SN release: wild west mode 🤠 \ stacker news ~meta

10.7k sats \ 69 comments \ @k00b 21 Sep 2022 meta

We've grown into needing negative feedback.

We now effectively have a downvote button. Next to the time on all posts and comments, there's now a ... where you can tell us you don't like something. Think of this like a downvote. It costs one sat (currently) and is a vote to 'outlaw' an item. Items with low downvotes relative to upvotes are simply down ranked. However, if an item receives enough downvotes, they are outlawed and filtered from view.

Wild West Mode

If you toggle on "wild west mode" in settings, downvotes have no effect on your experience. It'll be like they don't exist. Downvoted posts don't lose ranking and are never outlawed.

If you're not logged in, or haven't toggled WWM, by default you are in tenderfoot mode.

What's next

I'm going to work on reintroducing free posts and comments over the next day or two. Relative to before removing free posts/comments, half of new users begin engaging. We reckon posts/comments aren't prohibitively expensive, but loading up a wallet is a bit of a pain - particularly for users new to lightning.

To reduce the potential spam burden, free posts/comments will start out as outlawed and can get upvoted into tenderfoot mode.

After that, I'll continue as planned improving ~jobs economics and refining search. Then we'll add another sub and a design refresh.

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535 sats \ 0 replies \ @ken 21 Sep 2022

This is an awesome solution @k00b! Thank you so much for your continued work!

I'm so bullish on stacker.news.

394 sats \ 2 replies \ @nout 22 Sep 2022

Should the Wild West Mode add a cowboy hat to the SN logo? ;)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Sep 2022

Hmmm

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @mf 22 Sep 2022

Love it!

362 sats \ 14 replies \ @Brunswick 21 Sep 2022

Do distaste votes effect reputation, or is it isolated to a post or comment?

51 sats \ 13 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

It doesn't affect reputation. The only reputation we track right now is how well you upvote so this is unrelated and not reflected in that.

Edit: you express a concern of mine by calling it 'distaste'. I want it to mean 'flag' so perhaps that's what I should be calling it rather than 'I don't like this' or 'downvote'.

218 sats \ 0 replies \ @sancristrader 22 Sep 2022

There are three types of downvotes: spam flagging, downvoting vacuous or illogical posts, and distaste or disagreement. The third type should be somehow made expensive. I am afraid that the distinction between the downvote types without manual dang is impossible

0 sats \ 11 replies \ @Brunswick 21 Sep 2022

Also, is the author aware of how many palates he has offended?

10 sats \ 10 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

No, not as it is now.

21 sats \ 9 replies \ @Brunswick 21 Sep 2022

I don't see it being used purely as a spam/troll control system and it will also be used as an ostracism tool. I don't have an opinion either way whether that's bad. I'm sure there are plenty users that would like to see some types of opinion obscured from view. I do like this idea of crowdfunded moderation and lowering the bar to participants who don't have any sats to start out.

21 sats \ 2 replies \ @deleted231216 22 Sep 2022

it will also be used as an ostracism tool

This is also my worry, that it could potentially be used to silence people from all users' feeds (unless you actively enable wild west mode), rather than only filter out messages (not individuals) that are unconstructive. I understand if you mute someone who you don't like, but muting people globally (by downvoting all their posts regardless of content) from all users' feeds is worse. But I don't know if this feature would be used in this way.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Brunswick 22 Sep 2022

Haha, I was wondering why I haven't been seeing quest77's comments lately.

@koob Here's an example of someone being a racist dickhole, but not necessarily spamming or being a bot. Is antisemitism against policy, or is it better to just let the community stifle comments like this?

Posts and comments with calls for violence seem like they should explicitly be banned from a liability point of view, but maybe not?

55 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Sep 2022

We need to add flagging rules to the FAQ but off the top of my head, these are the valid reasons to flag:

spam
scam
racism/bigotry
threats of violence
excessive and unnecessary meanness
unwelcome nudity
encouraging self-harm

A lot of these are subjective, which is why it's optional to see the consequence of flagging.

There is no "policy." Just suggestions, votes, payments, and algorithms.

reply on another page

10 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

It might be abused, but how much your 'flag' counts depends on your, as you say, reputation. We don't want it to be used when people merely disagree so we'll keep an eye on it and adjust accordingly.

15 sats \ 4 replies \ @Brunswick 21 Sep 2022

People do easily become temporarily irrational when their assumptions are challenged. It might be wise to allow people to 'reverse' their flag by upvoting.

20 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

Good point

view replies

371 sats \ 2 replies \ @zuspotirko 21 Sep 2022

That's like the best implementation of downvotes possible. Awesome!

And the branding "wild west mode" is real good. Have you thought about a career in marketing?

690 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

The branding is all @kr who has a career in marketing lol

520 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr 21 Sep 2022

inspired by the social media discussion on this joe rogan podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44

306 sats \ 6 replies \ @cointastical 21 Sep 2022

Brilliant solution!!

There's a dilemma though now. Do I:

A. Leave in Tenderfoot mode (i.e., disable Wild West Mode) so that obvious troll posts are hidden, or
B. Set Wild West Mode so that I can be among the first to upvote a good post or comment from the free posters which I would not see when Wild West is disabled? Upvoting these can increase my earnings from the daily earnings payment.

And a question. Would there be benefit in us being able to, in wild west mode, know which posts and comments would not be visible in Tenderfoot mode?

Also,

Next to the time on all posts and comments

Caveat ... all new posts and comments. Old posts and comments are grandfathered in with no ability to flag. Not a problem, just pointing that out.

