Discussion of NodeBB Updates
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@Polygeekery said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
A distant #3, and what I am leaning towards: burn all the downvotes and disable downvotes entirely. The reason I like this option is it forces people to actually respond to the post if they want to show their disapproval.
That's what @codinghorror said as reasoning for Discourse not having downvotes
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@fbmac just because he said it that does not make it wrong. Most people here think that downvotes are stupid. We all know that they have been gamed to hell and back, and that I was the worst offender on that.
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@fbmac said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@Polygeekery said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
A distant #3, and what I am leaning towards: burn all the downvotes and disable downvotes entirely. The reason I like this option is it forces people to actually respond to the post if they want to show their disapproval.
That's what @codinghorror said as reasoning for Discourse not having downvotes
Even a backwards running clock may still be right once in a while.
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@Polygeekery said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
The reason I like this option is it forces people to actually respond to the post if they want to show their disapproval.
No it just means some people won't show their disapproval at all.
Also:
#4, leave all downvotes in place and make them public anyway
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@loopback0 added, even though I disagree with it.
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@Polygeekery said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@loopback0 added, even though I disagree with it.
Now that's civilized discourse!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Now that's civilized discourse!
You take that back!
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@loopback0 said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Now that's civilized discourse!
You take that back!
ο
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@kt_ said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Further: @flabdablet, @tufty, @Polygeekery, @Fox, please leave this shit in the garage. It's infuriating that you keep taking it with you to all of the fucking threads, be it , meta or elsewhere. What happens in garage should stay in the garage.
@boomzilla exposing downvotes happens outside of the garage, too. You people don't give a shit about it when he does it just for his pet trolls, but god forbid @ben_lubar does it equally for everyone.
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@Fox seriously, take it to the garage. We are attempting to have a discussion here.
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Another option, lock @Polygeekery and @fox in the garage and we won't ever remember downvotes exist.
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@Fox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@kt_ said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Further: @flabdablet, @tufty, @Polygeekery, @Fox, please leave this shit in the garage. It's infuriating that you keep taking it with you to all of the fucking threads, be it , meta or elsewhere. What happens in garage should stay in the garage.
@boomzilla exposing downvotes happens outside of the garage, too. You people don't give a shit about it when he does it just for his pet trolls, but god forbid @ben_lubar does it equally for everyone.
I also find it fucking hilarious that the strongest opposition to ben's actions is a bunch of users white knighting a hypothetical oppressed class of people who might maybe be negatively impacted by this extremely minor violation of the basic human right to privacy.
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@Polygeekery said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@Fox seriously, take it to the garage. We are attempting to have a discussion here.
No. You people are attacking ben and calling for him to step down and shit, HERE, IN THIS THREAD. If you want to take it to the garage, take all of it there, not just what I'm saying about it.
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@Fox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
I also find it fucking hilarious that the strongest opposition to ben's actions is a bunch of users white knighting a hypothetical oppressed class of people
I actually wanted to point this out earlier because I thought it was funny, but refrained from doing so to avoid a flamewar.
But seriously, please, stay calm in this thread and category. This is not the place for continuing the war between you and Polygeekery.
@Fox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
You people are attacking ben and calling for him to step down and shit, HERE, IN THIS THREAD.
If you don't think that Ben should be punished for this, you can say so in a calm, civilized manner. Others have done that before you.
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If anyone would like their downvotes purged from the record, I can set something up for that. Send me a message if this is the case.
We haven't had the discussion in the staff forum yet (it's not Monday until tomorrow) so this would only be if we decide to make them public.
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@ben_lubar said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
If anyone would like their downvotes purged from the record, I can set something up for that.
Since I haven't done so before, I'll hereby explicitly allow you to publish my downvotes. There shouldn't be that many outside the downvotes thread anyway.
Oh, and BTW, I'm for option #3 (remove downvote feature) or #4 (make them public).
