2y ago

Don't you find it disappointing that people apply Herd Mentality for upvoting top comments, even if it's not the best one out there?

It doesn't matter if the most upvoted comment is pro or against subject in discussion. All that matters is bolstering a comment that is minimally compatible with participant's thinking and making it win against the opposite argument (competing and most voted one).

So it seems that the most satisfactory comment (for most readers) doesn't really matter at all. What matters, before anything else, is visibility of an opinion that somewhat aligns with one's thinking, rather than writing or finding the most corresponding comment for that subject, fully compatible with reader's perception.

33 comments

I think it’s more that not every comment gets upvoted after there is quite a few.
Early comments get voted on by merit. Once there is a few comments that have sufficient upvotes and replies, they become their own ecosystem.
If I’m in the comments of a popular post, I might upvote the first few top level comments I see as all make a good point. The fifth might make the best point and deserve to be higher, but alas, it only gets one upvote. By the time I get to the sixth, it’s just saying the same thing differently, no upvote needed. Seventh is interesting, so upvote, but it’s getting boring now. I don’t read further comments.
Other people stop at comment 10. Others stop at 4. So the first few get magnified, the rest struggle for the same level of attention and eyeballs. But it’s not a competition. So if the discussion is good, who cares. The 10th discussion might be the best because all the people with short attention spans, like me, aren’t there.
- Yeah, the issue is that early upvotes compound into more upvotes via visibility. You could have the best comment in the thread, but if it’s 10 days after the post was made and nobody else sees it, it won’t get any votes.
  
  Well yeah, that’s just kind of the nature of conversations. That’s why a witty retort made an hour later just doesn’t have the oomph as a less funny one made in the moment.
  In order to facilitate conversation, comments need to function like conversations, and those things just aren’t set in stone.
  What it really comes down to is, when you comment, are you here to talk to people, to listen to them, or to get votes?
  
  so keeping tabs on posts by quickly downvoting/upvoting (in)convenient subjects, as well as slightly steering them away from what's really being discussed, might be a pretty handy tactic for manipulating course of conversation, and also making them look like not sufficiently valuable or important to be worth one's time?
- That’s the main issue with this system.
  On Reddit you occasionally came across a post that was set up in election mode. The idea is that if you’re Youtuber or a podcast host, and you’re interested in having Q&A, but there are way too many questions, this way you can filter out all the boring questions and focus on the inserting ones. People can send a top level comment with a question, and they get to see all the other proposed questions in a random order. Then you can upvote and downvote as much as you like. Since the comments are in random order, there’s no top comment bias. However, there is still a time related bias. The first few people don’t have many comments to choose from whereas the latecomers have thousands of comments to vote.
- I think a good rule of thumb would be to only upvote a comment if you think it’s not only good, but that it should be higher in the thread than it currently is. Then the comments already at the top wouldn’t end up so overweighted.

Thankfully Lemmy somewhat negates this with their ranking algorithm. "Hot" is the default for comments and "active" is the default for posts, which according to the Lemmy docs, both "Counterbalance the snowballing effect of votes over time with a logarithmic scale."
Basically, if a newer comments gets some upvotes, but still has fewer upvotes than older comments, that new comment will still be shown near the top at first. Then after some time passes, the algorithm slowly shifts to sorting more by "raw" number of votes instead of taking time into account.
- Neat. I wonder if it’s using the original reddit algorithm as inspo.
- For me comments tend to look the same as new. Which isn't bad compared to the oldest toppest.
- The big problem I’ve seen with “Active” as the default post sort is that you occasionally get year old posts suddenly get comment-bombed when someone scrolls too far and upvotes it. Suddenly that year old post is marked as active again, so it’s in everyone’s feed. And most people don’t even bother checking time stamps before commenting, so you suddenly get a flood of comments on your year old post.

Hivemind-that-must-not-be-named users: (insert unfunny meme repeated 1000 times) Gets 69420 upvotes “eDiT: tHx 4 dA gOlD kInD sTrAnGeR!!1” “eDiT2: oMgG pLaTiNuM?! I nEvEr eXpEcTeD tHiS 2 bLoW uP!!!11!”
Another user on there: (actually helpful response) gets 2 upvotes
- This.
  
  Don’t let’s reuse their stupid catchphrases

If it bothers you, why not sort by New and ignore votes?
You’re not going to avoid herd mentality when socializing within a social species. That’s just how we work. So if it bothers you, curate your experience to how you want it.
- Sorting by new ends up creating a group that just picks winners and losers for those who don't. Hence "the knights of new" with their disingenuous framing that they were doing a public service. All they were really doing, whether they knew it or not, was picking which snowballs get to roll and which don't.
  Most, if not all, have to sort by new or it just trades issues.
  
  Browse new
  First comment
  Collect massive Internet points
  ???
  LEMMY

What I like about Lemmy at the moment is that it's not completely saturated with those people vying for Top Comment for sweet epic Reddit karma.
*I'm back from months later to say GODDAMIT I WAS WRONG

I think any sort of social aggregator will always have this as a challenge it wrestles with.
In my opinion, the onus of applying critical thinking when reading comments/sources lies with the reader.
When a very large upvoted comment takes places, I personally comb through some of the replies to see if anyone has sources/background that might be contradictory (and then I’ll review myself for my own opinion). It’s extra effort but I only apply this things I’m “vested” in.
- sdfasfsadfasdf

Great, now I've up voted yours!

Unfortunately this is always the case with platforms that have voting in them. As soon as you get enough traction your comment/post will always be among the top (I would know, I had like 200k+ comment karma on Reddit). It's way better than the alternative though, having no votes at all would encourage spam and low effort posting and make browsing kind of miserable.
Some people long for the old days of forums where nothing was sorted and everyone had a fair chance at saying what they wanted but it always devolves into low effort posting, spam, and people fighting with trolls. 4chan is evidence of that.
- it’s way better than the alternative though, having no votes at all would encourage spam and low effort posting
  Upvotes only, never show the results, never show people their "karma" count. Let the thread reflect the impact.

Herd mentality is disappointing in general and usually slows progress in society.

This is why brigading is a problem.
There was a lot of it in the lemmy.world defederating from whatever they defederated from the other day thread.
- I don't understand why people get so angry at other instances for defederating. It's why the option exists. I fully support its usage. It's not like users are cut off from them, they can easily participate in both the defederat-or and defederat-ee's communities.
  
  While defederation is a valid tool, it's also shouldn't be the first choice if there is friction between instances. Instance Admins should talk to each other see if the problem can be resolved through various means, if not then defederation becomes a more reasonable option.

33 comments