I’ve always been a little skeptical of the up/downvote mechanism on any social media platform. It makes it so easy to weaponize the human bias towards group conformity, by doing exactly what you described.
I won’t try to argue the voting has no benefits. It can be helpful to reduce the reach of truly bad faith posts for example, and everyone loves the little dopamine hit of seeing one’s own posts upvoted - me included. Just that it also has real drawbacks, and I’m not sure whether the good outweighs the bad.
I may be more willing to be skeptical. I’m not sure if the reduction in bad faith is really worth the downsides of vote ranking myself.
If SomethingAwful can survive to this day without it and an intact strong community identity, I think it comes down to the usual things that tip the scales heaviest of all things considered: Site ownership, moderators. A sense of humour doesn’t hurt either.
ThreeJawedChuck@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I’ve always been a little skeptical of the up/downvote mechanism on any social media platform. It makes it so easy to weaponize the human bias towards group conformity, by doing exactly what you described.
I won’t try to argue the voting has no benefits. It can be helpful to reduce the reach of truly bad faith posts for example, and everyone loves the little dopamine hit of seeing one’s own posts upvoted - me included. Just that it also has real drawbacks, and I’m not sure whether the good outweighs the bad.
Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I may be more willing to be skeptical. I’m not sure if the reduction in bad faith is really worth the downsides of vote ranking myself.
If SomethingAwful can survive to this day without it and an intact strong community identity, I think it comes down to the usual things that tip the scales heaviest of all things considered: Site ownership, moderators. A sense of humour doesn’t hurt either.