This article accurately describes a problem, but while it claims to talk about digital media in general, it is really just talking about Twitter.
Here's the giveaway:
> A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare.
Every. Single. Platform. has an equivalent to this - except Twitter. Reddit (and HN) have visible downvotes. YouTube's downvotes, invisible though they now are, can at least influence the recommender algorithm. Even Facebook has "frowny emoji" reactions. But on Twitter, the only way to express disapproval is to "join the conversation" - thereby amplifying it, and incurring all the negative consequences Devon explores.
It's engagement genius. (Accidental genius, naturally - like most of Twitter's "core game loop", it's an unforseen, emergent phenomenon about which its inventors seem faintly embarrassed). The "grifter" problem Devon mentions exists almost exclusively on Twitter, because it's incentivised by the platform!
Normally I wouldn't get so heated about this stuff, but Twitter has attracted a critical mass of the world's journalists, so its incentives flow directly into The National Conversation(TM). This has visibly malign results, prompting many people to look for ways to fix it. This is a noble aim, but won't get anywhere if we regard Twitter's design decisions as immutable and inevitable, rather than a deliberate choice.
I don't think downvotes/emojis work the same way as real life human feedback, at all. On places like reddit, downvotes more often than not incite anger or resentment in the recipient, whereas strong negative feedback in real life is a much more powerful form of feedback that can trigger embarrassment and shame, which at least can lead to self reflection. I's much easier to make a fool of yourself on reddit then in from of living, breathing people.
Being anonymous is a big part of this. There is very little consequence of being controversial online if you're just another person posting (and not, say, a celebrity where your presence means something offline too). The most might be people noticing that one particular person is stirring up trouble (and block them). Offline conversation has the benefit of being in real time. The other person almost has a social obligation to listen and respond. In addition, you know it's a real person that you're talking to (although, with people spending more time online, their real-life etiquette has changed for the worse; people shout, berate and threaten others like there is no consequence). Online conversation is static; you can ignore it, and nobody will know. Anybody can read it at any time as if you were continously shouting it. Nobody is obligated to respond or pay attention. You have no idea if the person responding or commenting is real, or is just a bot, or is a troll trying to make you irrational and angry. It's terribly confusing.
It's extremely annoying to spend time thinking about and carefully writing something only to have it downvoted by unknown people for unknown reasons.
And anything vaguely political or controversial is the kiss of death for downvote systems because it triggers upvote/downvote wars where downvote becomes "I disagree with this viewpoint (so it must be downvoted to oblivion.)"
> YouTube's downvotes, invisible though they now are, can at least influence the recommender algorithm.
YouTube's algorithm is opaque, so obviously folks could be wrong about this -- but there's a pretty common belief that dislikes actually cause a video to be recommended more often, making it not really that much of a disapproving glare. Same with the Facebook frown, except that FB is pretty open about it.
People think a lot of obviously wrong things about various social media algorithms, and this might be one of them, but in a way that's beside the point. The belief is sufficient to negate the social pressure effect, regardless of how well founded that belief is.
Well they also aren't bad things: they count for two likes and are used to indicate sadness, not disapproval. According to articles on the ranking decisions, Facebook internally calls them "Sorry". You don't want to take a post where someone says something sad and people react with sadness and say "this is bad content".
I think you're confused. Facebook has both a "Sad" reaction and an "Angry" reaction. They can both be used to agree with and disagree with the recipient, depending on context.
Ah, and you believe the original post here was talking about Angry, not Sad? (I have a hard time reading "frowny" in general non-Facebook contexts as "angry" instead of "sad", but I also have a lot of weight using the term over the years as part of "frowny pants" and so might be biased.) FWIW, all "reactions"--including Angry--were worth two Likes when they were first introduced (maybe maybe there was one that was worth 1.5? though I think it was all 2.0), but Facebook recently downmodded Angry (only) to be worth zero (but not act as a counter-signal). And, as you seem to understand--though I feel like you fail to appreciate the gravity--neither are inherently negative reactions: if you post something about vaccines (say, to choose something that people get super upset about) and you get a thousand Angry reacts, there is literally no way to know if those people are angry at YOU for posting the article or angry at the CONTENT you posted (commiserating with you), and so this mechanism simply doesn't serve as a "disapproving glare" as it isn't merely context-dependent but subjective in meaning.
