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

@Zeb  
Well, that eliminates one concern.  
For a while I thought I overheard from somewhere that this site now permitted unregistered users to fave and vote things.

If we were to move to a reputation system, what would count as reputation?

@SeraphimDawn
 
I’m not sure a comment number makes sense, as plenty of people lurk or even post images and don’t feel inclined to comment. There’s no reason to exclude them from voting.
 
I would be fine with reaching some minimum level of activity before voting, perhaps meeting one of several criteria, just to make sock accounts more difficult, but I think we need to be careful to minimize the exclusion of genuine users just because they don’t use one particular function of the site.

@SeraphimDawn  

 
2 months seems a bit long. I think a month would get the job done.

@Zeb  
Yeah, I meant to mention that about the unregistered users in my post also, but forgot. The main point was the time minimum and the post requirement. Something between 10 and 50 sounds fair.

@byte[]  
I think literally everything “could” be counted as reputation - number of comments, forum posts, uploads, average score on uploads, etc. The trouble with such karma is that it becomes an end-goal incentive, and unlike badges it doesn’t paint a good picture of a user - it’s just a number.
 
Regarding the limits people have been proposing for “unlocking” the ability to vote…they all seem remarkably severe to me. Uploading, commenting, and faving I think should be available straight off the blocks, with various other site features being rolled into “you are now a trusted user” such as voting, editing tags on other posts, and creating galleries - with a benchmark that should be achievable within 24-48 hours of site usage.
 
Beyond the point of becoming an acclimated user, I don’t see a lot of use for reputation as an outwardly-visible user stat. I do think it would be interesting if it were used as the basis for a downvote quota - that is, it’d only take 10 or so points of karma to earn the ability to downvote, but each downvote “spends” one of those points and you lose the privilege if your reputation hits 0 - meaning every user has at any given time a hidden value between 0-10, and that serves as a dual threshold with full hysteresis.
 
Kinda went on a tangent there, but what do you think?

@WingbeatPony  
Indeed. There are MANY users who do not comment or upload images. But merely fave/upvote/downvote art as they browse the site. And only have accounts for keeping faves or similar. Any kind of system that requires comments or uploads, etc could massively diminish the number of people able to do anything on the site.

@Zeb  
Maybe require people to have a certain number of faves before they can vote?
 
1 month probation for new users?

Another idea might be to give new accounts the ability to upvote or downvote once a day after 5 days. 10 times a day after 10 days. Unlimited after a month.

@SeraphimDawn  
The idea I outlined - with karma having a total and daily limit of 10 - would effectively give a limit of 10 downvotes per day with a probationary period proportional to how active the user is. I can see the merit in raising that cap over time, but with the way such points would be earned in my system it’d probably be better to simply raise the baseline of daily votes before they start impacting reputation. Which, again, I think would work better as an internal variable than a badge of pride.

Limiting number of votes by time period would balloon the number of dupe voters.
 
Limiting number of votes by reputation/activity would balloon the number of frivolous site interactions (ie. 100 comments of “boop!”)

Is there a way to limit downvotes by IP? I know people use proxies and what not but could that be a course of action taken to curtail this downvoting sprees? Kinda like an overheat button where you’re given a certain amount of downvotes in a time period?

I am both for and against downvotes in general. I think they do serve a useful purpose when used responsibly, but are so often used irresponsibly, thus the current conundrum.
 
That said, I personally feel that a large part of the problem can be solved by not using a strictly linear scaling of downvotes to upvotes to determine the overall score. Downvotes are inherently meaningless until they start approaching the same order of magnitude as upvotes. Granted, while this solution is not very effective for images with very low vote counts, it would take far more effort to make a dent in images with even moderate vote counts than it is currently.
 
Rather than a simple subtraction of  
score = upvotes - downvotes  
something more along the lines of  
*score = upvotes - [max(downvotes / upvotes, 1) ** downvotes]  
Making downvotes count proportionally to the number of upvotes until their numbers meet or exceed OR  
*score = upvotes - [max(log(downvotes)/log(upvotes), 1) ** downvotes]  
With error checking of course, making downvotes logarithmic with respect to upvotes until they meet or exceed.
 
Other non-linear scalings are of course possible and one may turn out to be useful.

@Battle GT  
That’d screw over people using mobile (ISPs route thousands at a time through the same IP) and anyone connecting through uni or work nets. Plus a lot of people have dynamic IPs that change every day or so.

Of course, we could be massively overthinking this and implementing hide could improve the way people downvote by itself. If it were a button on thumbnails alongside fave, upvote, and downvote (can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone say the comment thumbnail button is very useful), it would provide an alternative for downvoters who don’t feel like they have a better option.
 
To that end - what color do you guys think “hide” should be so Arifproject can draw her as a proper, independent pone? I’m thinking either pinkish-purple, or blue like other buttons in the metabar.

@WingbeatPony  
What about a whitish sorta color? Hmm… Wait that’s Albany.
 
Could make her a different shade of red than her sister. One’s the Good twin, one’s the bad twin.But which is which! Find out next time on, Derpibooru and You~
 
Or pinkish purply could work like you said. Sorta close to red, but not easily mistaken for it~

I think this is a problem with no good solution. Perhaps the best solution is if you remove downvote to remove upvote as well. Removing one without removing the other creates a flawed system in which unfavorable or low quality art, because enough people upvote, is seen as valuable as art that is of much higher quality or consumed much more time to make.
 