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@asdf said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
But seriously, please, stay calm in this thread and category. This is not the place for continuing the war between you and Polygeekery.
In case you haven't noticed, I've been mostly ignoring him. My problem here is with the @administrators and other users insulting and having a hissy cow at ben for shit that's been done before without any uproar like this. This is not about Polygeekery at all, this is about the downvotes change and the extremely hypocritical reactions to it.
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@Fox Ok, in that case, I apologize for overreacting. Still, let's not counter rage with rage. We've had enough emotional posts in this thread already.
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@asdf said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@Fox Ok, in that case, I apologize for overreacting. Still, let's not counter rage with rage. We've had enough emotional posts in this thread already.
Fair enough. Personally, I don't think @ben_lubar should be punished, especially if @boomzilla wasn't. At least ben did it evenly, and with some measure of approval from the people doing a lot of the downvotes. Boomzilla has done it on a case-by-case basis without permission from the individuals he's exposed, so if ben should have to step down over this, so should boomzilla, in my opinion.
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I don't think anyone has to "step down", just that in the future prudence should be allied in the area of un-private-ing stuff.
The whole blakeyrat debacle should have taught us well this lesson, seems it was forgot.
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For me the problem isn't what the change was, it was that he single-handedly changed the entire forum in a potentially contentious way without checking with the other staff first.
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@Fox you watch that tone, young man!
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@ben_lubar said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
If anyone would like their downvotes purged from the record, I can set something up for that. Send me a message if this is the case.
That's reasonable, and the sort of option that can be provided when these things aren't preempted. I already purged mine manually though when things went public the first time.
I'm not "white knighting" (man, that's an ironic accusation), I'm genuinely uncomfortable with privacy rules changing retroactively. Most of us have personal and work lives we'd like (or must) keep separate from this forum. Seeing changes be rushed and uncoordinated, especially when they alter an expectation of privacy (however admittedly slight such might have been) alters my risk analysis for continued engagement here.
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@heterodox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
I'm not "white knighting" (man, that's an ironic accusation), I'm genuinely uncomfortable with privacy rules changing retroactively. Most of us have personal and work lives we'd like (or must) keep separate from this forum. Seeing changes be rushed and uncoordinated, especially when they alter an expectation of privacy (however admittedly slight such might have been) alters my risk analysis for continued engagement here.
Ditto.
In my view, making downvotes to be generally public would be akin, though to a much lesser extent, to unlocking the ο .
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@asdf said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@ben_lubar said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
If anyone would like their downvotes purged from the record, I can set something up for that.
Since I haven't done so before, I'll hereby explicitly allow you to publish my downvotes. There shouldn't be that many outside the downvotes thread anyway.
Oh, and BTW, I'm for option #3 (remove downvote feature) or #4 (make them public).
Oh, also, same here for everything except the part about the downvotes thread.
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@djls45 said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
In my view, making downvotes to be generally public would be akin, though to a much lesser extent, to unlocking the ο .
To a much lesser extent, if I agree with you at all. It's just assignment of pseudonyms to numbers. They're numbers that could cause drama, which I don't like, but it's not exactly PII.
I think the extent to which I agree with you is that if no degree of thoughtful consideration is put into a change of this lesser impact, how much more, if any, consideration would be put into a bigger change affecting access logs, private forums, private messages, or profile details?
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@djls45 said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@heterodox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
I'm not "white knighting" (man, that's an ironic accusation), I'm genuinely uncomfortable with privacy rules changing retroactively. Most of us have personal and work lives we'd like (or must) keep separate from this forum. Seeing changes be rushed and uncoordinated, especially when they alter an expectation of privacy (however admittedly slight such might have been) alters my risk analysis for continued engagement here.
Ditto.
In my view, making downvotes to be generally public would be akin, though to a much lesser extent, to unlocking the ο .