The reactions I see are a sad crying sad face with a single tear and an angry red frown. Neither of those would be described as a frown. You are right that neither is something that could be used to tell someone they are being inappropriate.
> YouTube's downvotes, invisible though they now are, can at least influence the recommender algorithm.
YouTube has this feature, but the information it signals is now hidden from the public. The hiding of dislikes have essentially nullified the disapproving glares of the surrounding audience. I'm wondering what the ultimate effects on viewership will be, and the effects on the algorithm might not be in the favor of viewers.
A theory I have is that the lack of dislikes could make potential viewers more anxious that they could be stepping into misinformation at any time and have no easy (even if unreliable) way of checking veracity, so they choose to engage with less content overall.
I have also heard that if someone dislikes a video after watching it all the way through, it still counts them as "engaged" and doesn't negatively impact the channel's exposure. That would mean that a viewer could be mislead into thinking that a dislike means "nobody should watch this", whereas the effect is actually the opposite for the platform's algorithm.
I would really like to see hard data on this from a YouTube channel with significant viewership, detailing how the view count and engagement have changed since dislikes were hidden. If YouTube claims that dislikes don't influence viewership, there should at least be evidence that it is so.
I have not been able to figure out if the YouTube downvote means "this video is bad and should not exist" or "it's a good video but I'm not interested".
Nor has anyone else, which makes attempting to use these mechanisms as "signal" somewhat circumspect, and only gets worse once you take into consideration the mathematical issues with trying to then "average" a bunch of unrelated metrics (something people love to try to do with five star ratings even though it is well-documented as returning garbage; the only reason it is sometimes better than nothing is because nothing is a pretty low bar for a competitor to defeat ;P), but I'd say one of the key issues is actually the sampling bias of "who bothers to vote": different topic posts attract different kinds of people (or are barraged by niche audiences) who are quite likely to react to really awkward things that are ancillary to the correctness or quality.
This problem even happens in places you might fail to notice if you aren't paying attention: as an example, with ratings for hotels, depending on the location--even for what is essentially a cookie-cutter franchise--hotels attract different audiences, and so the ratings people leave mean something different! I noticed this often as a I (used to... damn pandemic ;P) travel a lot, and in some cities (like San Jose) all the reviews of a Marriott would be talking about how useful the rooms are for parties, as a lot of the people booking hotels are doing so for tech companies, whereas in another city (I can't think of an example but imagine some place you would usually go on for a vacation instead of a conference) all the reviews would be focused on whether or not the pool was a fun and safe place for their children. I frankly care about neither of these qualities of a hotel :/.
What you probably want to do is enough "collaborative filtering" to only care about voters who are similar to you. This is the kind of thing people were talking about a lot back in the days of the Netflix prize competition (which had an amazing forum they deleted :/), with k-means clustering of users trying to figure out which subset of votes "matters" to you, and people thought this would be the future and how every site worked... but then Netflix seems to have just gone in a direction of extremely simplistic category affinity (and even removed five star ratings recently). In my case, this would eventually (hopefully) case me to ben heavily weighting people who tend to rate a hotel based on the quality of its bed and the smell of its air, to the exclusion of almost every other rating axis.
The reality is that--for better or for worse--platforms refuse to actually provide rich signaling for these mechanisms (and what they do do is sometimes misunderstood: like, it actually irks me that this grandparent post thinks a Facebook sad react is supposed to be bad somehow: if you say something and I react "Sad" I might very well be commiserating with you... and Facebook knows this so Sad is worth two Likes! fwiw, they did finally decide to make Angry worth 0 ;P) and even--such as the case of Netflix--tend to remove and "simplify" signaling mechanisms over time, and so none of these mechanisms they have "matter" really as they are so low signal and are used so naively.
The only content platform I can think of that "got big" (but isn't anymore) which really tried hard to work on this problem is Slashdot, which asked you why you were downvoting something, and then 1) required you to choose whether you got to comment anywhere at all on the post's thread OR vote on any of the comments and 2) would show your voting decisions to other people who would "meta-moderate" your decisions to decide how good you were at it and then change how often you were given the option of voting. This way you could actually separate out "tyranny of a majority that I think is dumb" from "this comment is actually off-topic or an attempt to incite chaos".
