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Downvoting Considered Harmful - Boing Boing Article with Several Links

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 16 2014, @12:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the mod-me-up! dept.

First-time submitter MostCynical writes:

An article posted by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2014/09/15/downvoting-considered-harmful.html has interesting insight into moderation:

A study http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf [PDF] published in a journal of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence found that sites that have a "downvote" button to punish bad comments lock the downvoted users into spirals of ever-more-prolific, ever-lower-quality posting due to a perception of having been martyred by the downvoters.

Cory continues: What's more, positive attention for writing good posts acts as less of an incentive to write more good stuff than the incentive to write bad stuff that's produced by negative attention.

How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf [Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec]

Why Reddit sucks: some scientific evidence http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/09/09/why-reddit-sucks-some-scientific-evidence/ [Henry Farrell/Washington Post]

So... do you downvote? if so, why? Does this article make you reconsider your down-modding?

[Editor's note: I offer for your consideration and commentary our very own SoylentNews Moderation FAQ.]

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:50PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:50PM (#93998) Journal

    "most of the time it is against groupthink."

    When everyone thinks alike, then no one is thinking. Can't remember who said that, a general, I think - I'll check . . . . Ben Franklin said it, and later George Patton said it again. Ahhh, Albert Einstein is also credited with it. There's no telling who said it first, but there are three great men who believed it!

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   3  

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by JeanCroix on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:51PM

    by JeanCroix (573) on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:51PM (#93999)
    Obviously, all three of those men were thinking alike.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:53PM (#94001)

      whooosh

      • (Score: 1) by JeanCroix on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:54PM

        by JeanCroix (573) on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:54PM (#94003)
        Obviously, I should have credited OP with a higher degree of subtlety.

  • (Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 17 2014, @12:24AM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 17 2014, @12:24AM (#94317)

    When everyone thinks alike, then no one is thinking. Can't remember who said that, a general, I think - I'll check . . . . Ben Franklin said it, and later George Patton said it again. Ahhh, Albert Einstein is also credited with it. There's no telling who said it first, but there are three great men who believed it!

    Yeah but none of those guys ever met a hipster.

    --
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