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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18754 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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Is there a consensus somewhere that the up/downvote is not a proxy agree/disagree?

the OG redditards made the rules and they said upvoting is for useful info, downvotes for fake shit

also i wanna elaborate that i mean actual reddit, not here where the upvotes send you to valhalla

I've always felt that making upvotes and downvotes visible to anyone but the moderators (or perhaps at all) was a bad idea and that it would be better not to have them at all. If people want to agree or disagree at least make them put their name on it.

As much as upboats can be farmed or warp the discussion to a popularity context, I think they serve a useful purpose. The ratio of lurkers to posters in all sites has always been lopsided in the favor of lurkers, and yet if we had no voting system these people's opinions would go unseen. The field would be dominated by those determined enough to wax lyrical at length. The upvotes serve a useful feedback system, if we are to have any discourse at all it would be meaningful to gauge the audience's reception to our arguments.

What could be done to make it a little bit more interesting is have a personal invisible tagging that the user picks. Could be a multi-axis affinity designation. The user's tags/afinity would be only visible to themselves and the backend. Then then "updoots" would also be collated so publically you would be able to see (received 10 updoots from conservatives, 5 downvotes from conservatives, 3 upvotes from progs, 7 downvotes from progs) etc. etc.

I'm not sure what the UI spec would be for this. But it would ameliorate the loss of information a raw number like 16 bears.

The bit about the ratio of lurkers to posters is something that I hadn't considered. I don't think it's enough to change my mind but it is a good point.

Yes, this is something that the drama website we forked our code from does well—all votes are public. (And downvotes are also counted as upvotes for algorithmic scoring purposes, which is hilarious and honestly not a terrible idea.)

Ideally it's supposed to be related to the "objective" (lmao) quality of the comment, regardless of your personal valence towards it.

I think that was the original idea on Reddit when they added the system.

I think LessWrong splits it into two different forms of karma.

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