Thumbing up and down: Abuse already?

@littlek,

Hi Littlek

(Funny - now that the automatic quote function is gone, I feel the need to say hello when responding to a post :-))

True about the tagging - if you are only interested in one subject, or a couple, you can do that. I guess tags are a more precise way to customise. I dunno, I dont think it's either/or - in some situations one thing might be more useful, in some another?

Like -- thinking of an example -- say, you're interested in relationships threads and use the tags relationships to find them; but there's a thread about, I dunno, how to deal with age differences that is not of interest to you. But it is posted to often, so it keeps popping back up. Then you could vote it down so it doesnt appear for you anymore, so from then on you dont have to scroll past it every time again? (Not that scrolling past one topic is any effort, but if you do this systematically I'm sure it could help save you annoyance.)

Again, maybe I'm misunderstanding the intention! But I think people are already using the thumbs down like that (Edgar mentioned voting down a bunch of his own threads to get them out of view). And people surely will in the future too. So that's in any case important to realise, when you're wondering why people voted down your thread..

Quote:

But, if the word game people got together and voted them all up, Craven's vote would be overruled and the games would be high on the list?

True, but that's I guess where the whole concept of community balancing that they've been talking about, which basically undergirds the voting system, would come in. This site has so many visitors (there seem to always be 100 online at any one time), that, the idea I guess is, for every ten game afficionados who vote games up there will be ten (or five, or fifteen) people who dislike games that vote them down.

The idea, I guess, is that for most topics it will roughly balance out, and if you're the kind of person who believes that democracy yields the best results, you'll argue that the most interesting threads will on balance float up and the more uninteresting ones float down. And of course, if you're not a believer in that, you can just set your preferences so that the voting doesnt affect the way the threads appear for you at all.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

That's fine as far as it goes. But you're forgetting that the site is now designed, on purpose, so that ratings have consequences for how everyone sees the site. [..] This is no longer about "I don't care about popularity contests." Personal vendettas against one correspondent now diminish everyone's experience of being on the site.

This is just not true.

The site has been expressly set up in such a way that every member can customise exactly his "experience of being on the site".

Don't like the ranking by votes of threads? Choose to rank them by latest post, or most replies, etc. If you change that setting once, it will be the way you like automatically from then on, and yet you can also at any time change it to something else again.

Don't like having the negative votes of others automatically collapse posts that have a worse than -5 or -10 net vote? Go to your preferences, and change them that henceforth you will see all posts, no matter how many votes down they got.

I think there's some Abuzz-legacy-inspired panic here that's not needed. Technology has come a long way, and this site offers a range of tools to avoid exactly letting the abuse by some affect everyone's (and yours, specifically) experience of the site.

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There are 2 sets of thumbs that I've been using.

The topic thumbs I simply use to remove items from my view and to prop up toics that I like. I think that this is a legitimate purpose. Thumbs up threads you like, thumbs down threads you don't like or don't want to see anymore.

The individual post thumbs I have been using to show support for a person's post (rather than the useless post of "I agree") I don't think I've used the thumbs down for a individual post thumb yet.

1 Reply

@nimh,

Hmm. That all sounds good.

Now just a matter of figuring it out on this end.

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@nimh,

Nimh, it seems that you're telling me that the thumbing is a communal thing (by and for the community), but telling Thomas that it is an individual experience.

If I vote down a thread, that thread lowers on my view or everyone's view?

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@littlek,

What he's saying is that it can be either (maybe both) communal or individual; it all depends on how you adjust your settings.

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@nimh,

You all need to remember that human nature is what it is.....we always have a positive response to those who we perceive to be more like us and a negative one towards those who are different. Thus under the rating system those who are different are discouraged from positing, or at least being honest about their differences. Likewise, an in your face instant personally negative response to what we say hurts, given the rating system there now exists a coercion to play to the desires of the mob.

Craven as the social engineer here surely is aware of this, if he were not he would be incompetent at his job. It is very clear what was wanted.

1 Reply

@nimh,

Nimh is making the most sense here. Craven knows damn well that the system will be used in different ways by different users. I didn't see any abuse on the Phoenix's thread ( and let there be no doubt; I like Phoenix, a lot). I don't happen to agree with her regarding overtly loving children in public and see nothing wrong with expressing that opinion with a thumbs down if I don't think the post has merit. At the same time I will thumbs up an opinion on the topic that I think has more merit. Isn't that what happened there; and why would that be abuse? I will also routinely vote down game threads and others that don't interest me to collapse them from view, too. As I see it; this tool can help me customize my experience, for me, so why wouldn't I use it?

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@nimh,

nimh wrote:

Thomas wrote:
That's fine as far as it goes. But you're forgetting that the site is now designed, on purpose, so that ratings have consequences for how everyone sees the site. [..] This is no longer about "I don't care about popularity contests." Personal vendettas against one correspondent now diminish everyone's experience of being on the site.

This is just not true.

The site has been expressly set up in such a way that every member can customise exactly his "experience of being on the site".

Personal vendettas diminish my experience of being on the site by devaluating the "sort by most votes" option. True, they don't affect it if I never use that option, but they do affect me by making me not want to use it anymore.

nimh wrote:

Don't like having the negative votes of others automatically collapse posts that have a worse than -5 or -10 net vote? Go to your preferences, and change them that henceforth you will see all posts, no matter how many votes down they got.

