[meredydd]

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.

[picardythird]

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.

[bene_legionary]

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.

[AussieWog93]

>On places like reddit, downvotes more often than not incite anger or resentment in the recipient

I'm not sure the reaction to IRL disapproval is much different, at least for the people who receive a lot of it.

[musicale]

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.)"

[bcherny]

I wonder if the difference is that on Reddit, you can’t see who it was that downvoted you.

[amalcon]

> 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.

[umvi]

Frowny emojis on Facebook aren't anonymous though so people are reluctant to use them

[saurik]

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".

[underwater]

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.

[saurik]

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.

[underwater]

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.

[joe-collins]

Meatspace disapproval signalling is expressed instinctively, unless conscious control is applied. It's opt-out.

Emojis and downvotes require actively choosing to reply. They're opt-in.

And we know damned well that opt-out yields much higher volume.

[nonbirithm]

> 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.

[ars]

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".

[toto444]

That's the same on reddit and HN. You can use downvote to mean "I disagree with this opinion but it is a valuable one" or "this comment is rubbish".

[saurik]

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".

[hn_throwaway_99]

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.

[underwater]

On Facebook you see the content because of the relationship you have with that person. On Twitter you form a relationship because of the content.

As a result Twitter personalities are incentivise to be one dimensional. Normally talk about tech, but make a political statement? Expect complaints.

[pbronez]

Twitter is actually rolling out a private downvote option. Downvotes aren’t shown to anyone except the admins.

[gonehome]

Only on tweet replies I think - you can’t downvote the original tweet that started a thread.

[andrewclunn]

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.

[AussieWog93]

I think it's a little bit more than just disagreement. For me at least, usually it means I both disagree with someone and thing they're full of shit.

[saurik]

This is also true of disapproving glares.

[yesenadam]

> on Twitter, the only way to express disapproval is to "join the conversation"

I've never signed up for Twitter, so not an expert, but doesn't unfollowing someone express disapproval?

[GauntletWizard]

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.