this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I think the system on Reddit was pretty terrible and ripe for abuse. Over the years I saw a lot of threads where people discussed being harassed by another user who disagreed with them in a sub, and then proceeded to hunt down their posts and down-vote every single thing they posted across the site. Downvotes for literally no reason other than some irrational dislike of someone they don't even know, etc. Conversely, lots of high karma posters who never really contributed anything other than low effort posts like memes and pics.
I think having and using the upvote/downvote system is a very poor tool for promoting critical thinking and open discussion. Even posts that contain opinions that seem horrid to the majority of others commenting in a thread discussion can still have value as they can help illustrate the world is larger than the little bubble present in a thread and sub of like minded people where only those who agree with each others' ideas are given value.
Already disliking that I see the upvote/downvote buttons present on kbin as well as reputation points, so not really even sure I will be engaging long term tbh. Have stated before in other comments that I don't think it wise to just recreate the systems in Reddit since we will just end up in the same place, with the same issues. We should be better than that. Feel free to downvote now. ;)
I do wonder though what a better alternative might be (and if this has been studied at all). It's fundamentally an issue with people being emotional and often quite bad at separating their own personal feeling from their voting. I know some platforms simply disable downvotes, which partially solves the issue, but at the same time, I think there is some value in communities being able to downvote spam or genuinely poor content. Maybe if you had to also make a comment - thus upping the amount of effort required - it'd be better?
Kbin does also have the quirk that votes are actually public, so you can actually tell if someone is following you around downvoting everything. That could potentially be seen as a rule violation and lead to being banned from an instance.
While probably computationally too expensive, I would like some system where up/downvoting isn't about objective quality, but only about personal preference. Essentially the system would "cluster" up/downvote behavior from users like youtube clusters like/dislike of videos and then recommend posts which people who like the same content as you like and people who dislike content you like dislike. I am not sure how many clusters/dimensions you would need though and I guess individualized sorting would quickly become computationally prohibitive as you would have to do a scalar multiplication of the post-dimensions with the user-dimensions for each post and then sort the stuff.
That's an interesting idea, though I'm wary of the risk of funneling users into echo chambers. Just think of YouTube around 2016 when every gaming video led you down a rabbit hole of Gamergate to Ben Shapiro and ultimately raw white supremacy.