Hacker News Reader

Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

My counterpoint to Democracy 2.0 is dead simple: If we could buy a car that was $2,000 cheaper (but had no seatbelts), many Americans would.

Humans are bad at some things. Understanding complicated situations where they aren't experts is one of them - Statistics, safety, complicated systems, etc.

Also, reddit is in many ways democracy 2.0 and they upvote literal fake news all the time.

View on HN

you can, it's called a 3 wheeled motorcycle.

Information overload leads to people seeking succinct information and answers. The upvote/downvote systems ubiquitous today are easily manipulated to spread misinformation, propaganda, and fake news.

We need to do away with upvotes and downvotes. It’s manipulated everywhere it exists.

And even when not explicitly manipulated, the wrongness is baked into the system. At least once a week, I catch myself rewriting a comment not to improve it but to increase my chances of getting upvotes. How many claims do I make, how many positions do I believe, simply because I know somewhere in my subconscious that they'll get upvotes?

It won’t happen. And the reason is: It outsources community curation. A couple of moderators can manage millions of posts, because they only need to pay attention to the outliers. It also allows the moderators to easily fall back on “it’s what the community wants” when the core values change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com