No I won't. These are the first settings I changed to "no_collapsing" Thursday morning, but A2K is ignoring my settings for this parameter. It still uses the default settings when it displays the site to me. (I posted this in "New A2K bugs already, so I expect it'll be fixed sooner or later.)

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Yes, I wish there was an ignore button--one that would move a thread out of our active queue so we didn't have to deal with it every time we logged in--that would just be for our own use alone. I HATE to vote thumbs down on a good fun thread that I just don't have time to play in personally--just to get it out of the way for me.

Some sites have a subscription feature that allows you to subscribe to threads that you know you want to follow--you subscribe automaticallywhen you post or you can just subscribe to read without posting--and you can unsubscribe if the thread gets too wacky or uninteresting.

That way you don't have to 'disapprove' a good thread just because you have no personal interest.

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@littlek,

OK, thanks for the link littlek!

Yeah, looks like Craven foresaw using the thumbs down primarily as a tool to deal with outright offensive things:

Quote:

I guess it will differ for each user and then the collective will be the site's culture and values. For me, I will vote up things I am interested in and vote down things I find personally untoward.

So I see myself trying to use the positive votes to highlight content I think is interesting and useful, and use the negative votes to bury content I think is rude or obnoxious.

But it's a bit ambiguous because he also wrote:

Quote:

Think of it like this. A2K is a newspaper that let's everyone be a journalist and an editor. When you vote things up, you are promoting the story. When you vote things down, you are burying it.

So you can also just use voting down as a way to move something to page 20 (in this case: collapse it) because you dont find it interesting, while you vote for things you find more interesting to appear on top.

Anyway, whatever the guidelines, people will use this option for whatever way it can help them navigate around more easily ... so I guess that the least I'm saying is that when people vote your topic down even though it's not rude or offensive, it could still be for a number of other reasons other than "They disagree with me but don't have the guts to offer an counterargument" or "They don't like me".

And again, of course, anyone who doesnt like the effects of all of this can just change their settings and not be affected by it!

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@maporsche,

Yeah Maporsche, same for me!

And it makes A2K life a lot easier, too...

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@littlek,

Quote:

If I vote down a thread, that thread lowers on my view or everyone's view?

Just yours... but it also has the cumulative affect on the thread's score... which may disappear it from other's view... but that's based on their own preferences. You alone don’t have the power to collapse it from any but your own view.

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@littlek,

littlek wrote:

Nimh, it seems that you're telling me that the thumbing is a communal thing (by and for the community), but telling Thomas that it is an individual experience.

If I vote down a thread, that thread lowers on my view or everyone's view?

It depends. It lowers it in the view of every user who uses the "sort by most votes" option -- which I understand to be nimh's point to you.

At the same time, everyone is free to choose a different sort option, in which case it doesn't change anything. I understand that to kind of be nimh's point to me.

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@littlek,

Quote:

Nimh, it seems that you're telling me that the thumbing is a communal thing (by and for the community), but telling Thomas that it is an individual experience.

If I vote down a thread, that thread lowers on my view or everyone's view?

Like Maporsche said, both...

If you vote down a thread, that thread sinks a bit on the "Sort by votes" list. And that's the default setting for new users.

BUT - every user can at any time switch to a "Sort by latest posts" (or another) setting with one click. And every user can change his preferences to make sure posts or topics with a lot of negative votes dont collapse out of his view too. And then he or she can experience A2K henceforth without any impact of the voting stuff.

1 Reply

Sooo ...... one thing with the preview function is that underneath the post you're writing, you see only the post you're responding to. In the old site, you just saw the thread as it developed; so if you clicked preview, then underneath you could see, hey there's been four more new posts since I started writing! And eh, they all already said what I was saying... Embarrassed

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@nimh,

Yep, I'm getting it. Thanks, nimh. I have been playing. I am happy that I can undo any voting I do.

1 Reply

@littlek,

Yes, they could certianly try. But assuming that the majority of the site (lets say 70%) isn't interetsted in them those in the majority will eventually tire of seeing those threads "At the top" and and will vote them down. So it might take a while in that sort of situation but eventually the thread will sink.

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@nimh,

Yeah, and I forget details of the post I'm responding to if it's complex.

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@littlek,

It's both communal and individual, I'd say.

I, for example, don't use the "most votes" setting for the threads. I'd like to see who has posted most recently. So the communal votes don't affect that aspect very much. (Additionally, I'm tagging threads and using the tags, so I can see the most recent post in what is tagged e.g. "politics" quickly...)

However, if I don't like a topic, I'll vote it down, so it'll disappear from view. Even if everybody else seems to like it, and votes it up.

On the other hand, I'm reading along in a view threads that others don't want to see, or that have been voted down for whatever reason. But due to the setting for how I get the threads displayed, they're still there.

As a consequence, I won't see a thread that has a count of e.g. 12, but I will see a thread that has a rating of -7.

And, finally, threads that have been voted down collectively because they are simply spam - well, those fall under the threshold I've set, and I won't see them due to communal voting. I may have to play with the threshold setting in the future, but it seems to work well at the moment.

---

In summary, it's really a mix of communal and personal interaction with the site, and how you're using, through your settings, the results those interactions render....

0 Replies

Thumbing up and down: Abuse already?

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