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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.

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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.

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?

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