How To Manipulate An Internet Community While Pretending To Be Impartial - Important Understanding
(media.conspiracies.win)
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Another way is a scoring system designed to favor even the slight majority view and exclude the minority.
On reddit, a 1000-vote controversial comment can get 49% supporting it and 51% against. The score is -20 and it is collapsed and hidden from view - at least on .win these aren't collapsed and hidden. Vice versa 51% comments get +20, but after a while suppressed people leave and those comments become +510 and it looks like overwhelming support.
Communities that don't want to be echo chambers could do better. For example, if upvotes count as +1 and downvotes count as -1/4 then the strongly-held views of the minority still get a fair viewing. Back to the 1000-vote controversial, instead of -20 it gets +383 -- not at the top, but still part of the conversation.
The only comments to be truly suppressed are ones that nearly everybody agrees are just terrible. I'm not saying 1/4 is the right weighting because the less a downvote counts the harder it is to hide spam and trolls, but something besides 1:1 will lead to a healthier community.