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by pibaker 42 days ago
By stopping integer counts do you mean not collecting upvotes and downvotes at all or just not displaying them?

If it is the later, I think it can be an interesting experiment, although I doubt it matters that much because you can still gauge the "engagement" based on how your posts rank. But there is absolutely no way HN could work if posts and submissions stop being sorted based on their votes. Community moderation via voting is what allows HN to remain functional despite having only two moderators. If votes stopped mattering for a week then HN will likely be flooded with spam by day two and the experiment will be halted by day three.
3 comments
altairprime 42 days ago
Just not transmitting the numbers to clients. I’m aware that a dedicated actor could try to infer their effects through study, code, etc., but I’m interested in the effect on the majority of people rather than those adamantly intent on counting their numbers.
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Leonard_of_Q 42 days ago
Voting combined with voting on the votes/voters worked quite well in the olde days of yore when Slashdot used such a system. You did not 'vote up' or 'vote down', instead you voted things like 'insightful' or 'overrated'. Some of those categories caused the vote count to go up, others caused it to go down. Users decided for themselves whether they wanted to see all posts or only those above a given threshold. Then there was the meta-moderation system wher a rotating cadre of users could flag abusive votes. If a user got too many sch flags he lost his voting rights. This latter system would be good to have here as well given that I've seen a lot of abuse of the down-vote button where all recent posts for a user who has voiced an opinion outside of some desired narrative get voted down no matter their subject. Such abuse would be caught if there were a meta-moderation system in place. It would help reduce the group-think which is seen on sites like HN and Reddit.

A similar voting system is - or was - in place on lobste.rs where a reason for voting down needs to be given. It does - or did - not have meta-moderation though which takes away the possibility to get rid of vote-abusers.

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card_zero 42 days ago
Is moderation truly accomplished via votes, though, as opposed to flagging?

You say "spam", but unpopular comments are rarely promotional. They lack any one unifying quality. They might be naive, and/or they might be difficult.

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altairprime 41 days ago
Flagging doesn’t report any numbers to clients, so any potential changes to it are out of scope re: my client-accessible integers concerns. There was a big thread about the flagging system in the AI rule-change post a few weeks ago that may be of more interest to you along those lines, though!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341705

I especially appreciated dang’s reply, quoted here out of context as a teaser:

> We're going to add that.

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