The goal of an internet forum is to have a high signal/noise ratio, something that is both objective and subjective. An imprecise understanding of master-slave morality is applicable, where the priority is good vs. bad, not the easily hijacked nice vs. mean. Respect should be defined by 4chan ethos; it's okay to capture the HWNDU flag but not to SWAT Shia Labeouf's home. Casuals should be discouraged and mocked, but not arbitrarily interfered with by a badmin or exalted priesthood/parasitic inner-circle clique.
Conservatism is about recognizing that humans are flawed by default and cautiously maintaining institutions based off that fact. Sizable, sophisticated (i.e. not Facebook Groups tier) lib-right online communities are few and far between.
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Policy:
Many of the replacements gaining traction during the jannie revolt, like Lemmy or Kbin, have anti hate-speech clauses in their ToS. Some platforms may be motivated to keep defect-attracting/distractionary content out, others to coddle fragile feelings, and many more just imitate contemporary norms. This has the hidden cost of encouraging positive feedback loops, akin to stocks and other markets (depending on country and decade) becoming overvalued because players are artificially and capriciously restricted from shorting or insider-trading. Social ecosystems are healthier when some dissent and disruption isn't restricted, counter-acting degenerate individual and collective behaviors.
A healthy community doesn't try to shove 1a/1b discrimination under the rug. Discussing the consequences of ethnic IQ disparities (without double-speak), and making off-color jokes doesn't hurt anybody. It keeps thin-skinned normies and up-tight narcissists out. Genuine type-2 discrimination is bad not because verbal abuses are committed against cultural groups, but because such content will drown out regular activity. Voat was obnoxious mostly because it didn't crack down on brigading. Wolfballs shut down his Lemmy instance when he got tired of real Nazi content. Ruqqus had some dank memes, but stormfront scared off non-political content. c/ConPro is saturated with posturing nutjobs and glow-in-the-dark bait. Sometimes that overflows here with low-effort anti-Davidian sentiments getting upvoted, with no joke or observation attached.
R/adviceanimals and r/politics are similarly bad for accelerating the evaporative cooling effect across the rest of the website. 50k> subscriber hobby subreddits were better 11 years ago.
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Mechanism:
The worst aspect of Reddit is the innate encouragement of group-think and information cascades[1]. Replacements like Scored are doomed because they inherit this central flaw from Reddit. Downmodding keeps the most inane comments out of the way, but it also buries constructive disagreement and nuanced perspectives. Large, weakly moderated subreddits (as opposed to unmoderated derailment or brigading) inevitably devolve into a sanitized or polarized wall of brain-dead extroverted cliches, shedding intrinsic quality. A bad mix of those who touch too little and too much grass.
Hacker News has some weighted voting and lightweight automated content detection, so it gets some mechanism right, if not policy. LessWrong may or may not have mechanisms for quality curation; I need to do further research. The two technical founders of Stackoverflow and Discourse had some good conservative (non-political) insights and solutions for community degradation, if only tainted by living in coastal urban communities and bias towards 80s/90s progressivism like many other boomers and X'ers. A better platform gives more weight to those who participate responsibly, independently, and have good taste.
Lemmy's federation model swarms too far, hurting discoverability of content and communities[2]. If instance A defederates from instance B, user1 from instance A should be able to override this and view+participate in instance B; instance B would still be able to blanket-ban all users of instance A. Perhaps a return to Usenet's big-8 hierarchy is ultimately more coherent, where a central cabal coordinates group names for general interests. Like Usenet, there'd be the more permissive alt. hierarchy[3], and different instances/providers can create unaffiliated hierarchy groupings. The ultimate intent is not to be more/less inviting to newcomers, but to make regular usage efficient, less exhausting.
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Other:
Larry Sanger was ultimately right that Wikipedia's neglect of expertise resulted in the rise of agenda-driven cliques. He was a bit too conventional on how you determine expertise, but preferable to the permissive civil-libertarianism of Jimmy Wales.
Any platform that uses heart imagery for upvotes, like squabbles.io, Youtube, or Twitter is dead on arrival. Aesthetics dictate culture.
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- I get autistically particular over the 'hivemind' term, since popular usage of that term implicitly discounts spontaneous order and bazaar styled norms
- Champagne socialists ruin everything they touch, whether it was Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, or it's modern latte guzzling LARPers committing cringe with like-minded freaks. Lemmy deserves Reddit refugees. So does Mastodon, but Twitter addicts were too sheltered and mainstream to figure it out. Inadvertently, G+ was the only microblogging platform to attract half-decent contributors.
- Tragic that there's no alt.right newsgroup
Further reading:
First simple way is to not hide up/down votes.
For example, in reddit scoring if 1000 people vote on a comment that's a 55% slight majority view then the comment is scored +100. It looks like a lot of people agree with it leading to hivemind, but +550/-450 shows a different story. Conversely a 45% view scores -100 and looks universally scorned.
Second way is weigh downvotes less than upvotes.
Same example with upvotes worth 1 point and downvotes worth 1/4 points. The 55% comment scores a higher +437, but the 45% comment now scores +312 -- not far behind instead of negative and hidden.