25 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

Set Wild West Mode so that I can be among the first to upvote a good post or comment from the free posters which I would not see when Wild West is disabled? Upvoting these can increase my earnings from the daily earnings payment.

I was thinking about distinguishing free posts/comments from outlawed content - rather than starting it as outlawed. It might be a little more work, but it's something I can do if you would prefer (B).

Would there be benefit in us being able to, in wild west mode, know which posts and comments would not be visible in Tenderfoot mode?

Yes, working on that now. I got kind of impatient and shipped before I finished that.

Caveat ... all new posts and comments. Old posts and comments are grandfathered in with no ability to flag. Not a problem, just pointing that out.

Are you sure? You might be seeing that you can't flag content you've already upvoted.

266 sats \ 4 replies \ @cointastical 21 Sep 2022

I was thinking about distinguishing free posts/comments from outlawed content -

Oh, that's sufficient -- or even preferable.

I got kind of impatient and shipped

No rush.

Are you sure? You might be seeing that you can't flag content you've already upvoted.

You were correct. I had just glanced at an older post where I had upvoted the post and all the comments as well. Now I see So it's working perfectly!

12 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Sep 2022

You can now see when things have been outlawed in WWM.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @cointastical 23 Sep 2022

Hmm ... I see a post that I flagged (currently at spot #8 in the front page), and it shows the flag, but it does not have the OUTLAWED indicator. But then when I log out, that post does not appear.

So is that a case of it being OUTLAWED but that "OUTLAWED" tag doesn't appear? Or is there another reason the unauthenticated session will not see that?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cointastical 23 Sep 2022

but it does not have the OUTLAWED indicator.

[Update: It now shows the OUTLAWED tag].

So is that a case of it being OUTLAWED but that "OUTLAWED" tag doesn't appear? Or is there another reason the unauthenticated session will not see that?

Maybe, ... the OUTLAWED tag simply is not real-time, but whether that post appears in the ranking is real-time?

[UPDATE 2, it must have been me not refreshing the page. My question was answered here:

#73269 ]

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 23 Sep 2022

Outlawed tag is real time. It just doesn’t update the ui when it crosses the threshold after flagging.

346 sats \ 2 replies \ @pi 21 Sep 2022

Great, thanks.

What about introducing a penalty for offenders, make it exponentially more expensive for them to post new stuff, until they “behave”

40 sats \ 1 reply \ @zuspotirko 21 Sep 2022

What about the other way round? Downvoting is expensive but becomes cheaper every time the comment has been downvoted already

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

Both are interesting ideas. I wrote up a huge doc on all possible angles to this, and this is what we needed for nearly any approach - negative feedback. It will likely need tons of refinement.

374 sats \ 0 replies \ @thrown 27 Sep 2022

As long as a comment has some upvotes relative to the downvotes, it may be better to consider it “spicy” or a “hot take” rather than artificially down ranking.

Might be cool to have that distinction between “bad content” vs “hot take”

268 sats \ 0 replies \ @dk 25 Sep 2022

love the thoughtful details of this solution! thanks, @k00b

266 sats \ 1 reply \ @gms 21 Sep 2022

It gets interesting, what I like the most about SN is that you listen to users k00b keep it up!

25 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

I'm building SN for you so it'd be silly to not listen.

266 sats \ 1 reply \ @KyleOfTheCorn 21 Sep 2022

This is a cool concept! Maybe we can call this an "ellipse attack"? I don't like calling it downvoting because Reddit sucks. Flagging?

6 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

Flagging is good. It's how I think about it and how I think it should be used. When you say "I don't like this" about something, it replaces the lightning bolt with a flag. But downvote is most familiar to most people.

If you want to try it on a post/comment, I recommend this one: #72540

239 sats \ 0 replies \ @cointastical 23 Sep 2022

I had done a browser page search for "OUTLAWED", and Chrome highlighted them in yellow, and the current one in the results was highlighted in orange.

At first on seeing that I thought that this was something the Wild West mode was doing, and I figured it must be like a scoring feedback (e.g., Orange had lots of users who had flagged it, .. yellow was just near the threshold, etc.). Eventually I figured out it was due to my browser page search. Just thinking about it, that color coding might be a nice qualifier. It is not something I would submit a Github Issue for requesting it, but just wanted to share that.

239 sats \ 0 replies \ @scampy 23 Sep 2022

Thanks for everything you do @k00b. This site really has become my go-to news source and discussion forum.

189 sats \ 1 reply \ @satup 22 Sep 2022

Can I reverse "I don't like..." if I change my mind?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 22 Sep 2022

No, not yet at least

162 sats \ 0 replies \ @NothingNewUnderTheSun 22 Sep 2022

Like this way of doing things

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @rijndael 24 Sep 2022

Glorious

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @guyfawkes 21 Sep 2022

Hey @k00b, is there any reason why users can't see the amount of downvotes? Socials showed this for many years and then overnight, gone. Is there some law that prevents this? Other than that, a really elegant approach.

198 sats \ 0 replies \ @kilianbuhn 22 Sep 2022

seeing downvotes is really toxic and could ruin the culture of this community

we can already ratio each other with upvoting other comment which is way funnier 😂

11 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 21 Sep 2022

I can add that if we want it. But in general, I don't want people downvoting something only because they see that other people have.

It could create mob-like behavior, which might be why other socials remove it.

363 sats \ 0 replies \ @guyfawkes 22 Sep 2022

From my perspective, I'd rather the risk of mob-like behavior on my posts/comments in exchange for the information the number of down votes provides to me.