Regrettably, it doesn't scale well in my experience. I take part in one large political internet forum (for reasons that are increasingly unclear to me...) where this kind of up/down system was tried, albeit with uncapped totals.
Prior to that users could only recommend posts, and the mechanism was transparent enough that members of a faction would cross-promote each others' posts and employ many other 'turf war'-like tactics to maintain mindshare. After up/down voting was introduced about a year ago, a majority of members prefer it while 25% or so complained bitterly about censorship and all the usual cliches. Flamebait or outright stupidity is now downvoted fairly quickly, but turf wars persist and a negative response to a new thread is frequently seized on as an excuse to start a mini-thread about 'downvoting trolls' and use said 'discussion' to keep the thread alive despite its poor reception by a majority.
Anecdotal to be sure, but with about 2m monthlies and a year's worth of observation (plus umpteen meta-polls, since every community enjoys gazing at its own navel) the trend is pretty obvious. By comparison, HN is populated by wise and kindly Vulcans.
Wonderful post. I'm looking forward to an enlightening discussion about this.
I was disappointed by the end, however, because it suggested that downvoting was a way of managing trolls. I think downvoting means different things to different people: some downvote to merely show disagreement, for example. So a downvoted comment on Hacker News does not necessarily mean that it is likely a troll comment. Therefore, downvotes can't achieve the necessary shared awareness.
(I will disagree with myself and note that comments that have been voted all the way down to -4 tend to be trollish, so maybe it works to an extent.)
I think down votes are enough for shared awareness. It's not the perfect system because you can get downvoted simply for disagreeing with the community at large. However, being downvoted for having a different opinion isn't heavily stigmatized on HN. I rarely see a -4 rating on a comment that isn't trollish, off topic, or a joke that backfired.
Most social interaction has this kind of fuzziness. It works most of the time which is good enough.
You raise an important point. About a year ago, on a community website I run [1], I implemented a group moderation system like the one I described in this essay and it worked pretty much as described.
However, there are certainly some cases of people voting against comments on the basis of disagreement rather than comment quality - which goes against the comment voting guidelines [2].
This issue does occasionally come up among regular commenters. Interestingly, simply pointing out that someone was downvoted for expressing an opinion that was unpopular rather than illegitimate seems at least partially to reverse the effect (unlike HN, users can change their vote after making it).
Again, this seems to suggest that as community moderation becomes internalized as an important value, it becomes more effective at preserving quality discussion.
Is it really possible to have people vote on quality?
I've noticed most people don't understand how to be objective. Worse still is unless you are familiar with excellence you will be very poor at judging it. Perhaps this is because of differing measures of excellence people use or the result of ignorance.
I think a system that accepts fuzziness in measurement would be better than one that tries to be exact.
If disagreeable opinions are just as likely to cause the negative effects of trolling as "real" troll comments, don't you need the same countermeasures in place?
I don't think that offering a point-of-view that many people disagree with would cause any negative effects.
However, if there is a culture that doesn't tolerate a diversity of dissenting opinions, then the group's reactions to the differing point-of-view may have negative effects.
There has been, at minimum, at least 3 different presentations in which I've had to joke "I'm pretty sure this is the first time the word shitcock has appeared on a slide at X"
The Chinese have a way of handling uncomfortable posts. They make them visible to the poster, but invisible to everyone else. That way, the poster thinks no one is interested, and hopefully goes away. Since most people won't even know that's possible, they won't check with another login.
No reason to piss a troll off by deleting his post. Just hide it from everyone else.
Prior to that users could only recommend posts, and the mechanism was transparent enough that members of a faction would cross-promote each others' posts and employ many other 'turf war'-like tactics to maintain mindshare. After up/down voting was introduced about a year ago, a majority of members prefer it while 25% or so complained bitterly about censorship and all the usual cliches. Flamebait or outright stupidity is now downvoted fairly quickly, but turf wars persist and a negative response to a new thread is frequently seized on as an excuse to start a mini-thread about 'downvoting trolls' and use said 'discussion' to keep the thread alive despite its poor reception by a majority.
Anecdotal to be sure, but with about 2m monthlies and a year's worth of observation (plus umpteen meta-polls, since every community enjoys gazing at its own navel) the trend is pretty obvious. By comparison, HN is populated by wise and kindly Vulcans.