Debate thread: About downvoting (modnote:no, not being removed again)

Here are my thoughts on this issue:
 
I don’t think going back to the old system, i.e. giving up, is a preferable solution because then the problems of the downvoters commiting voter fraud by creating multiple accounts and refusing to give constructive criticism would be left unresolved. Arguing that downvotes are beneficial is as superficial and naïve as arguing that upvotes are beneficial because then the artists would not know what are the pros and cons of their art as they are simply told by the votes that this amount of people like it and this amount of people don’t like it – furthermore, when the voters do comment, they still don’t give the basis of praise or criticism in most cases – and are left wondering what is right or, more occasionally, what is wrong, concerning which, I am not saying that such vague votes result in every artist not improving as there have been at least 2 cases that I know of in which the artist decided to judge his/her own art and improved, but whether their critique of their own art is the same as the critique of the downvoters is unknown; however, these exceptions are very rare and renders the main argument for going back to the old system negligible. Also, simply adding the Hide function is equivalent to this solution because voter fraud and silence would continue, but the consequences of adding a Hide function are uncertain as I have never encountered an image board that had such a thing; although, Hide’s consequences could probably be approximately predicted by considering the results of having filters, but according to The Frowning Pony in the Downvoting is being replaced by Hiding thread, people have tended to not use filters and instead downvote whatever they would’ve used a filter for, which could probably be explained by supposing that they either didn’t know or refused to take responsibility for their browsing (something the DWM movement refused to do whenever kids encountered porn), in which case, perhaps the Hiding function would not be utilized much, by virtue of which, renders it pointless. Making downvotes public or applying the voting system upon comments would have negative consequences because, in the former, people will go out on a witch hunt for downvoters, of which I am certain will happen because in the replies section of the tweets by For Exposure, an account that tweets statements by people who want free artwork or free work to humiliate them by exposing them – ironically enough – , but they don’t give out names because of what I’m about to tell you, there were significant amounts of people wanting to know the names and even addresses of the persons quoted to “punish them”, so publicizing downvotes is a terrible solution, and, in the latter, people’s inclination to rage and shitpost would be triggered which I’ve seen often enough in the comments sections of FiMFiction to not read them anymore, so that is also another catastrophic solution. One solution that seems to be likely to work is to add to the Up- and Downvoting functions a system that demands reasons for liking or disliking, but, since the moderators don’t want to moderate any further than the comments sections, I’m not sure what could be done to force people to give constructive criticism other than a least lower bound for the number of characters typed. I’m left undecided on this matter.

@Cirrus Light  
desired p-value is 0.995  
z=1.64485

@Nonymous  
Removing upvotes would definitely encourage positive comments, but it is unlikely any constructive criticism would be encouraged, and I want to ask: What would be the purpose of downvotes then? or, more generally, What consequences do you envision for your solution?

@Nonymous  
Maybe I’m just on the wrong images but I don’t see much criticism unless you consider random/smartassed comments/“OMG SO KAWAII”/etc. criticism.
 
I just think the fact there is an actual score system is the problem and if we go back to no downvotes people will find a way to abuse it in some other way.

@Background Pony #6996  
My solution was sarcastic, removing either defeats the purpose of the other.

@Corrderio  
I’d tell you to look up any image with muslimshy or a transgender humanization, but those are just wastelands of rule 0’d criticisms (and rule 0’d trolling, which is fine).

@Nonymous  
Oh trust me, I remember that cesspool.
 
EDIT: Hmm, maybe disable comments after a week or so after an image is uploaded? Seems like past that point there isn’t any real value in commenting on an image.

Upvotes serve an actual purpose of showing what’s really trending and what sorts of characters and artists really stand out. It helps people get their stuff seen.
 
Downvotes serve little purpose outside manifesting bias and trolling. If you don’t like something, you should be helpful and comment why. If you’re too lazy to do that or just don’t care enough to do that, you shouldn’t be able to so easily influence something’s ratio. Just hide it.
 
That’s my two cents.

@Nonymous  
Ah, I see. Apologies for myself not detecting sarcasm.

@Background Pony #2907
 
Downvotes serve an actual purpose, showing what people really dislike and what sort of art style and content really strikes a nerve.
 
Upvotes serve little purpose outside of manifesting biases fanboying. If you like something, it should be easy and fun to express why. If you’re too lazy to support something you like, you shouldn’t be able to so easily influence something’s ratio.
 
These are legit my 2 cents as well.

@byte[]  
That’s two variables. We’ve got one equation and five variables, though…
 
Unless the exact way in which this is implemented is sensitive information? In which case you can PM me. Or maybe they’re short replies just because you’re busy…
 
I’m just really curious and a bit excited to talk to someone who knows the answers about mysterious thing, though.
 

Find a bad image in the all-time top scoring.
 