As someone who rarely uses Twitter but scrolls through Facebook every now and then, I strongly disagree.
I read a joke once that went something like "On Facebook, I spend half my time deciding if I want to debunk pseudoscientific bullshit, or if I want to have friends." Point being lots of times I'll have friends or acquaintances post shit where I think "Did this person just suffer a head wound?", but if it's someone I want to remain friends with, I just scroll by it. I often wonder if that person noticed they usually get tons of positive emojis with other posts but it tends to be crickets when they post their "I'm just doing my vaccine research" posts or whatever other bullshit.
Down votes don't mean your comment was made in bad faith or unhelpful. It means somebody who has amassed more than 500 karma disagrees with you. Let's not kid ourselves about what karma, Reddit gold, or any such approach actually is used for.
Unfollowing someone is the best way to get their tweets in your timeline with the current state of Twitters algorithm. You were interested enough to follow and mad enough to unfollow == engagement.
People just need to be able to speak freely. Likes and dislikes and other scoring systems just encourage echo chambers and are almost purpose-built tools for astroturfing.
People are afraid to say their opinion because of the backlash. Not everyone has a well thought out opinion, that doesn't mean they deserve to be punished. The human experiment can only move forward with open displays of ignorance coupled with open-minded discussion and acceptance.
It's idealistic to think this could happen easily, but I see no other way for global civilisation to come to terms with our historical cultural differences.
We're either going to devolve into systems where nothing matters and everything goes, which frankly we already have with 4chan, or allow certain views to prevail over others, which literally every forum or approval-based channel has these days, or find a different way to share differences and come to terms with them, which I hope somebody invents soon.
I totally agree with the comment here. I love that you say:
> I see no other way for global civilisation to come to terms with our historical cultural differences
I agree.
But the path we are on is the opposite. 'We' (or whoever is running the show - as I don't think the state we find ourselves in is natural) is not about allowing for diversity of opinions, and building personal resilience and tolerance to diverse thinking via the application of reasoned argumentation.
No. Instead we herded into low engagement, preferably simplistic binary positions. We are even moving away from law, into a time of cancel culture driven by corporate policy. We are going into hardcore tyranny of the individual.
The reason is (imo) that it is far easier to govern when you treat people as a collective. If you have imprinted thoughts patterns into what might have been individual thinkers, and support that throughout their lives via top-up programming from the media, you can guide this communal thinking.
The answer from my perspective is for everyone to be trying achieve maximum individuality. (Everyone thinks they are individual, but they are actually expressing received opinions. I don't even say I am an exception - though I do think I am working on it.)
But who's got time for individuality?!? There are mortgages to pay, children to train into the system - er, I mean educate, work takes a lot out of you, and passive engagement with screens is so tempting.
Imagine a "ಠ_ಠ" button on each tweet. The poster finds out how many people THAT THEY FOLLOW* clicked that button, but can't find out specifically who. They just know that the crowd of people that they respect has a certain air of disapproval.*
I love this. This is so much more interesting than a downvote, which could easily come from someone you're disagreeing with or people who share their views. This is your friends giving you the hairy eyeball. I want this.
Let's say you're a Nazi and all your friends are too. Then you start wondering if Lebensraum is all that important, but your friends all click ಠ_ಠ: demonstrating why mechanisms that enforce conformity do not enforce correctness or virtue.
I don’t think that the author’s suggestion was meant to enforce correctness or virtue, but rather to provide a means for your friends to nudge you out of extreme behaviors.
Now, if one’s friends have opinions that the rest of us find to be terrible, then maybe it’d be better for that person to be able to drift away easier. But I think the thesis here is that most of us aren’t at the extremes / aren’t in bubbles mostly comprised of extremists, and a private-hairy-eyeball would perhaps help many of us from radicalizing our dialogue.
There are conversations and then there are conversations. The dinner party conversations are ephemeral, often in a smaller groups than the whole of the attendees. This is discourse in a small group where there is high bandwidth communication and nothing is recorded verbatim for posterity. Opinions can be malleable, folks may change their mind in the course of conversation.
