“Downdinging” Trolls Actually Encourages Them. Only Ignoring Makes Them Leave
Not sure what effect this study by Stanford on how people relate/behave online should have on the ratings systems here at LGF, but it’s certainly thought-provoking.
Turns out that updings really don’t seem to reward people & get them to participate more. Downdings only encourage the trolls to retaliate by attacking everyone else and basically shitting all over the community. And ignoring people and not responding at all to what they do makes them wander away, dispirited.
Nut graf:
By applying our methodology to four large online news
communities for which we have complete article commenting
and comment voting data (about 140 million votes on 42
million comments), we discover that community feedback
does not appear to drive the behavior of users in a direction
that is beneficial to the community, as predicted by the
operant conditioning framework. Instead, we find that community
feedback is likely to perpetuate undesired behavior.
In particular, punished authors actually write worse
If this is true — then how do we wind up with a functional (well, more or less) place like this for conversation? I wonder what platforms they studied … if it’s the message boards on Yahoo News, then god help them, for that place is a cesspool of aberrated humanity. Or Breitbart/Red State/Free Republic.