Just a clarification: I didn’t mean that I think the voting was particularly broken or needs fixing, I meant the PEOPLE are imperfect and some topics, themes, and styles won’t work here, regardless of voting or feedback/filtering mechanism. It’s not a “downvote problem”, it’s a “community preference expressed through voting”, which may or may not be a problem. The voting is an indicator, not a cause.
Controversial topics on some dimensions are welcomed, but on other topics are indistinguishable (by the members of the community) from garbage or attacks. The joy and pain of a voting system is that there’s no oversight or leadership who declare whether the masses are “correct” in their judgement of what they want more or less of on the site.
If the people are broken, the system could compensate with better rules. If you tell someone to upvote or downvote on the basis of like/dislike, most of what you are going to see is bias...because people like their opinions confirmed.
I didn’t say “broken”, I said “imperfect”. The system can compensate a little bit, if most of the people want it to. But if it compensates/interferes too much with users’ preferences, the people leave (and different people may or may not join).
There’s no way to make a purely voluntary social chat group to be more accepting of dimensions of disagreement they don’t accept as valid. And I, for one, don’t want that anyway.
If you hold “membership of the group” and “voting according to agreement instead of truth” as fixed, sure. But under these assumptions a rationality promoting group is doomed to failure .
I also didn’t say “voting according to agreement instead of truth”. More “voting according to what we want to read and write about”. I did presume that we don’t have the option (nor, in my part, the desire) to radically change the membership. Though, now that I think about it, that’s isomorphic to someone finding a different group (instead of or in addition to this one) that’s more receptive, and I do support that.
I’m OK with being doomed to failure, if the only definition of success is “every idea, regardless of priors and preferences, gets an equal voice”.
Just a clarification: I didn’t mean that I think the voting was particularly broken or needs fixing, I meant the PEOPLE are imperfect and some topics, themes, and styles won’t work here, regardless of voting or feedback/filtering mechanism. It’s not a “downvote problem”, it’s a “community preference expressed through voting”, which may or may not be a problem. The voting is an indicator, not a cause.
Controversial topics on some dimensions are welcomed, but on other topics are indistinguishable (by the members of the community) from garbage or attacks. The joy and pain of a voting system is that there’s no oversight or leadership who declare whether the masses are “correct” in their judgement of what they want more or less of on the site.
If the people are broken, the system could compensate with better rules. If you tell someone to upvote or downvote on the basis of like/dislike, most of what you are going to see is bias...because people like their opinions confirmed.
I didn’t say “broken”, I said “imperfect”. The system can compensate a little bit, if most of the people want it to. But if it compensates/interferes too much with users’ preferences, the people leave (and different people may or may not join).
There’s no way to make a purely voluntary social chat group to be more accepting of dimensions of disagreement they don’t accept as valid. And I, for one, don’t want that anyway.
If you hold “membership of the group” and “voting according to agreement instead of truth” as fixed, sure. But under these assumptions a rationality promoting group is doomed to failure .
I also didn’t say “voting according to agreement instead of truth”. More “voting according to what we want to read and write about”. I did presume that we don’t have the option (nor, in my part, the desire) to radically change the membership. Though, now that I think about it, that’s isomorphic to someone finding a different group (instead of or in addition to this one) that’s more receptive, and I do support that.
I’m OK with being doomed to failure, if the only definition of success is “every idea, regardless of priors and preferences, gets an equal voice”.
If voting was only about topics , the situation would be much better. But the explicit instruction is like /dislike, not ir/relevant.
Disagree—voting is and should be about what we want on the site, inclusive of relevance, style, respect for prior work, and general tone.
And with that, I’m going to bow out. I’ll read any responses, but probably won’t reply further.
But it will inevitably include “against my biases” ,because that’s disagreement, too.