The example I think about is a Religious Forum. If they had a “downvoting” feature that was implemented in the same way that the Less Wrong feature is...anyone showing up who asks too many skeptical questions could just be downvoted out of existence without anyone answering their arguments.
Bidirectional voting has its disadvantages, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Sure, if you get a seed culture that’s skewed enough in one direction, karma-like systems can be used to enforce conformity with it. But that’s hardly unique; if you wander into a LiveJournal (a voteless format) or a Facebook discussion (a unidirectional format) and start spouting off opinions outside the local Overton window, you’ll quickly find yourself getting shouted down. There’s no purely technical way I know of to break what I’ll politely describe as an ideological consensus cluster.
That being the case, I find myself thinking more of the incentives karma creates in an ideologically mixed environment that values things other than conformity, like clarity and originality. Sure, offending someone’s ideology is risky; but people on the other side aren’t mindless political monsters, they care about those other values as much as you do, and if you respect them you won’t get many downvotes. But ignore those norms to dribble content-free “hooray for our side”, and the best you can hope for is a few upvotes from people suffering from halo effects.
What happens if you don’t have the option of downvoting? Well, suddenly it doesn’t matter what your opponents think, since they can’t effectively punish you for it. People don’t stop caring about discourse norms, they still have the same reactions to following them that they always did, but the thing is that being clever and polite and original is hard; it takes effort and care and some facility with the language. Repeating buzzwords for a few safe upvotes from true believers, on the other hand, doesn’t. Stripped of downside, that’s what people are going to fall back on—which of course leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of radicalization.
(Twitter and Tumblr make salient examples, although they both have other issues going on. Open Facebook comment threads are a somewhat purer case.)
Bidirectional voting has its disadvantages, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Sure, if you get a seed culture that’s skewed enough in one direction, karma-like systems can be used to enforce conformity with it. But that’s hardly unique; if you wander into a LiveJournal (a voteless format) or a Facebook discussion (a unidirectional format) and start spouting off opinions outside the local Overton window, you’ll quickly find yourself getting shouted down. There’s no purely technical way I know of to break what I’ll politely describe as an ideological consensus cluster.
That being the case, I find myself thinking more of the incentives karma creates in an ideologically mixed environment that values things other than conformity, like clarity and originality. Sure, offending someone’s ideology is risky; but people on the other side aren’t mindless political monsters, they care about those other values as much as you do, and if you respect them you won’t get many downvotes. But ignore those norms to dribble content-free “hooray for our side”, and the best you can hope for is a few upvotes from people suffering from halo effects.
What happens if you don’t have the option of downvoting? Well, suddenly it doesn’t matter what your opponents think, since they can’t effectively punish you for it. People don’t stop caring about discourse norms, they still have the same reactions to following them that they always did, but the thing is that being clever and polite and original is hard; it takes effort and care and some facility with the language. Repeating buzzwords for a few safe upvotes from true believers, on the other hand, doesn’t. Stripped of downside, that’s what people are going to fall back on—which of course leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of radicalization.
(Twitter and Tumblr make salient examples, although they both have other issues going on. Open Facebook comment threads are a somewhat purer case.)