Haven’t read your entire post yet but agree broadly with the idea. Unsure of your methodology but I think knowledge has to be built from the ground-up. Lack of understanding leads to frustration. Upvote systems encourage that difficult concepts must not simply be described but also taught/explained thoroughly rather than just ‘pointed at’.
For example, I can understand on some level if someone tries to explain to me why object oriented design patterns in programming are inferior to procedural, but if I’ve never made programs with either methodology, I will only understand the broadest strokes, none of the examples given or reasoning will really resonate with me.
On average, when describing any concept, a certain number of people will have the necessary ‘base understanding’ to grok it based on the explanation, and an additional number of people will need significantly more explanation to understand.
I think on one side of the extreme, you have an explanation from someone with an extremely autistic brain, going into far more detail than one might need, assuming the listener is lacking all relevant information.
On the other side, you have the schizophrenic or manic brained explanation, which describes things completely intuitively, assuming that the listener understands all of the unspoken elements without needing them to be explained. Most people would think that it just sounds like complete gibberish.
I think the perfect middle ground is the ‘highly esteemed teacher-brained explanation’, someone who describes things both basically and intuitively in perfect amounts, so the widest audience is capable of understanding even some amount of the concept. Imagine the best teacher you’ve ever had in college, whoever was able to really convey difficult concepts in a way you immediately understood on a fundamental level, allowing you to then develop more complex understanding. I think upvote based systems, at their best, encourage this sort of information.
I think at their WORST, upvote systems discourage valuable discourse that requires an understanding of the subject matter so that you can intuitively grok a difficult, novel piece of information.
This then causes the content to trend towards being easily comprehensible but lower overall quality, novelty and complexity. This is often referred to as speaking to the ‘lowest common denominator’ when referred to derisively. This is the ‘endless summer’ of internet communities. The larger and less specified a demographic is, the less unique, interesting, and high quality it becomes, as the content valued by the average user is different than the content valued by the informed, experienced, insular user.
If your system intends to solve these problems, I support it strongly. I think that a website/app can support a large community without also being lowered in quality. I think the endless summer effect is not an inevitability of all systems of this type, but a symptom of describing the ‘most valuable information’ as the ‘most upvoted or engaged-with information’ which is frequently not the case! I mean, that’s clearly evident to anyone who’s used Reddit.
I assume you live in the US or Canada. The fact that you feel the need to give the 9-year-old a kid license (the tile is smart!) I think points to societal issues to do with norms and structure that lead to the sort of effects described in the OP.
US and Canadian cities (and much of Europe and the developing world that designed their cities by the West’s example) are generally not designed in a way that is friendly towards kids exploring and existing in the world safely.
I don’t mean ‘safely’ as in ‘they might fall down and scrape their knee or get lost’, I mean ‘safely’ as in ‘they might get struck by a driver going 40mph while staring at their phone as they barrel down a stroad’ or ‘they need to walk 3 miles to get to the nearest convenience store or park’.
It’s easy to find a number of examples of parents being disciplined or even arrested for allowing their children to walk to school, the store, or the park. To allow a child outside without guidance is considered gravely irresponsible by western society at large in a way that really isn’t healthy or helpful for promoting independence, in my opinion.
https://reason.com/2023/01/30/dunkin-donuts-parents-arrested-kids-cops-freedom/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parents-investigated-letting-children-walk-alone/25700823/
https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-son-park/index.html
In Japan there’s a cultural rite of passage (usually in smaller towns, it seems) where children sometimes as young as 3 or 4 are sent on an errand, usually to go to the store and pick up a few things, or visit a family friend and retrieve something. There’s a Netflix series documenting a slightly more staged version of this, called ‘Old Enough!’. It’s very cute.
Here’s another potentially interesting article regarding this, from NPR, about playground safety:
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/03/15/594017146/is-it-time-to-bring-risk-back-into-our-kids-playgrounds
I hope one day we can organize our society in a way in which kids can experience safe amounts of risk and develop into capable human beings. Thanks for doing your part.