Systems are often resiliant in the light of individual variation. Discarding voting entirely because of the actions of a few is like seeing the outliers in people clicking where they think a country is on a map. Sure, you’ll see a lot of dumb guesses that are radically incorrect, but the majority of clicks tend to be on the country.
In the same way, the voting tends to generally work, for a given understanding that voting was always theoretically (from reddit days) supposed to be upvoting good contributions and downvoting spam./trolls/etc, but voting is also or even more about what people agree with. So as long as you realize that’s what’s actually happening, voting is generally accurate enough.
Of course it’s infuriating when people agree with things that are wrong, but that is a wholly different issue.
I mean I know the studies and I think it was a thing but I have found it does not work very often in many systems like this on the internet and the issues we have with voting. Its funny because I recently read a thing by lucien greaves and it really scratch my itch on that. He called it emergent stupidity. His basic thing is that estimates must be free from influence and coercion, and derived from a diversity of opinions. Now I would include that influence and coercion is often part of gaming the system. Something we see often. Also things like the bean guessing everyone is doing it in basically the same way. Guessing a specific number it might be. As I said people do not apply the same principles with the voting system. If everyone voted based on their actual opinion or did not vote at all it would likely be useful and I think we saw that at one point early on like with slashdot. If some upvote everything and some downvote everything you would think it would cancel but I don’t think it does partiailly because of the fractured nature of this medium. Some topics will have hoards of upvoters and some downvoters. That is even before you take into account the ones trying to game. So again personally I would prefer none of it and just have the sytem use what I have put into it. Ironically if the system was done that way were peoples voting effected an algorith for only their feed. So their choices only effected them. That would actually be useful on a population level but the moment it was known it was being used for that it would start down the same hole of people not voting for themselves but for their percieved effect on others.
That’s… the wrong way to look at it.
Systems are often resiliant in the light of individual variation. Discarding voting entirely because of the actions of a few is like seeing the outliers in people clicking where they think a country is on a map. Sure, you’ll see a lot of dumb guesses that are radically incorrect, but the majority of clicks tend to be on the country.
In the same way, the voting tends to generally work, for a given understanding that voting was always theoretically (from reddit days) supposed to be upvoting good contributions and downvoting spam./trolls/etc, but voting is also or even more about what people agree with. So as long as you realize that’s what’s actually happening, voting is generally accurate enough.
Of course it’s infuriating when people agree with things that are wrong, but that is a wholly different issue.
I mean I know the studies and I think it was a thing but I have found it does not work very often in many systems like this on the internet and the issues we have with voting. Its funny because I recently read a thing by lucien greaves and it really scratch my itch on that. He called it emergent stupidity. His basic thing is that estimates must be free from influence and coercion, and derived from a diversity of opinions. Now I would include that influence and coercion is often part of gaming the system. Something we see often. Also things like the bean guessing everyone is doing it in basically the same way. Guessing a specific number it might be. As I said people do not apply the same principles with the voting system. If everyone voted based on their actual opinion or did not vote at all it would likely be useful and I think we saw that at one point early on like with slashdot. If some upvote everything and some downvote everything you would think it would cancel but I don’t think it does partiailly because of the fractured nature of this medium. Some topics will have hoards of upvoters and some downvoters. That is even before you take into account the ones trying to game. So again personally I would prefer none of it and just have the sytem use what I have put into it. Ironically if the system was done that way were peoples voting effected an algorith for only their feed. So their choices only effected them. That would actually be useful on a population level but the moment it was known it was being used for that it would start down the same hole of people not voting for themselves but for their percieved effect on others.