| > Hidden downvotes are a terrible idea First and foremost, I agree that this will probably end poorly. However, I could see this being a good idea in the right hands, because it _could_ be used as _part_ of a more comprehensive auto-mod tools, including self-shadow-banning. Imagine you had a human reviewing highly ratioed comments, providing a final judgment on "is this comment actually unhelpful, or is it just being brigaded?". (And let's imagine one judgment option is "unclear, do nothing".) You could then keep a per-user metric of their (mis)alignment with that judgment across all their votes. That metric could then be used to weight the votes of that user. High alignment then classifies that user as a "trustworthy unpaid mod" behind the scenes, which can then be used as a signal to determine future human reviews. Similarly, if someone has an absolutely stellar alignment, you can use the occasional disagreements to do meta-mod reviews of your mods' judgments. If you go really wild and draw some correlation between mis-votes and hashtag/topic/channel/whatever, then you can use that. Low alignment could then be used to devalue votes from that user, leading to a slow shadow ban, and potentially even other more visible effects. All of which can be done regardless of the visibility of the votes, of course. But hiding "down" votes should help to reduce the pile-on effects of brigading ("a ton of other people downvoted it, so I am safe in the crowd") and thus the temptations leading to slowly shadow banning yourself. But unlike completely taking away down votes, like YouTube, you leave enough rope for bad actors to hang themselves. It's equivalent to the system Slashdot has had for decades (IIRC). Do I trust Twitter to put in place something with that amount of utility, feedback, and nuance? Nope. And even if they did, they'd throw away the value of having invisible scores for the opportunity to add "gold checkmarks" or some other BS. |
That's exactly what I thought when I read this too. That system worked really well (not perfect, but did the job) back when Slashdot was super popular. I think your right, good idea in the right hands and if they are careful with how they do it.