How do reddit downvotes work

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Browse All News Articles. Smart TVs Ads. Twitter will test the use of Reddit-like upvote and downvote buttons as a way to better highlight the more interesting and relevant replies in a longer conversation thread.

In some cases, the upvote and downvote buttons may be up arrows and down arrows, while in other cases they may be thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. Twitter is exploring the use of Facebook-style emoji reactions. If, however, such a system ever become a public feature, that could certainly change. Here's how it worked: The researchers convinced an anonymous website—under the promise it would remain nameless—to allow them to test slight manipulations in online voting.

Over six months, the research team took a small percentage of more than , written comments and slightly altered their vote rating as they were submitted. Four percent of the comments were given a positive edge a single upvote while another 2 percent were struck with an immediate disadvantage a lonely downvote. The researchers discovered that by increasing a comment's score with a single vote, they would boost its final score by an average of 25 percent. I was surprised to find that a single positive vote could create such a huge snowball effect.

Oddly enough, this snowballing didn't work in reverse—nobody was ganging up on commenters unfairly based on a downvote or two. Instead, the researcher's artificial downvote made users slightly more likely to respond positively, essentially negating the researchers' interference. Reddit is occasionally chastised, even from the inside , for sameness in opinions and groupthink.

There are certainly some aspects of an echo chamber. By separating the users they sampled into those likely to vote positively and those likely to vote negatively, the researchers broke down the herding effect into a combination of two behaviors. The researcher's extra upvote seemed to convince many nonvoters to join in, and it also encouraged positive votes from those who might have otherwise voted negatively or abstained. And, Martin argues, the effect is not all bad: "I think the term hivemind is used pejoratively, and people forget all the things it enables.