ArsTechnica

Staff / From the minds of Ars

Observations on what’s getting downvoted, with some dissected specimens

A look at the greatest misses of late, and some theorizing.

Happy Sunday everyone. This is a two-part post in which I explore a few of the most downvoted posts from the past week, as well as offer some observations about what kinds of things we're seeing downvoted generally. We remain committed to understanding how the system is working, so that we can make changes to improve it. By and large, we believe that the signal-to-noise ratio has increased, but we also note that some quality posts have not received recognition.

Below are the most downvoted posts from the last week. We won't make a habit of looking at these, and I'm not going to mention the authors' names, or link to them in context. The idea isn't to shame anyone, start a pile on, or anything of the sort. Rather, I thought it would be a good idea to share some insight into why a few comments received the votes they did.

The comments

First up, in "Engine in development could cut Mars travel time to three months," the following comment landed an almost unbelievable -162 votes.

"This is fantastic news! Who cares about worldwide hunger when we can spend trillions playing with rocks on Mars?!"

There are many reasons this post was downvoted, chief among them that the author has engaged in extreme hyperbole in a rather off-topic manner. As another reader points out later in that same discussion, NASA's budget is nowhere near trillions of dollars, nor is NASA's budget anywhere near enough to address worldwide hunger. Long story short, this is a troll post, and the readers weren't interested. As I'll expand upon in part II below, this post is of the "but I don't even have a TV" archetype.

The next post only rated -115 votes, which is still far beyond the -20 votes needed to collapse a post. But in this instance, the moderators also got involved. The story was "Too little, too late: Blockbuster gives up on trying to beat Netflix." The post in question looks to place the blame for Blockbuster's failure, but does the poster blame Blockbuster's lack of innovation, its customer service, or the difficult transition from being a brick-and-mortar to an Internet service provider? No, this poster decides to engage in some off-topic political trolling:

"Another victim of the Obama economy. If they can survive through inauguration day there are brighter skies ahead."

Unfortunately, another poster decided to take the bait, and once again the moderators got involved. This troll counter-fired,

"Judging by your comment, you must be the spawn of Mitt Romney. It takes intelligence to troll. Ignoramuses on the other hand..."

This post, coming later in the thread, achieved -45 votes. Both posters earned a temporary vacation from posting.

Our review of the new XCOM game certainly brought forth readers eager to downvote substance-free griping, and a few readers eager to provide that griping. The most downvoted post in the thread rated a -50, presumably because it, too, was substance free, with a dash of personal attack.

"Another Ars apologist review. This game is stream-lined, dumbed down, and XCOM in name only."

Apparently most readers were happy just to vote it down and move on to more interesting comments.

The same situation appears to be true of an all-too-common troll at Ars Technica: the one wherein all users of a certain OS or smart phone are branded as idiots/poor people/dorks/etc. This particular specimen appears in the thread under the story, "Survey says: iPhone 5 owners not bothered by iOS 6 Maps—are you?" In fact, there was a bit of a contest to see which trolling posts might take top honors as most downvoted in the thread. Weighing in at -67 was this pointless gem:

"When people buy a phone because they have more money than sense, you can wonder why a broken feature doesn't bother them."

Not far behind at -65 was another similarly brilliant post:

"Wait, many Apple users don't about anything except making sure they have the latest version so their friends will be impressed? Put that up there with water being wet."

These are, of course, classic, substance-free trolling posts. Personal attacks are not permitted at Ars, and when personal attacks morph into wholesale attacks on huge groups of people, they are even less tolerable. Intelligent discussion does not arise from them, because there's nothing of intelligence in them in the first place. And nota bene to the readers who think there is intelligence in them: find another site to read. Better yet, find a time machine and go back to the mid-90s when it was at least fashionable to troll usenet with this kind of stuff.