Online forums have much smaller bandwidth and much larger pool of participants. Nuance in expression is terribly limited to the ASCII character set. What ever you've written, whether a thoughtful paragraph or two, or just adding a short bit of flavouring to the discussion is now cast in stone for all time.
My suspicion is that the size and durability of online forums is antithetical to nuanced discussion.
...And what comes when people are under the cloak of anonymity, or otherwise feel there will be no negative consequences to whatever they choose to do.
> A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare.
It's interesting to see that people are now arguing in favor of public shaming and peer pressure as ways to control behavior, and lamenting that these are now harder to implement at scale. A generation ago the internet was seen as a way to escape pressure for conformity.
> Bringing it into a private space like DMs is crucial, because it credibly shows that you're not trying to get brownie points from your in-group by bashing them in public.
The problem with DMs is that they are too much work for the passive onlooker.
Public forums like Twitter, Reddit, etc. should include the possibility of sending private signals: "uncool" badges that take no more than one click, but that are only seen by the original poster.
Perhaps a weighted surfacing of the "uncool" numbers. If a certain number of 'considered authentic' users mark it as such that starts to become visible on a post, and on the overall 'karma' of the author's profile.
The idea being if the author DOES care, and sees they're getting marked as 'uncool' then they have a chance to self-censor/edit/adapt. But if the authosr doesn't care then the audience still has a chance to see what some sort of 'curated' members have said about the content, and that the author's overall rating has potential to take a hit for it.
Any system can be gamed, of course, but the lack of clear options for contributing negatives about content is how we've gotten into this mess. Sole up/down votes are not enough.
I've seen a lot of sentiments like this article, where the author is talking about what methods they can use to make others behave the way they'd like. But I rarely see the opposite - an author talking about being receptive to others trying to change their own behavior. That seems to be a large part of the problem right there. As long as everyone is convinced that the problem is other people and not themselves, it's hard to see how things will improve.
Has it ever been theorized that in even so pure a place as HN the down vote is abused?
At any rate the disapproving glare has been the go to tool of small minded and provincial people throughout history, and is often enshrined as such in media. So I guess I'm not that sure that having one will solve all problems.
It takes a lot fo time to do each person, especially considering time zones. Not to mention, all your time is spent reaching out to people who were rude.
The author makes a good case for why private coaching in DMs is an effective way of improving the Quality of the Discourse(TM) but not why anyone would invest the effort to do this.
Yes. One point I make about virtual worlds is that space keeps everything from being in the same place. The annoyance radius of jerks is limited. In Second Life, it's about 100 meters, and the world is the size of Los Angeles. There's no "retweeting" or "following" or "broadcasting" to amplify jerks. So jerks are a very local problem.
In real life you communicate on a much higher level. Non verbal communication is so important. That's why I don't believe in pure working from home. At least till we have full 16k VR work environment simulations.
Honestly I agree only very partially: in some context seeing others in a room, full body is indeed very useful, but that's not the case most of the time. Giving a remote lecture is painful because it's almost impossible to feel the class, discussing serious business is similar, but daily work, at least most of daily works do not really have, or can be designed not to, such needs.
The real issue is being really able to separate work and life, or have a local social activity in person, in the physical world, while have a secondary and separated working life in a "virtual" world. This is hard IME, we tend to make friends where we are most active, then it's hard to separate remotes people from work to real physical and human world, for that I still have to find a real solution but meeting each others sometimes while keeping WFH for the rest again suffice in most cases. Having a local physical life separated from the work it's not that hard, at least if we do not live in a desert/very remote areas.
The main issue I see in practice are mostly due to the lack of "social interest" in many remote workers who actually prefer to be remote just to avoid working with their colleagues, so they do not interact as needed, they do not try to communicate what's needed etc, the lack of habit and organization where most people simply start from scratch just like child doing their first experience "in the wild" without real experience, but those issues can be solved just with trials and errors in few years: for the system part we need to rediscover really remote work vs working on the shoulders of giants on their platforms, for the human part simply learning to develop a kind of "remote sociability" for work and a healthy local sociability where we physically live.
"Remote sociability" is hard, but not that hard IF we learn it, of course we (society) have to really try to learn...
