes or so, then inevitably crawls back upward as people actually read what's said. One change suggestion I'd have for HN is to disallow downvotes within some time of posting, like 30 minutes, give people a chance to read it, and decide whether it is truly not contributing to the conversation.

I assumed the latter, because those places tend to be places worth sticking around, and because this is definitely where HN falls in.

I don't think this is a regular occurence on HN. But on reddit? All day every day.

Personally, I often upvote posts I disagree with, because it is a good discussion starter or just generally a good comment/discussion/disagreement.

On Reddit though, it’s the standard.

Those regularily get called out as "bad", "toxic" or "hateful". Or banned.

Which actually is the reason I got rid of my reddit accounts.

If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The cap SD system only works if the group of people posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people want to punish in some way. When the real vote should have been a disagree 0.

Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.

But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.

Without a culture that rejects them, they, by nature, rapidly overwhelm most communities in content if a voting system is present.

"if you insist on taking up my class time making jokes, please see to it that they are funny."

I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) on content but each individual could set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to personalize how that other user's vote contributed to their view of the overall score.

It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see how people would react.

The idea of whitelisting users to even count their contribution at all had not occurred to me, but I might take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as well, since you brought it up.

Another interesting feature would be to set vote significance based on a subset of users from a given subforum. In reddit terms, this would be, maybe you trust the content or membership of a given subreddit more than you do the subset of all users, so you set the website to filter on `r/foo` user upvotes instead of `r/all` user upvotes.

There's a lot of potential here to let users craft their on miniverse of relevance and information filtering.

Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.

No worries if not, I get that it's not a trivial ask to dig up an example.

My own suspicion is that, as HN has grown, it has become more influential, and therefore more worth manipulating, and therefore more people are trying to manipulate it rather than just participating in it.

FWIW I didn't downvote your comment when I encountered it days ago, but I do notice that comments that have very basic logical flaws in them tend to be downvoted without replies. Downvotes aren't just a tool to enforce civility. This is just my assessment of your comment, I hope you take it in the good faith that I intended.

I don’t want to transform this into a discussion of the original but I specifically intended to mean that to imply that the whole thing is that crypto functions like M3 and that value transfer is the underlying goal, legal tender just being a tool. After all, we use IOUs commonly (Splitwise exists on this principle) and they aren’t legal tender. I felt there was enough there to make the connection.

But anyway, if you think it is a logically incorrect comment, that’s on me to communicate better. Thanks for the feedback.

Anyway, I can’t have this discussion any more with you, because I have to save my comments for the most information transfer (I have an account rate limit).

Maybe not here, but he said here and Reddit. It's definitely the norm on Reddit.

In HN you can send an email to the mods so they can take a look. Also the site may detect it automatically (the details are unclear, it's part of the secret sauce).

> because I'm not sufficiently ideological

Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.

Try to stick to technical threads, preferably if they have less than 100 comments. You will be happier.

Maybe there should be a separate URL to view recent comments with <1 points?

/graycomments, or /controversial, or something like that.

I’d certainly use that to sprinkle some upvotes. There are often high-quality comments that get downvotes early for whatever reason. It has a discouraging effect even if it gets corrected over time with more votes.

Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political", this is quite impossible to do.

Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere. People will try and justify it with walls of text about the oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue intersects with their politics.

In fact, it would be a diminishment of their love to analyze it purely through a political framework—which is one reason many people don't like "everything is political". It diminishes many of the most important aspects of our lives.

It’s not very “external” when the police are breaking down your door to force themselves into the middle of your activities. It’s something you need to be constantly aware of - if you want to have love at all, then you need to thread it through the government’s loopholes; if you do it in public, you are “an activist”.

It would be nice if “love” and “government” could be cleanly separated - but for queer people, that seems to be a fantasy that only straight people have the luxury of believing in :/

That may seem to you as if I am splitting hairs. For me it's one of the most important distinctions in the world, and one that is lost when we insist everything is political.

You sit there and you tell us that there are things that you enjoy that cannot be described in a political manner. Nobody has ever suggested that your love for anyone is directly political.

Where you can live, who you can openly love, what jobs you can hold, what education you can have, what art you can view, and who you can fraternize with... these are all impacted, sometimes substantially, by political decisions.

Love is not some tangible item that sits apart from the rest of lived experience. It is created and nurtured THROUGH that lived experience. You love your partner in the way that you do because you have the freedom to do it. Your perception is colored by the free society in which you live, and by the attitudes of the people within that society.

I have a black friend from high school... a nationally celebrated former athlete, who started dating another high school classmate of mine in college. As soon as they were able, they moved away. She was a white girl with a black man, and even people they had grown up with were uncomfortable with the pairing. Her friends literally sat her down and informed her that her kids would look like her father, and didn't want her to experience the sort of emotional distress that a parent of a black child suffers when living in society. The negative attitudes of people around them at the time forced them to leave the state.

Most of my gay classmates also moved away, all to California, for similar reasons.

There’s an old joke about the Network OSI layer: What are layers 8 and 9? Political and Financial.

I think the context with things like that refer to internal business politics and having diplomatic conversations versus State or National Politics.

Avoid religion and politics in general seems like solid advice as it’s too emotionally charged for most people to discuss purely logically. (Also, there are too many x factors and most politicians are relatively short term (speaking of USA here).

Aside from political discussion, I see that opinion (say os or console X is better than Y) also bring downvotes.

I find that asking questions and giving facts (not a wrong one) won't get downvoted and stay at 1 at worst.

Even tabs vs spaces is an ideological battle. And so is for and against downvoting. I am against downvoting because I am against censorship and for free speech.

And to then say "avoid ideology" or to be modding a platform based on a "no ideology" ideology is like being against meaningful conversation on a conversation platform.

So we are left with excessive pampering and everyone walking on eggshells. Whenever something gets ideological, we can't handle it and so we censor it. Or hide behind a downvote. All because we're not allowed, and hence have had no practice.

The platform that can handle political discourse without breaking will be the next great social media platform. We owe it to ourselves to build it, instead of pretending this is already it, whatever your platform of choice.

I upvote everyone on this bases. In reddit for example, If I sort by controversial more often than not it just someone with an equally dumb or smart but different opinion.

Discussing stuff in the Internet is difficult, and requieres a very good moderation, something that IMO HN does a good job, for what I've seen.

Reddit is the wild west of subs, there are good and bad mods, but once a sub becomes too popular it's just impossible to avoid vote brigading.

I've also been administrator for a number of forums, and it's basically volunteering job. If you're not paid or getting a profit from it it's very hard to justify the work and the headaches that require to moderate a community.

In fact that's the main reason I've closed or sold the communities I had. In the end, there's not a lot of people who is willing to have reasonable and educated discussions, and nobody can do it all the time, so IDK, hope someone else has the energy, I don't.

From the communities I had, there's only one left. It has not a lot of users, yet I need time and energy to learn programming while I keep going to my current job and juggle with my life, so I'll probably experiment with it to automate moderation in some way, hopelly not making it miserable for the users.

It's not the political threads that are a problem. There seems to be a few companies that you can't contradict in any way on the threads that repeat their mantra. It's usually not even the large ones, so it's very surprising when you get in a discussion that's quite visibly on a bad sideline, you point a technical flaw, and get downvoted into the minimum, just to have your comment go back up by the long tail of people upvoting unfairly greyed comments. (And you only discovers the "culture sponsor" if you go back and read the comments again.)

I imagine that's also unavoidable in a forum where a number of people that breath those mantras through the day frequent. I don't think there's any manipulation going on (except for workplace propaganda), but that does make technical thread political too, and it's probably very disorienting if it's a technical subject you care about.

Anyway, I don't think HN has any penalty for accumulating downvotes. So I don't think there's any improvement to make here.

Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means they're not experiencing any harm.

Nothing you can say can hurt me == I have an unhealthy habit of suppressing my negative emotions

I simply mean that I'm old enough, have experienced enough that there are very few people in the world that can say something which I haven't already been told or I haven't imagined myself. Some rando on the net can't possibly hurt.

But yeah, I don't mean to suggest suppressing your feelings.

But I also think if people don't trigger a warning as someone worth shunning that their criticism affects us, especially irl.

Can you give an example?

Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if you agree with it or not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

>Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.

https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...

I feel following this advice leads to better communities with more diverse and more useful conversation.

Says who? And why should anyone listen to them? There seems to be a lot of talk about how it's not being used as designed, but absolutely no one provides any evidence to support that there's "One True Way" to use voting buttons.

Do not specify any rules nor instructions about when to vote left and when to vote right, but too much votes in either direction and the comment starts getting hidden.

If you disagree with the trend where any particular comment is going, figure out the horizontal direction you should click by yourself.

edit.

I think there is no need for up/downvotes after this system is implemented. Some secret amount of horizontal votes in either direction is good (counted as upvote). Too much over the limit and the extra is counted as a downvote. Hide the score from voters. Ban comments that attempt to discuss the score of any comment. Now everyone has a reason to be a bit more careful when voting (...except when a comment is obviously too left or right).

Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it.

Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.

Downvotes are of even less consquence.

Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.

I think this should be true to individuals, in regards to the ownership they feel over their online account and the content they create.

But I do not think this is (or should be) true in regards to an online community. Because I think sites like Hacker News and Ars Technica have relatively healthy comment ecosystems, where the content of the comments is valuable and contributes immensely to the store of knowledge these sites contain.

(Notably, Ars Technica has a more obvious, perceivable liberal political bias which I happen to agree with, so I'm sure the value of that community is divided, whereas I think Hacker News is more politically balanced.)