Emerging Trends

As we keep an eye on the most downvoted posts on the site, a few trends are clearly emerging. Certain kinds of posts are absolutely going to get downvoted. Here's a typology of bad posting behaviors, with an explanation/theory behind each of their arguments. It's a work in progress.

  • Son of the "I don't even own a TV" guy: This is the poster who thinks other people will find it interesting that he cares nothing about their discussion or their interests, and in fact judges himself as somehow morally superior as a result. The morphology of this on Ars Technica includes people popping into threads about Windows 8 to proclaim how they will never use Windows, people popping into threads about iOS 6 to proclaim that they never have and never will buy an Apple product, and people popping into Android related threads and claiming that they will never purchase "crappy plastic phones." In these cases, the posters have failed to understand that no one really cares what their personal disposition is on something, if they have nothing to add to the discussion.
  • The "I only know how to speak in hyperbole" guy: This poster is not always trying to troll, but it often looks like it. This is the individual who cannot introduce nuance into their point of view, but instead must use superlatives and extreme language in what I can only assume is an attempt to get attention. They typically love phrases like "worst ever," "new low," "complete fail," "absolute best," "going downhill," and the like. The broad, sloppy brush is the favorite tool of this poster. Closely related to this poster is this fella:
  • The "anybody who X is/does Y" guy: It never ceases to amaze me how many posters are willing to take one small facet of someone's life or identity (say, their choice in OS), and extrapolate from that all manner of ethical and moral criticisms, or perhaps more commonly, someone's intelligence.
  • The "Ars Technica is the worst site ever but I'll be back again tomorrow" guy: There's a handful of readers who simply dive into our comments to chastise us about how horrible we are, but of course they come back day after day. A variation on this is the "I can't stand your Apple coverage" guy, who nonetheless reads all of the Apple coverage and comments on it. Ditto for science, ditto for gaming, and other areas of the site. We've definitely noticed that these sorts of posts are getting downvoted as well.
  • The "unpopular but sincere opinion" guy: This is the guy we are trying to figure out how to protect. In the absence of trolling, we would prefer to see differences of opinion respected, and I will say that for the most part, we have not seen heavy downvoting of people merely because of their opinions. In the few instances we've observed so far, unpopular opinions have been downvoted when they were accompanied by other off-putting factors, such as those listed above. But it is not uncommon to see a respectable but differing opinion sitting somewhere with -10 votes. On the one hand, that's not enough votes to put something in jeopardy of being collapsed, but on the other hand some readers are finding it demoralizing.

In all, we are pleasantly surprised by how well the system is working. It's not without its flaws, and we did note that this was an experiment from the outset. For the most part, we presently feel that collapsing a post is a suitable treatment for content that the community on the whole finds negative. Remember, to get to -20 votes, you have to have a net -20. Posts with 10 positive votes would thus require 30 negative votes, and so on. We are presently considering a few more tweaks to the collapse system, but we're not yet ready to discuss them. One thing is amazingly clear, however: readers are using the voting system in a very intense way. I believe we are close to seeing 20,000 votes a day, and that number has continued to grow each day we are publishing. Best of all, more votes are being cast up than down, which means the community is trying to lift what it likes best.

Expand full story

You must to comment.

   

You May Also Like
http://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/10/observations-on-whats-getting-downvoted-with-some-dissected-specimens/
arstechnica.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-22
60707
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:A26APPZL3WN7QQ5L2XWFJ4HQ56TA2NT6
<urn:uuid:7f88e46f-9ed5-4a1f-8dbd-b70ae8c19dd8>
2016-05-29T09:22:29Z
50.31.151.33
sha1:BIC3NJNV5VTEME7XP27PFPR3EA5RAAUM
<urn:uuid:a5c7230b-7a56-4a26-8713-228af6d758f1>
http://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/10/observations-on-whats-getting-downvoted-with-some-dissected-specimens/
length
response
<urn:uuid:4ebe0bb0-eb9a-45cc-bd0b-e579e9deda3b>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-217-139.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-22
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf