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Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

I quit reddit for good on Saturday. There are two major problems with it:

- Downvoting creates echo chambers,

- No accountability for moderators.

I think the downvoting should be removed completely. Downvoting is basically giving people the power of a mini-censor and the people love it.

Subreddits can be completely censored by moderators and there's no way to know this is happening. Maybe reddit can develop a way to judge the behaviour of the moderators. Like showing what posts they removed, for example.

I've been part of plenty of internet communities that don't become like this. Even completely public forums and IRC channels. I guess HN isn't as bad as reddit because we have an above-average intelligence crowd, but there are some opinions I am careful not to mention here as well.

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How do you filter out user sentiment without downvotes?

I think there are flaws in downvoting, but they are less than systems with only upvote (eg Facebook).

Upvote only encourage extreme views that attract attention because if 5% like and 95% dislike (theoretical) this is ranked higher than 4% and 0% dislike.

What we really need is a score that is like as percentage of views that will be more meaningful.

Mixing in some sort of cost to post/vote will help as well because people will be more judicious with likes. Currency is hard to work out as steem is a big fluffed-fest. Maybe something where you get credits every day and can exhaust or bank them.

I've never actually used Facebook so I haven't seen the effects of only upvoting. But up/downvoting is not meant to signal agreement or disagreement anyway. It's meant to signal whether it's a useful post or not. But people treat it as the former which is why it creates echo chambers. I think the Facebook "upvote" is meant to signal agreement. Does it also make the post go to the top?

Something like that.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter what up/down vote is supposed to mean. It matters what the outcome is.

Up means prioritize, down means deprioritize.

Completely agree about downvoting. It really does nothing for me as a user, as I am able to reply to something if I feel strongly enough about it. A great way to go about detoxifying social media is to limit negative interactions as much as possible.

Upvoting, on the other hand is valuable as it helps cut through the noise. A great example was the thread awhile back about WhatsApp encryption where the first comment was from Moxie.

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