Then find a good image in the all-time worst scoring.
 
Having both works.

@Background Pony #6996  
Further thoughts on this issue:
 
It appears to me that a solution, for specifically voter fraud, will require statistics to solve in which perhaps indexes for Upvotes and Downvotes will need to be developed from a graph, where the x-axis is Upvote/Downvote density and the y-axis is time since the picture was uploaded; although, concerning how to remove false votes and what situation would the graph be most applicable, whether it should take data from the accounts or the pictures, I’m not sure. The placement of where the owners of each account on Derpibooru will have to be accounted for, but in a way such that one does not know their exact position, so perhaps knowing the city and state of the country they’re in would be enough?, but then again, I’m not sure as I’m not a statician and having only began teaching myself statistics, so I’m left thinking about utilizing the techniques in the following papers, if any of y’all are interested, Redistricting and the Will of the People by Jonathan C. Mattingly and Christy Vaughn and Redistricting: Drawing the Line by Sachet Bangia, Christy Vaughn Graves, Gregory Herschlag, Han Sung Kang, Justin Luo, Jonathan C. Mattingly, and Robert Ravier, which are papers that have investigated the voting system of the USA, so they might shed some light on the voter fraud problem. I haven’t quite completely understood the papers, especially the second one; regardless, perhaps some progess could be made going from them. I think a probability measure and distribution might have to be used if one was to consider accounts that have certain tags and filters on or off. This thought has a lot more uncertainty, considering that this would enforce the result of less voter fraud rather than influence people such that they wouldn’t do so.

@Background Pony #6996  
@Background Pony #6996  
Please use paragraphing. It would make it a lot more readable. There’s a preview tab above the comment box.

@Background Pony #6996  
@Cirrus Light  
Restatement(Sorry for that. It might still be hard to read due to my florid prose from whoever knows where.)
 
Here are my thoughts on this issue:
 
I don’t think going back to the old system, i.e. giving up, is a preferable solution because then the problems of the downvoters commiting voter fraud by creating multiple accounts and refusing to give constructive criticism would be left unresolved. Arguing that downvotes are beneficial is as superficial and naïve as arguing that upvotes are beneficial because then the artists would not know what are the pros and cons of their art as they are simply told by the votes that this amount of people like it and this amount of people don’t like it — furthermore, when the voters do comment, they still don’t give the basis of praise or criticism in most cases — and are left wondering what is right or, more occasionally, what is wrong. Concerning which, I am not saying that such vague votes result in every artist not improving as there have been at least 2 cases that I know of in which the artist decided to judge his/her own art and improved, but whether their critique of their own art is the same as the critique of the downvoters is unknown. However, these exceptions are very rare and renders the main argument for going back to the old system negligible.
 
Also, simply adding the Hide function is equivalent to this solution because voter fraud and silence would continue, but the consequences of adding a Hide function are uncertain as I have never encountered an image board that had such a thing. Although, Hide’s consequences could probably be approximately predicted by considering the results of having filters, but according to The Frowning Pony in the Downvoting is being replaced by Hiding thread, people have tended to not use filters and instead downvote whatever they would’ve used a filter for, which could probably be explained by supposing that they either didn’t know or refused to take responsibility for their browsing (something the DWM movement refused to do whenever kids encountered porn), in which case, perhaps the Hiding function would not be utilized much, by virtue of which, renders it pointless.
 
Making downvotes public or applying the voting system upon comments would have negative consequences because, in the former, people will go out on a witch hunt for downvoters, of which I am certain will happen because in the replies section of the tweets by For Exposure, an account that tweets statements by people who want free artwork or free work to humiliate them by exposing them — ironically enough — , but they don’t give out names because of what I’m about to tell you, there were significant amounts of people wanting to know the names and even addresses of the persons quoted to “punish them”, so publicizing downvotes is a terrible solution, and, in the latter, people’s inclination to rage and shitpost would be triggered which I’ve seen often enough in the comments sections of FiMFiction to not read them anymore, so that is also another catastrophic solution.
 
One solution that seems to be likely to work is to add to the Up- and Downvoting functions a system that demands reasons for liking or disliking, but, since the moderators don’t want to moderate any further than the comments sections, I’m not sure what could be done to force people to give constructive criticism other than a least lower bound for the number of characters typed.
 
I’m left undecided on this matter.
 
Further thoughts on this issue:
 
It appears to me that a solution, for specifically voter fraud, will require statistics to solve in which perhaps indexes for Upvotes and Downvotes will need to be developed from a graph, where the x-axis is Upvote/Downvote density and the y-axis is time since the picture was uploaded. Although, concerning how to remove false votes and what situation would the graph be most applicable, whether it should take data from the accounts or the pictures, I’m not sure.
 
The placement of where the owners of each account on Derpibooru probably have to be accounted for, but in a way such that one does not know their exact position, so perhaps knowing the city and state of the country they’re in would be enough? But again, I’m not sure as I’m not a statician and having only began teaching myself statistics, so I’m left thinking about possibly utilizing the techniques in the following papers, if any of y’all are interested, Redistricting and the Will of the People by Jonathan C. Mattingly and Christy Vaughn and Redistricting: Drawing the Line by Sachet Bangia, Christy Vaughn Graves, Gregory Herschlag, Han Sung Kang, Justin Luo, Jonathan C. Mattingly, and Robert Ravier, which are papers that have investigated the voting system of the USA, so they might shed some light on the voter fraud problem. I haven’t quite completely understood the papers myself (to say it again, I’m not statician). Regardless, perhaps some progess could be made going from them.
 
I think a probability measure and distribution might have to be used if one was to consider accounts that have certain tags and filters on or off.
 
This thought has a lot more uncertainty, considering that this unconstructed, partial solution enforces less voter fraud rather than influence people such that they wouldn’t do so.

@Background Pony #6996  
*statistician

@Arifproject  
OH MY GOSH. MR (MS?) HIDE! _{Hyde*
 
Just a thought}

@The Smiling Pony  
My question is how does a few downvotes directly effect you at all though? Do you get complaints from the artists who get downvoted or something?

@Rod Hungwell  
That was all explained in the announcement thread.

@Rod Hungwell  
We’ve had many artist DNP over mass downvoters, yes; essentially over the sort that downvote things just because they’re on the front page (and before the recent 2-minute display delay, often before they would even render), that vote down all of an artist’s work out of some sort of spite for one image they made, or because of whatever ship/character was drawn. As in, I recognize the voters and their behaviours, not “guesses”, and not people that downvote an image here and there because the quality is bad or they were caught off guard by something nasty.
 
And of course, there’s dupe voters, a constant pain of people that believe their “it’s shit” opinion matters a whole damn lot and go to whatever lengths necessary to tank the score on images they don’t like. Mostly because of the artist involved, the ship/character, or because it competes with an image they like in one of the “Top X” lists.
 
The effort put in to keeping this place running is something taken for granted.

Request about downvotes: If you will keep downvotes, please implement “alternative score”, or “reaction” and possibility to search pics by this parameter:  
Score = upvotes - downvotes  
Reaction = upvotes + downvotes  
It will really inspire some sort of artists.
 
Or even you could show ONLY “score” and “reaction” on the page instead of upvotes, score and downvotes.

Further thoughts on this issue (cont. on eliminating false votes):
 
Here’s perhaps a sketch (by someone that’s not a statistician, so treat this with a grain of salt smaller than a string in superstring theory.).
 
Assign to a person P_j a number of accounts a € {1, 2, 3, …}, so there is a function F : a -> N, where N is the set of natural numbers, starting with 0, which is the probability that P_j had commited voter fraud, so
 
F(P_j) = a - 1 / a ,
 
since with multiple accounts P_j has multiple possible votes if they choose to act upon them.
 
Now, let P_j € v , where v € V is the place P_j is in, a vertex in the world with defined edges e € E.
 
Taking the area, one could then get upvote and downvote densities.
 
At this point, I’m uncertain now, so here’s some ideas:
 
1 Perhaps, the votes could be aligned as a Gaussian distribution?
 
2 It seems to me the Gibbs Probability Measure could be used as in Redistricting and the Will of the People.
 
3 Of course, there is the case in which we don’t know if a P_j is a voter fraud in which one would have to indentify known voter frauds and, from the number of voter frauds and number of people aren’t frauds in a v, a Gaussian distribution could be formed upon which a suitable transformation of the total votes could be used to form a new index. (Argh, that was a tedious, incomprehensible statement and probably wrong.)
 
Need to think a little more.

@ushiki  
I decided to give your idea a bit of logic-following, and I think you ought to consider what this would do to images with a relatively even number of upvotes and downvotes. Sorted by score, such images tend not to bubble to the top, despite a lot of people expressing their like/dislike - whereas with “reactions,” you’d be pushing controversial posts higher than neutral but otherwise benign posts. That’s an incentive for certain types to post more bait/etc. and I’m pretty sure this is not the sort of inspiration we want to give, you know?
 
In fact, even if a post isn’t controversial in the slightest, sorting by “reaction” would push artists who don’t receive much attention even further out of the limelight. I’m sorry, it’s a nice idea in theory, but I don’t think it helps the cause.

@WingbeatPony  
couldn’t it discipline downvotes fairies and tough internet guys who can’t into filtering and hiding because hiding for the weak?

@ushiki  
I don’t see how it could, since their approach to downvoting is “making their voice heard,” and this would only serve to make it even more apparent.