The Tyranny of Comment Voting Systems
Yesterday, I was chatting with my dad about the implications of the Oculus VR acquisition (still a good thing), and specifically, the crazy fan backlash against it. While we were talking, he said something interesting:
“I was reading the comments on Palmer Luckey’s reddit post, and it was incredible. The comments were universally negative.”
I wasn’t entirely surprised, but it also made me wonder - was it really universally negative? My knee-jerk reaction was negative too, so I expected gobs of negativity, but there have been plenty of cooler heads that have come out at least cautiously optimistic. Was that optimism really just limited to journos and developer celebrities, too removed from the real people to have a similar reaction?
I didn’t think so, so I headed to the comments to do some investigation…
Negativity? Check. And just LOOK at all those upvotes! Scrolling through the comments, sorted by the default by ‘Best’ comments, it looked like my dad was right. The response was overwhelmingly, shockingly negative. You could scroll through comments for DAYS before seeing anything remotely positive. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet, so I changed the comment sorting from ‘Best’ to ‘Controversial’. And wow, what a difference it made:
There’s still plenty of negativity mixed in, but now the response looks WAY more balanced. And that seems more real to me. And this, ladies and gentleman, is why voting systems in comments are a terrible idea. And Reddit goes a step further than just allowing voting - if a comment receives too many downvotes, it gets hidden by default, and you have to click a button to expand it. For example:
A couple things to notice. First of all, there’s no indication whatsoever just how far below the “threshold” this comment was, or, indeed, what that threshold is. It screams “Hey man, this is a really awful comment. Open it at your own risk.” And we all know how terrible the internet can be, right? That’s one heck of a risk. But, for the sake of Science, I took one for the team and opened up this horrible thing:
MY EYES! THE GOGGLES… THEY DO NOTHI… oh, wait, that’s actually a super reasonable opinion, followed up with another person agreeing with him. For this sin, the comment was banished to the nether realm supposedly reserved for comments about eating babies or hitler or other such Internet-horribleness.
Also of note: it got hidden with a score of -10. Keep in mind that the upvote/downvote count next to the total is essentially fictional, and only the total is correct. So it’s impossible to say whether this post got 0 upvotes and 10 downvotes, or 100 upvotes and 110 downvotes, but the fact is, a net difference of 10 people not liking what the post said was enough to banish it to comment-hell. That is absolutely silly. Let’s do some napkin math here. That post has nearly 6,000 comments on it. Let’s be really, really generous and assume that 10% of the people who read the post then went and made a comment (I bet its really closer to 1%, or maybe even .1%). That means that 60,000 people were looking at this post, reading comments. That means that those 10 net people who didn’t like that post represent 0.01667% of the audience. If you use 1% instead, it’s .0016%! This is giving an INSANE amount of power to an absolutely infinitesimal portion of the audience.
The other side of comment voting - upvoting - holds true as well. If you look at the ‘Best’ sort, one of the top comments is a long one about how disappointed the person is in Palmer and the rest of the team at Oculus VR. It has 3751 net upvotes. If we use our figures from before, that corresponds to between 0.6% and 6% of the total audience of the post. Less ridiculous than the earlier negative example, but still a crazy minority compared to the number of eyeballs that were on this post. Just so we’re clear, the post is good - thoughtful and earnest and not at all vitriol-laden. I don’t agree with his opinion in the slightest, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be able to share it. What I don’t agree with is this idea that because a few percent of the audience feels the same way, that it should be presented as the best comment, ahead of all other comments. Nothing about it is better than that comment above, that got -10 votes and was doomed to never be looked at again, other than it is expressing the right opinion. Where “right” is defined by this very active, very loud minority.
I have no doubt that the founders of Reddit added this system of voting in comments in a laudable attempt to democratize comments - to let the best comments float to the top, and keep the scummy underbelly down in the deep dark where it belongs. But the result is anything but democratic. It empowers a tiny minority to present the illusion of majority opinion - making people think that theirs is the only view out there, just like my dad thought about this thread. It’s a terrible system that actively prevents any kind of healthy discourse, and reddit, as well as the internet at large, would be a much better place without it. Get rid of comment voting, Reddit, and let users decide for themselves if a comment is worthwhile or not.
