this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Do you think the Internet and websites with 'voting' systems encourage hivemind thinking and discourage any debate or discourse? Solutions? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I 'upvote' more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone's entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example).

Think about one person in your life who you first thought was a complete asshole and once you got to know them they were pretty cool, maybe you became best friends with them. The point is, judging a person based on a minute snippet in time is a fool's errand, and your own state of mind contributes a lot to your own judgement of people. Your next thought might be, well they have a history of x, y AND z, so they deserve every bit of judgement coming their way! I would ask you, why? Are you not simply fueling further hatred, vitriol and division? So instead of stopping for a moment and thinking about the world from someone else's perspective, you'd rather just spit out some more hatred and move on like that person doesn't exist?

I would love to see some solution to the shitty state of the Internet. I only say Internet because for the most part this doesn't happen in real life in my experience. I think it has to do with consequences and social sigma and so on. I reckon it would be pretty awesome if there was something like the following:

  • all upvotes are free range, people can give out upvotes like they were candy
  • downvotes come at a "cost", whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

In an ideal world, and setup, this would help raise positivity in the world and have people at the very least have a second thought before being negative.

Yes I understand there would be flaws, I've worked with and used computers for a long time, I know. I chose not to delve deep into those as I feel that would defeat the purpose of the message I'm trying to convey. And, you know, lead by example.

What do ya'll think? Any suggestions to boost positivity in the world, I'm all ears, smash them and any other thoughts in the comments.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The simplest solution is dealing with visibility by changing default sorting settings.

Maybe the top three comments are always most upvoted, most upvoted new (i.e. 'hot'), and most controversial.

But really the upvote/downvote is just data, and it's up to each client to handle that data as seen fit.

Though yes, there's very often 'hivemind' where people will pile on top of whatever the trend of a comment is, upvoting ones that had a few initial upvotes or downvoting ones that had a few initial downvotes. It's less common to see a comment switch from the initial momentum, even when a very similar comment in a different place in the thread has a very different response from users.

So the solution there is to show relevant ranking/sorting data like "3rd most controversial" or "22nd most upvoted" but to hide the specific counts.

This was part of the whole Reddit thing of hiding votes on new comments to prevent bandwagoning like lemmings (pun intended).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I’d be technically impractical, but I’ve always thought there should be a system for weighing of individual users feedback. I follow a lot of trade related communities and 100% see a lot of issues where bad, wrong, and sometimes just plain dangerous advice gets a flood of upvotes from the amateur community while the handful of downvotes from qualified individuals gets drowned out. I think OP’s idea of making upvotes easy and downvotes difficult exacerbates this kind of issue.

I can also see the issue where a mod team simply blesses the users that they agree with and it just reinforces the echo chamber effect that is already an issue in some communities.