The data doesn't surprise me. Downvotes feel bad. There is a special kind of frustration that you get after composing a response, and coming back to see -2: WTF is that?! -2? Minus two what? Did the OP downvote me or was it someone else? Two people? Wait, -3 now? Are people just piling on? Did I say something that this community as a whole doesn't like? They make you guarded and defensive, and that alters your mood. After being downvoted, I have found myself away from the keyboard, minutes later, still feeling slighted. They definitely alter my approach to commenting. From a functional perspective, not only can you sort without downvotes, their presence increases the variables in the sort, which makes sorting for one signal more difficult. A downvote is not the opposite of an upvote. Also, what would be the equivalent of a downvote in a face-to-face conversation? I imagine an upvote might be someone saying 'good point'. But people don't say 'bad point'. Disapproval without explanation is not the converse of approval without explanation.
>Disapproval without explanation is not the converse of approval without explanation. So maybe have "ignores" on your user page, or perhaps some other thing like that a way to "downvote"? I do like the concept of a downvote, the idea that the community can decide what things are definitely bad and should be hidden away. However, I think it needs to be a system that is less a downvote and more a report system. Perhaps add a "requirement" to downvote that displays your name in a comment where you explain what you did. Leave the comment blank and you will similarly be disliked because you just attacked a person with zero explanation. So a comment highlighted in blue is one which represents that the user also committed to a "I want this to be hidden" report. That way you know what is wrong and can go to improve. And have a way where if you up... node? dot? hub? attach? a comment that is a downvote, it adds your name to that comment and adds another downvote to the comment above it.
By contrast, positive feedback does not appear to influence authors much at all.“Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such,” they say. And it gets worse: “These authors are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community.”
Damn, that really spells out the challenge of creating a positive community experience.
I don't think this is probably a good interpretation of the data. What do they mean by "doesn't influence"? I suppose it probably actually means, "doesn't alter their observed behavior," which is totally different from "doesn't affect." Positive reinforcement affects all of us, but if everyone seems to appreciate what I'm doing, then why change? If someone tells me I'm an idiot, then maybe I'm going to do something different the next time (e.g. try harder, strike back, etc).By contrast, positive feedback does not appear to influence authors much at all.
No kidding. The linked article goes quite a ways to explaining much of what I saw yesterday on http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ . It was painfully apparent the user who posted the following question ( http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/25rzci/wanting_to_learn_haskell_then_i_hit_this_error/ ) was a newbie to both Reddit and Haskell. The result of the query was: two people tried to actively help the newbie (and, judging by the responses, the newbie seems to have understood this), one person was "helpful" (and the newbie responded in kind), there were several anonymous downvotes, and the single truly neutral question posed by the newbie “What are the ways the Haskell community have settled on to get better diagnostic messages out of the compiler?” went unanswered. Based on the article linked from medium.com, it would be fair to say the Haskell community has lost a new recruit. Sad, just sad.
The problem in general is the over-reliance on voting as the best or principal measure of quality contribution. Wikipedia rejected the voting model early on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOT#Wikipedia_is_not_a_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_substitute_for_discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Voting_is_evil http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Polls_are_evil http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_vote_on_everything Voting up and down is a really low-investment form of interaction. Approval style voting is not ranked/relative and is context free. While voting should still be included, it should not be the principal or most important gauge of quality contribution.
I was just reading this. The Medium article does leave some parts from the paper untouched though: Interesting that they didn't find an effect for the positively evaluated users. So on the left those who upvoted it and on the right those who downvoted it, and their underlying relations. Interesting graphs! mk or forwardslash, if you're bored... edit: sorry for the double notifications, something went wrong on my side.We find that negatively-evaluated users are more likely to down-vote others in the week following an evaluation, than in the week before it. In contrast, we observe no significant effect for the positively evaluated users.
We define a social networks around each post, a voting network, as illustrated in Figure 9. For a given post a, we generate a graph G = (V,E) with V being the set of users who voted on a. An edge (B,C) exists between voters B and C if B voted on C 30 days prior to when the post a was created. Edges are signed: positive for upvotes, negative for downvotes. We examine voting networks for posts which obtained at least 10 votes, and have at least one upvote and one downvote.
b_b Ah, I agreed with your comment regarding the counter intuitively stated "positive feedback has no [discernible] influence on the author" but this is what the authors seem to have meant by that. It could've been clearer in the Medium article. Which is a bit odd that they would've left it out, to me at least, because insight into the effects of positive reinforcement seems so naturally interesting.
But without down-votes you end up with silly facebook and 9gag content. If you stoically see downvotes it should not alter your mood. You are the master of your mood, not the random people that dislike your comment, or weather or politics. Imagine a large feed straight with news, and all get only upvotes - general population will upvote cats instead of any actual news. There is no way how to combat low quality content if you have option only to upvote. It does not work in /r/all, but downvotes are very crucial part of every smaller subreddit.
Reddit has these problems, and Reddit has downvotes a-plenty. The audience is what determines whether oyu end up with silly facebook and 9gag content, and the bigger the audience, the lower the common denominator. We have a small feed and all we have are upvotes. I haven't seen a single image post yet (and let's keep it that way). I think kleinbl00 hit the nail on the head with this comment; it's the size of the community and the "max" upvote threshold that prevent low-quality, low-effort content from rising to the top.silly facebook and 9gag content
This study was addressing comments rather than posts, and suggested that comments are adversely affected by downvotes. That said, I'd argue that its very easy to get a similar sort of posts based on upvotes alone compared to upvotes and downvotes. Reddit doesn't seem to demonstrate that downvotes work in general against specific types of content, but are in fact subreddit specific. As a result, the signal of total upvotes and the signal of upvotes + downvotes will be similar. However, this study demonstrated that this is not true for the majority of people. In the end, it is not what ought to be which determines the content, but what is.But without down-votes you end up with silly facebook and 9gag content.
If you stoically see downvotes it should not alter your mood. You are the master of your mood, not the random people that dislike your comment, or weather or politics.
My opinion about this is: if you can't give a positive feedback about something, don't give a feedback. Have your post ignored by the community could be worse than receive downvotes. And if you only allow upvotes you only can share your positive feelings in the voting system.
That's because talking about crap is fun and easy and creates more contention. Nobody is going to disagree with the fact that Roundabout by Yes is an awesome song (this is a poor example but whatever it's late). But we can argue about Shadow of the Colossus till the sun goes down and get something out of it.
I would think that a healthy community would not have any down/up/like voting system in place at all. A voting model encourages people to judge without comment. If you are posting in a format that uses a voting system, you may be a needy person who wants validation of others, not a discussion on the topic. If any system were to be implemented, I would recommend something like a trending, most shared or most discussed tag to ascertain the posts viability/popularity.
Probably. Everyone likes a gold star. I used to cringe at the students who proudly accepted their perfect attendance award at the end of the school year. Arbitrary awards are the worst kind. And internet voting is nothing if not arbitrary. (I secretly hope this comment gets a billion upvotes and a badge.)
In my opinion, upvotes are the problem. They allow for terrible content to rise to the front page in a short time. Only the most vigilant people can constantly downvote bad content into oblivion. The hands-off style of moderation on most subreddits doesn't help either.
The problem Reddit runs into that Slashdot or Hubski don't is the absurd quantity of votes. Slashdot stops you at what? 5? Hubski stops at 8 or whatever. My top voted comment on Reddit has 6900 upvotes. That's three orders of magnitude higher than either other aggregator (say that three times fast). The mistake, i think, is in presuming that three additional orders of magnitude gives you any advantage whatsoever in sorting.