Practically every website has adopted a ‘comments’ function – often outsourcing the legwork to services like Disqus – and it has come to be the norm that users can ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ each others contributions. Users can then view the ‘highest rated’ comments, (hopefully) letting them avoid a lunatic fringe of opinion. At first glance this makes aggregating public opinion a democratic process – but does it really produce the cream of the crop, or incline users to compromise their independence in an attempt to appeal to popularity?

It surprises me that so little research into ‘upvoting’/’downvoting’ seems to have been conducted. The only academic article concerning it I could find was a University of Texas study from 2009 concerning ‘upvote dynamics’ on Digg (more on this later). But to go back to the roots of the phenomenon, from what I can discern, the practice of allowing users to grade responses with ‘upvotes’ and ‘downvotes’ originated on Digg in 2004 – users would ‘digg’ or ‘bury’ posts at their discretion to raise them to the ‘front’ of the website split into different sections (politics, science, etc). Digg’s system allowed for stories to quickly receive mass-attention. Earlier ‘social news’ sites like Fark or Slashdot relied on stories to be hand-picked for the front page by editorial staff, which could result in it being hours before the story was published on the site. Digg’s system streamlined the process – a story could have mass publicity within minutes of its submission. It was a revolution.

Digg’s direct democracy was open to exploitation, however. The system could be gamed by organised users to control the front page of Digg and in 2006 ‘bury brigades’ began to receive mainstream coverage. The most notable example of gaming the democratic aggregator, published in the Guardian amongst other sources, concerned the ‘Patriots of Digg’ who purportedly buried ‘liberal’ stories with ideological zeal.

This directly democratic approach to content organisation was most prominently adopted by Reddit, but as well as the posts being ‘voted’ on, user comments on those stories could be up/downvoted also. One’s contributions’ ratio of approval or scorn are scored as ‘karma’ (this writer has a karma of 26), which “reflects how much good the user has done for the Reddit community” according to the site’s FAQ. ‘Reddiquette’ may encourage voting on as objective a basis as possible but it is a process which is impossible to give proper oversight. Reddit’s own ‘karma court’ issues facetious rulings on the ‘worthiness’ of stories but in real terms it comes down to the goodwill of the userbase (or the “preferences of the community”, to quote the UT study).

To recap, this model has been rolled out across the web. Even the BBC has integrated a Reddit-esque comment ratings system on its website. Despite this widespread dissemination of ‘tallied popularity’ neither ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ have yet to be added to a formal English dictionary unlike ‘Google’ (the verb) or ‘Unfriend’ (popularised by Facebook), it is probably just a matter of time. The question as far as I’m concerned, though, is – is there really any point to it? Surely by allowing ‘popular’ comments to be put in the most prominent spots this just incentivises playing to the middle ground and popular opinion, compromising one’s actual thoughts for the sake of public attention.

Through this angle, there is an argument to be made that it is really quite anti-intellectual. Is there any actual basis for ‘upvoting’ on news websites? I’ve never seen it written down anywhere. From what I can work out it just makes the website’s community look even more of an inward-looking echo chamber than it probably is in reality. Maybe it’s easier in terms of workload than actually having actively moderated conversation by web staff but damned if I can see the point in it. Do you go to a news website to be informed, or to have your opinions echoed at you to make you feel good?

Further, apologies for my prolonged absence. I have been in Naples for a while, which was very cool.

UPDATE: This interesting project aimed to “create a bot that’s only true purpose is to gain the maximum amount of karma using nothing but general circlejerk-type responses [on Reddit]” (ie, upvotes). Neat.