With reddit/scored scoring you get best neutral, best majority, ok neutral, ok majority, then hidden are best minority, ok minority, and then trash comments.
With differential scoring what you get is best neutral, best majority, best minority ranking followed by lower quality comments interleaved in the same way.
This boosting of minority views forces the majority to see and confront alternative views, inhibiting hivemind.
Definitely a better solution for websites that are trying to stick close to Reddit. Combined with admin/mod tools to prevent brigading, another alternative would have a leg-up over the trending alternatives.
Hacker News only gives you the downvote after a reaching a karma threshold, with somewhat enforced netiquette guidelines, and there's more disagreement within a comment section than 95% of subreddits. HN still often suffers from Silicon Valley monoculture. That specific solution would be pointless somewhere else with less focus. Better than no-downvote hugboxes like saidit(least-bad example) where feelings>quality.
My ideal solution is a radical departure from popular offerings, centered around something similar to Freenet-Locutus' web-of-trust.
Hacker News also has a -4 downvote limit. You never lose more than 4 points.
That's good because you can post a potentially unpopular opinion without having to worry about being dogpiled on, but bad because high-quality controversial comments are still pushed to the bottom or hidden.
I think everybody should see the same discussions because if each person can boost their friends or accounts they like or have upvoted then that's hivemind on steroids. You can't really do that with a distributed system.
Algorithms I've inferred from observation like YouTube treat all voting as engagement. For the purposes of considering a video's popularity and thus likelihood to appear in someone else's feed, upvote, downvote, and comments to whatever effect all count as upvotes. YT also has the benefit of spying on your play time, whereas reddit-likes can't tell how much you read.
So yeah rather than hide controversial comments, promote them.
Like Microsoft and many others, Google's corporate culture suffers from garbage metrics and other corporate careerist dysfunctions. It's amazing how much their product quality has suffered since they discarded open-allocation, a.k.a flat hierarchy, to ingratiate with the post-feudalist side of our economy.
I don't think I know enough about Google's culture to tell what you're talking about. YouTube, I just understand by observation. If downvotes count as engagement, people have incentive to ignore the dumb ones, and if they did, the dumb ones would naturally go to the bottom. I don't know if they would use that incentive. If people downvote offtopic out of spite, you don't want that going to the top.
Netflix is pretty open that their user-rating system being a placebo, as some viewers love to hate-watch. I'm sure Youtube pulls similar shit, but garbage-metrics specifically refers to ambitious middle-management types manipulating numbers to pull Gervais Principle shenanigans, to the neglect of intrinsic product quality or user preferences.
Once Google established a user-base off their first product, the path towards steady revenue and growth is of a war-like territorial nature. Two of their three or four widely used offerings post-2006, Youtube and Android, were acquisitions. They still had an engineering culture, but the well-connected professional (lawyers, etc) and investor class were now the profit-centers. Early on, they had no lower/middle-management in their org hierarchy, which benefits creative work if done correctly, but becomes a pain in the ass when the corporation is expanding rapidly. Their business needs changed by 2005, and so Goog decided commodified, component labor , treating the software engineers like the socially inept nerds they are, was more appropriate anyways.
By 2010 Google was in bed with government agencies and dominant political parties across the world. That's key to keeping the advertising department profitable, securing market access across the globe which is a pseudo zero-sum game. Probably black-budget sources too.
The system of "promotion" of content naturally depends on your goals, but in my theoretical forum platform I want to de-link "likes" from content moderation and curation. StackExchange shows how a community of dedicated users in a reputation-based system can push the best content up, but that has to be controlled by standards to avoid abuse. Pure engagement is also a useful metric for promoting content independent of that.
A "thumbs up" or "like" should be different than an "upvote that this content is on-topic and belongs on this board". I would give all content "like" and "dislike" buttons that are easy to interact with for all users, but then separate "+/-" vote buttons that are either restricted to a tighter class of users, or at least require extra steps to find and interact with.
Likes and dislikes are both forms of engagement and would be treated that way for neutral content promotion, but for logged in users a like would decrease the distance between that content and your "social circle", while dislikes would increase the distance, so a user would get more or less of certain kinds of content based on his likes/dislikes. (based on diminishing network effect) On the other hand the voting buttons would apply content moderation across the board. There are various ways to limit who has access to those controls or how much effect they have, but ideally most regular users get them. It's not limited to some kind of "supermod" class, you just have to take some extra step beyond a casual user. But I would also treat replying to a comment as a + vote, as simply by engaging with someone you are passively admitting the content belongs here. Don't engage the trolls. I don't believe there should be any janitors or moderators beyond that.
The two metrics should work together (or against one another) so that super-popular content can spread by the network effect despite being downvoted up to some threshold/limit, and you don't have to see content you don't like even if was upvoted as acceptable.
In response to ableistsl's removed comment:
Even though it's not its specific intent, my hypothetical web-of-trust (meaningful reputation scoring with simple, sound checks and balances) would downrank uncreative, non self-aware trolls along with those that take them at face value from the default viewing preference. In line with political-realism and lib-right conservatism, any new user would have to go through the automatic gatekeeping process of one the few groups. As for server policy, the main federated instance (presuming the admin shares my goals) would only be concerned with removing CP-level content and coordinated malicious disruption.