<story><title>Killing Community</title><url>https://www.marginalia.nu/log/82_killing_community</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjr00</author><text>&amp;gt; You can just ignore things you don&amp;#x27;t like!&lt;p&gt;I do think this is one of the big hidden problems with upvote&amp;#x2F;like systems.&lt;p&gt;Seeing a post you don&amp;#x27;t like or disagree with on Twitter&amp;#x2F;Facebook&amp;#x2F;Reddit with a lot of likes&amp;#x2F;retweets&amp;#x2F;upvotes&amp;#x2F;etc psychologically puts you on the defensive. 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means you&amp;#x27;re up against an &lt;i&gt;army&lt;/i&gt; of 10,000 people who disagreed with you! So you do what&amp;#x27;s natural: you fight back, you summon your &lt;i&gt;own&lt;/i&gt; army of people (hoping to get a respectable counter-army of likes). This creates a toxic environment and you can see it play out on Twitter: every Democrat-leaning tweet will have its top reply be a Republican-leaning tweet with a counter-point, and every Republican with a Democrat.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, on 4chan or other old-style message board withouts those systems... yeah, it&amp;#x27;s just some asshole with a stupid opinion. Just ignore them, no need to waste effort engaging.</text></item><item><author>thot_experiment</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s absolutely not for everyone, but I think the anonymous nature makes it so low stakes it&amp;#x27;s trivially easy for me to just not care, not engage. You can just ignore things you don&amp;#x27;t like!</text></item><item><author>JohnFen</author><text>&amp;gt; Outside of that it&amp;#x27;s egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet&lt;p&gt;Except for all of the hate, vitriol, prejudice, and disregard for the basic humanity of others, it&amp;#x27;s egalitarian and accessible??</text></item><item><author>thot_experiment</author><text>You can make a village in some interesting ways. 4chan is a village, that&amp;#x27;s why it&amp;#x27;s one of the best resources&amp;#x2F;communities on the internet today. I&amp;#x27;ve learned much of what I know about LLMs and generative AI on &amp;#x2F;g&amp;#x2F;. The toxicity&amp;#x2F;chaos of the place is probably the main thing that enables it to continue to be a village for all these years. There&amp;#x27;s more than one way to shear a sheep, and I don&amp;#x27;t think the 4chan method is the best way to make a village, but a village make it does.&lt;p&gt;I just mention it here because it&amp;#x27;s probably something that doesn&amp;#x27;t occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property in that the gatekeeping is &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; your ability to mentally filter every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs. Outside of that it&amp;#x27;s egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there&amp;#x27;s value to that that people miss.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trompetenaccoun</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s actually even worse on some sites. For example Reddit does not necessarily show the real sum of votes to begin with, but a different one created in an intransparent manner since the code isn&amp;#x27;t public. They call this &amp;quot;vote-fuzzing&amp;quot;. Arbitrary changes to the ranking algorithm have over the years completely changed what users see when they look at the vote count¹, and I suspect that&amp;#x27;s just the tip of the iceberg that&amp;#x27;s made public.&lt;p&gt;¹&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;announcements&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;28hjga&amp;#x2F;reddit_changes_individual_updown_vote_counts_no&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;announcements&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;28hjga&amp;#x2F;reddi...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Killing Community</title><url>https://www.marginalia.nu/log/82_killing_community</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjr00</author><text>&amp;gt; You can just ignore things you don&amp;#x27;t like!&lt;p&gt;I do think this is one of the big hidden problems with upvote&amp;#x2F;like systems.&lt;p&gt;Seeing a post you don&amp;#x27;t like or disagree with on Twitter&amp;#x2F;Facebook&amp;#x2F;Reddit with a lot of likes&amp;#x2F;retweets&amp;#x2F;upvotes&amp;#x2F;etc psychologically puts you on the defensive. 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means you&amp;#x27;re up against an &lt;i&gt;army&lt;/i&gt; of 10,000 people who disagreed with you! So you do what&amp;#x27;s natural: you fight back, you summon your &lt;i&gt;own&lt;/i&gt; army of people (hoping to get a respectable counter-army of likes). This creates a toxic environment and you can see it play out on Twitter: every Democrat-leaning tweet will have its top reply be a Republican-leaning tweet with a counter-point, and every Republican with a Democrat.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, on 4chan or other old-style message board withouts those systems... yeah, it&amp;#x27;s just some asshole with a stupid opinion. Just ignore them, no need to waste effort engaging.</text></item><item><author>thot_experiment</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s absolutely not for everyone, but I think the anonymous nature makes it so low stakes it&amp;#x27;s trivially easy for me to just not care, not engage. You can just ignore things you don&amp;#x27;t like!</text></item><item><author>JohnFen</author><text>&amp;gt; Outside of that it&amp;#x27;s egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet&lt;p&gt;Except for all of the hate, vitriol, prejudice, and disregard for the basic humanity of others, it&amp;#x27;s egalitarian and accessible??</text></item><item><author>thot_experiment</author><text>You can make a village in some interesting ways. 4chan is a village, that&amp;#x27;s why it&amp;#x27;s one of the best resources&amp;#x2F;communities on the internet today. I&amp;#x27;ve learned much of what I know about LLMs and generative AI on &amp;#x2F;g&amp;#x2F;. The toxicity&amp;#x2F;chaos of the place is probably the main thing that enables it to continue to be a village for all these years. There&amp;#x27;s more than one way to shear a sheep, and I don&amp;#x27;t think the 4chan method is the best way to make a village, but a village make it does.&lt;p&gt;I just mention it here because it&amp;#x27;s probably something that doesn&amp;#x27;t occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property in that the gatekeeping is &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; your ability to mentally filter every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs. Outside of that it&amp;#x27;s egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there&amp;#x27;s value to that that people miss.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ddq</author><text>Arguably, the addition of showing links to all the replies to a comment could have contributed towards 4chan&amp;#x27;s drift further into engagement-baiting content. It&amp;#x27;s the closest analogue to the visual, numeric feedback mechanism you describe.&lt;p&gt;Interesting because from a functional user experience perspective, it&amp;#x27;s an objectively useful feature for navigating discussions. An obvious addition in terms of web design, yet with unforeseen repercussions. The medium is the message, after all.</text></comment>