this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I do wonder though what a better alternative might be (and if this has been studied at all). It's fundamentally an issue with people being emotional and often quite bad at separating their own personal feeling from their voting. I know some platforms simply disable downvotes, which partially solves the issue, but at the same time, I think there is some value in communities being able to downvote spam or genuinely poor content. Maybe if you had to also make a comment - thus upping the amount of effort required - it'd be better?
Kbin does also have the quirk that votes are actually public, so you can actually tell if someone is following you around downvoting everything. That could potentially be seen as a rule violation and lead to being banned from an instance.
While probably computationally too expensive, I would like some system where up/downvoting isn't about objective quality, but only about personal preference. Essentially the system would "cluster" up/downvote behavior from users like youtube clusters like/dislike of videos and then recommend posts which people who like the same content as you like and people who dislike content you like dislike. I am not sure how many clusters/dimensions you would need though and I guess individualized sorting would quickly become computationally prohibitive as you would have to do a scalar multiplication of the post-dimensions with the user-dimensions for each post and then sort the stuff.
That's an interesting idea, though I'm wary of the risk of funneling users into echo chambers. Just think of YouTube around 2016 when every gaming video led you down a rabbit hole of Gamergate to Ben Shapiro and ultimately raw white supremacy.