This is one of the more frustrating parts of the whole thing. I try not to care much about votes, but when a "throwaway comment" gets 50+ upvotes, while a carefully thought out, heavily researched, link/citation supported post with a lot of "meat" to it gets no votes at all, or even a downvote... that's just kind of grating in some sense. Well, it is to me anyway.

Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)

The parent post made an assertion, but did not really justify that assertion. Sure, it's easy to say that in some abstract sense "down votes don't matter". I believe that myself, in that sort of abstract / hand-wavy sense. But real life experience shows us that down votes do matter to people - at least some people, some times, in some situations. Why? I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not going to pretend to understand the deeper aspects of that. But it seems self evident to me that it's related to the other evolved responses we humans have, related to peer approval, social status, recognition, embarrassment, etc.

But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you?

In the specific case I mentioned, I think it's largely about the mismatch between expectations and perceived subjective sense of "right/wrong" and reality. I expect random throwaway comments that just say "taxation is theft" to get downvoted. But when I spend 30 minutes doing research, looking up citations, and crafting a carefully composed response to something, to try to make a point or provide a useful reference to help somebody and then that gets down voted, it triggers that instinctive "unfairness reaction" that we have. Or that's my approximate theory anyway.

Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes?

I think because a downvote is a form of disapproval, and it's done in public, and it correlates to our desire to avoid being shamed / embarrassed, especially in front of others.

Of course I can understand the psychological part of it, but that's what I contest here.

You write an insightful message in a forum. Perhaps 5,000 people read it, 100 upvote it, 200 downvote it, and let's say that 5 reply with disagreement or trolling.

So in the end you find yourself frustrated with the 100 downvotes and the 5 trolls. It's irrational.

I can understand how people who profit from likes, upvotes and comments in forums and social media can care about their "Internet points". But for an individual person to care if their post has any kind of vote or to track the number of likes, sorry, I don't think that rationalizing it is any beneficial, productive, sensical.

Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down votes the first few comments would have an even bigger advantage than they do now.

[1] just like this comment I am leaving, which probably would have been better with just a down vote.

Any time I leave a comment, there is usually at least some thought and effort behind it, and a downvote without explanation doesn't teach me anything, or persuade me to change my mind.

If I don't know the reason for the downvote, my frequent assumption is "this person has poor reading comprehension, or isn't very bright, and just didn't understand what I'm saying. People often dislike things they don't understand. I guess it's true what they say: judge a man by the people who disagree with him."

That's completely unfounded, sure, but lacking any additional information, it's as valid as any other conclusion about why I got downvoted. Maybe I've made some obvious error, but how would I know? In general, getting downvoted tends to make me less respectful of other people on HN, and more confident in my own (flawed) reasoning, compared to getting a thoughtful disagreement.

How do we get from "I am being downvoted" to "malicious and petty people"? That looks like an issue. You said you have no problem being wrong, twice, but immediately assume anyone who downvotes your comment is malicious, when it could be a signal that your comment is just not hitting the right notes.

/snip

> It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.

I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact, it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of exposure.

I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture. This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters. Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general, downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and not worth complaining or even thinking much about.

Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but".

[1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with them

There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.

With that being said, the moderation here is very excellent and generally keeps the quality of discussion somewhat high, so I agree with your central thesis.

I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I have no control over the behavior of others on this site. I'm just putting that out there.

A good trick is to go to the comment history, and search until you find the last streak of not dead comments. It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine), and enough vouch unkill the comment. In the case of bopbeepboop it looks like many of the comments were vouched.

How does one do that? Haven't seen any option to do that.

In actuality, even factual and cited posts will get you shadowbanned if your opinion is contrary to the mainstream (on HN) narrative.

I think it’s more “conforming” than “constructive”.

I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.

You don't understand. The dim messages are a nerd badge of honor here! Some of my proudest HN messages are those that finished at -4.

As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted.

Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions.

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias.

Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.

I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained me at doing. Comment and walk away.

By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most any forum, including Reddit.

Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting pattern, that process might be discouraging.

My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here. That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try.

I agree to that.

But do not agree to just leave comment and leave approach in general. Then it is not a discussion anymore. You will never experience if there are any counterpoints to your opinion/facts, if you do not read replies to your opinions/facts. But if you experienced you get too emotional ... so aybe better this approach, than the furiated insulting one I guess.

I often raise somewhat controversial opinion and topics. Very rarely do I see clusters of downvotes, and I'm not surprised people are against my own ideas. Otherwise they would be common! It also mirrors society outside academia. It happens that later upvotes changes the score significantly. Such is it with all change.

Without some skin in the game, it's all spam and trolling otherwise. What might look strange in a mod system, might under analysis turn out to be well designed.

For all forums there is an adaption phase, before getting what people expect from posts.

* "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g., "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on e.g., Lobsters.

* Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3 downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or some random forum...

I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that though.

To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems: Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online, understand each other, and build our own defensive & observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, & growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece of understanding this web ought be able to encompass.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488