this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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I think you perfectly described my issues with comment sections on Reddit for the last few years. That attempt to appeal to an audience rather than further the discussion.
I used to love comment sections as much as, if not more than, the actual post on Reddit. It felt more like a conversation that had insight and humor. It got too big for it's britches and became that soulless monolith.
I get an almost nostalgic vibe from this place. It's nice.
Well, it's the nature of almost any online community. Say the 'popular' thing and you're lauded, even if a slightly less popular point is more valid / has better evidence.
There really is no good way to discourage this other than fostering a community which values the discourse over 'popular' thing. That's difficult to do even offline.
I'm not sure it's even possible to discourage it really. If you have any sort of user-user engagement system, whether up/downvotes or comments/shares or whatever, you're going to have particular sentiments that are popular with particular audiences and get more of that engagement. If you take those features out, you're going to lose engagement, pretty much definitionally.
I've always thought about creating some metric to weight users who create comments with the most engagement as higher. That leads to the most controversial or dividing comments rising though.
Some impartial judgement via mod points and or community awards to weigh valuable users would be nice.
The issue is any of these would be gamed, it might be possible today to use an AI model like ChatGPT but that's got its own biases.
So for the moment I can't think of a better system than upvote downvote.
Yeah, weighting 'engagement' higher is basically the youtube algorithm problem: you'd be attracting trolls most of all. You could probably devise something smarter, like weighting it to include all of most upvotes, fewest downvotes, and most comments; adding comments to it helps identify people who post positive but engaging things, but again that can lead to an echo chamber. Plus, it then under-weights new users compared to established ones, which can be unfortunate.
Yep. It turns out there is no such thing as a 'balanced' social network.
Which is analogous to life, depressingly enough.
I absolutely agree with you on this point. Comments used to be about commenting and carrying a conversation. Then they suddenly became monetized and sought after for the likes. Funny overrode useful and now comments are a trash fire that make one think twice before starting to engage with it.
The amount of times I've had to scroll and scroll for answers is way too high. Everyone thinks they're a comedian and that's always the top comment. So frustrating.