I disagree; downvotes have never, as far as I know, been treated as explicitly private information on this forum, and have on multiple occasions been publicized by admins on the rare occasions when a recipient cannot immediately discern the downvoter in question anyway. Furthermore, downvotes are not really PII, whereas people regularly reveal PII in ο. I don't view them as akin to one another in any significant sense.
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@heterodox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
if no degree of thoughtful consideration is put into a change of this lesser impact,
I guess it's a good thing this if statement parses as
FALSE
then. Ben put thoughtful consideration into it after a substantial amount of debate had been made on the subject and no one had presented any significant opposition to the idea.And do you really think that if little consideration goes into making a small change like this, that automatically means that little consideration would go into a much larger change like any of the examples you'd provided? That's one hell of a slippery slope fallacy you're pushing there.
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@ben_lubar said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
If anyone would like their downvotes purged from the record, I can set something up for that. Send me a message if this is the case.
We haven't had the discussion in the staff forum yet (it's not Monday until tomorrow) so this would only be if we decide to make them public.
That's a great idea.
If combined with a "downvotes will be made public in N days" warning, I think the publicization concerns can be addressed. (though it's up to you admins to decide if this is indeed the case, of course).Whether public downvotes will improve or worsen matters in this community is a very hard question to answer definitively.
If we mentally think of the community as consisting of "desirables" and "undesirables": (in practice, all people are both desirable in some ways and undesirable and others, so this is a simplification)
- Anonymous downvotes allow "undesirables" to downvote "desirables" without this being known, decreasing community morale, especially if false accusations start flying.
- Public downvotes may discourage some "desirables" from downvoting "undesirables" if they fear this'd drag them into an argument. This will decrease the amount of "good" downvotes.
- Public downvotes will allow a person to make an informed decision on how much the downvote he got means to him.
It should also be noted that anonymous downvotes aren't the same thing as anonymous comments - they can only be used to say a fixed statement: "post X and/or user Y are bad in some way" (can't even differentiate between the post and user for a particular downvote!)
Because of this, I don't buy the "chilling effects" rationales.In the end, the only real way to be sure what effect on the community it will have is to try it for a while.
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@Fox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
I guess it's a good thing this if statement parses as
FALSE
then. Ben put thoughtful consideration into it after a substantial amount of debate had been made on the subject and no one had presented any significant opposition to the idea.This point has been debated above. At length. It parses as
TRUE
to me and I have nothing further to say about that.
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
- Public downvotes may discourage some "desirables" from downvoting "undesirables" if they fear this'd drag them into an argument.
The net effect of public downvotes will likely be fewer and/or higher "quality" downvotes.
If "desirables" are discouraged from downvoting "undesirables" (kind of cringy terminology, but I see what you're getting at) for fear of being dragged into an argument, isn't it just going to be more "undesirables" downvoting to troll, and thereby the quality of downvotes is lowered? Just trying to clarify your argument.
It's legitimate discouragement... there are definitely "undesirables" on this forum who'll take any sign of disagreement and use it as an excuse to bash their newfound "enemy", for days, in unrelated threads. Not pointing fingers here; I'm not talking about anyone who's been involved in this discussion for the last, oh... sixteen hours, let's say.
- Public downvotes may discourage some "desirables" from downvoting "undesirables" if they fear this'd drag them into an argument.
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
If we mentally think of the community as consisting of "desirables" and "undesirables":
Let's just lock the undesirables in concentration camps and force 'em to code.
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@heterodox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
If "desirables" are discouraged from downvoting "undesirables" (kind of cringy terminology, but I see what you're getting at) for fear of being dragged into an argument, isn't it just going to be more "undesirables" downvoting to troll, and thereby the quality of downvotes is lowered? Just trying to clarify your argument.
True, I got my wires crossed here a little.
I've edited my original post
I've also added the following new point to it:
- Public downvotes will allow a person to make an informed decision on how much the downvote he got means to him.
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
I've edited my original post and also added the following new point to it:
- Public downvotes will allow a person to make an informed decision on how much the downvote he got means to him.