And for arguing people can abuse downvotes with multiple accounts, the same can be said of upvotes and this leaves the argument that people are trolling by spamming downvotes a logic fallacy since the same can be applied to upvotes.
 
As we’ve seen, backlash was immediate and loud, not just from people who could be considered ‘abusers’ of this system, but people with legitimate criticism. The only solutions in which everyone is happy and a fair system is in place is to leave it and perhaps institute an IP limit to downvotes/upvotes within a week (100 or so should do fine. Anyone who does more than this might need to consider a better use of time in my honest opinion), or removal of the system altogether.
 
Regardless, I’m not here to argue this, only offer a neutral standpoint on the system since I rarely use it to begin with. I’ve never felt a need to use it but seeing the downvote system was removed, even if only for a moment, irked me and left me concerned that this site was implementing a type of ‘safe space’ where people don’t have to worry about criticism, or as some of the overly sensitive people call it, ‘personal attacks on my hard work’.

@Zeb  
@WingbeatPony
 
lol, idk, probably gonna let Badum design Hide, if it’s implemented later :3

@ice1517  
This. Requiring comments to downvote wouldn’t be very helpful. I think a lot of people struggle to find anything to say at all about a piece, let alone something constructive (and that’s simply true of the Internet in general), or they just don’t want to contribute the time. Upvote probably means someone feels mostly positive toward a piece, and I imagine someone casting a downvote feels mostly negative toward a piece, and it’s honestly all the feedback you’ll get from some people.
 
Good constructive criticism is harder to write up because it takes awhile. Also, people need to have the right sort of mindset to make use of any criticism. If someone hasn’t steeled themselves, criticism won’t be helpful!
 
I’ve always understood that good constructive criticism consists of three parts. These three parts kind of demonstrate why requiring a constructive comment to cast a downvote probably won’t go over so well, because it’s time-consuming to do all of this well:
 

For Downvoting. I cant believe we are even having this discussion.

Keep downvotes. Keep them because they are a good way to filter things and they also give feedback to an artist without having to leave a comment that might be taken as trolling.

@LockeRobster  
And I can’t believe the hours I’ve wasted clearing out dupe votes from people triggered from seeing Flash Sentry or twilicorn, or someone setting up a hundred accounts to mass downvote every other recent image in order to boost their latest commissioned image.
 
Nor can I believe how many times I see the same names popping up do downvote the same ships or characters, regardless of the artist or quality of work.
 
Yes, downvoting does serve as a way to collectively filter out shitposts, and yes, for some artists it serves as a way to know if they’re doing well or not, but most people seem to simply have no concept of how much it’s abused by some, nor how many people downvote for the absolute most petty reasons possible (ie. “I like sunsetsparkle, so I will downvote every image showing either character shipped with other characters).
 
But that isn’t a problem anyone cares about. The system appears to work, so who cares about the mess behind it or the constant effort ensuring it still works?
 
 
The voting system was flawed from conception, and I didn’t conceive it, just inherited it, its problems, and maintenance. I’d’ve either had full public up/down, or just faving.

Well, that removal is pretty reasonable. Artists are absolutely necessary for the site to exist, while grumpy downvote-happy users are totally not, so it’s totally logical to do the thing that coddles the certain percentage of the former and simultaneously shoos away the latter.
 
Still, this change leaves plenty of room for abuse - like upvotes, faves and comments. Imagine people creating dupe accounts for upvoting stuff they want to see higher in ratings or not upvoting stuff only because they don’t like what’s pictured (instead of just using the filters, like they should)! So why the half-measure? I’d say, remove those features altogether and let the site staff set fair scores manually. These pesky users aaalways ruin everything.

@The Smiling Pony  
You know, even if for no other reason, another point for downvoting is…
 
@byte[]  

We don’t know how effective this will be yet. One of the most amazing things about AI tech like neural networks is how hit-and-miss they are, and boy do they home-run it sometimes. Of course it’ll take it a few weeks, months, maybe years - or maybe even no time at all if it can learn from past data just as effectively - to learn and be effective, but wouldn’t it be great if it could detect this kind of thing?
 
Honestly I kinda want to see how this turns out for science. Perhaps along with Wilson scoring.
 
And all that other stuff I’ve already said :q
 
But, while it’s good to make the site easier to run… Being easy to run also isn’t the point of a site. It’s a little unsettling how often this comes up as a justification for things. If there’s too much work then bring on more mods and delegate more. Simple as that. Most CEOs don’t do the work of their average employees. It’s one thing if you’re asking people to work 18 hours a day - then you should lead by example - but quite another when people aren’t forced to work any particular amount for a paycheck or anything. And of course, though, you’ll be dealing with the worst when your job is to protect against the worst, so don’t forget that despite their numbers they’re still a relatively small fraction of users…
 

 
@The Smiling Pony  
I think there are good ways to combat the first one, perhaps. But out in public probably isn’t the best place to discuss how this can be detected. I’m sure the tech wizards know, though.

I think making downvotes public could be a start while we come up with other ideas.