It's a good point.
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Public downvotes will allow a person to make an informed decision on how much the downvote he got means to him.
They'reβ more likely to go unnoticed because there isn't a good way to see the votes you get unless you revisit all the topics
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@fbmac said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Public downvotes will allow a person to make an informed decision on how much the downvote he got means to him.
They'reβ more likely to go unnoticed because there isn't a good way to see the votes you get unless you revisit all the topics
If they go unnoticed, they go unnoticed whether they're public or anonymous.
In order for them not to go unnoticed, we'd need notifications on downvotes, which might be a good idea as well (or perhaps not) but is a separate concern.
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
In order for them not to go unnoticed, we'd need notifications on downvotes, which might be a good idea as well (or perhaps not) but is a separate concern.
I already disabled the one on upvote because they're annoying. My profile could show each post history.
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
In order for them not to go unnoticed, we'd need notifications on downvotes, which might be a good idea as well (or perhaps not) but is a separate concern.
I think that'd be a terrible idea.
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@heterodox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
In order for them not to go unnoticed, we'd need notifications on downvotes, which might be a good idea as well (or perhaps not) but is a separate concern.
I think that'd be a terrible idea.
Because it would force people to care about their downvotes even more?
I think making downvote notifications an opt-in option - at the very least - would make sense, though - denying even that brings the point of downvotes into question.
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Because it would force people to care about their downvotes even more?
I think making downvote notifications an opt-in option - at the very least - would make sense, though - denying even that brings the point of downvotes into question.I'm fine with bringing the point of downvotes into question (and did in the other thread; it's negative social information). I think there's a reason other platforms don't attribute upvotes and downvotes, or only have attributable "Like"s, and those platforms probably have better researchers than we do. (Since we're all just talking out of our asses.)
At the point it's delivering downvote notifications, that's just the forum itself saying "Get ready... fight!" And I don't think this forum needs that; we do well enough on our own.
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@fbmac said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
Another option, lock @Polygeekery and @fox in the garage and we won't ever remember downvotes exist.
I am fine outside the garage, unless provoked unnecessarily. It is others who need reminding.
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There has been discussion of allowing people to have their downvotes wiped and that being an opt-in option to do. I think that is a bad precedent to set. If we are going the opt-in route, it should either be opt-in to keep or opt-in to have them exposed to the public.
This is the last time I am going to say it, I think that downvotes are stupid, and that they are a stupid form of private information, and I would gladly opt-in to either of those options. But, I will not speak for others. The meekest among us would be the ones trampled by having it exposed. Not outspoken people such as myself.
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@heterodox - for what's it worth, I wouldn't bind downvotes being completely eradicated either, might indeed be better than keeping/making them private/public/protected/internal...
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@Polygeekery said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
The meekest among us would be the ones trampled by having it exposed.
"The meekest among us" also being another way to say "People who have enough stress to deal with offline." :)
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Another potential point to consider is the effect of downvotes on third parties - people other than the poster and the voter.
What would they gain or lose if downvotes remain private/become public/are set to opt-in visibility?
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@Polygeekery said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
I am fine outside the garage, unless provoked unnecessarily
Then stop taking the bait and we won't have problems.
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@Fox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
No. You people are attacking ben and calling for him to step down and shit, HERE, IN THIS THREAD.
Has anyone actually called for him to step down? Or is this more finitions? Because I don't think I've seen anyone (except Ben himself, jokingly I assumed) suggesting that.
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Put me down under "keep things the way they are." All the proposals I've seen for changing the way downvotes work, or removing them entirely, look like they'll cause more trouble than improvement.
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@masonwheeler said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
@Fox said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:
No. You people are attacking ben and calling for him to step down and shit, HERE, IN THIS THREAD.
Has anyone actually called for him to step down? Or is this more finitions? Because I don't think I've seen anyone (except Ben himself, jokingly I assumed) suggesting that.
Polygeekery told him to do so.