Beyond the “deplorable” aspects of its content, Gab once had (until March 2017) an interesting technical aspect: fusing Twitter-style short-form microblogging with Reddit’s up/down-voting to popularly rank posts in page visibility.
I can only imagine how many problems Gab’s fusion of microblogging with up-downvotes created in terms of content moderation and user communication.
To reach its goal of diversifying its audience, the company has done only one thing: It removed the downvote button. Like on Reddit, users had the ability to vote a post higher or lower, determining its relevancy on the forum. Now items can only be voted up.
Sanduja is convinced the change will make the platform more positive and inclusive. In a phone call, he said Gab removed downvotes because trolls were doing it for entertainment and to harass women who were defending themselves. Also, “there were a lot of social justice warriors and members of the far left coming into our site essentially trying to start a brouhaha.”
Huh.
I’m guessing the ethics of downvoting as a moderation tool have not yet been perfected, even on a site which fused most of the Twitter microbloggimg experience with Reddit’s downvoting feature.
In fact, Gab had both up/down-voting AND reblogging. Which one was used for its promotion algorithm if there was one? We’re they competing with each other?
And the difference between microblogging sites and news/question sites is how the former are geared toward a tighter, personal expression which isn’t necessarily meant to invite a high level response and assessment compared to posts on the latter. To place the scrutinizing tool of public downvoting on all microblog posts seems like not only a tool for massive abuse, but also a great waste of such a tool.
It reminds me of that one Gumball episode in which the characters 1-5 star-rate each other on an app, resulting in the entire town becoming paralyzed from doing anything in their lives in fear of losing their stars (someone actually tried to do this in real life).
It’s a bit like the much-requested “dislike” button which will likely never appear on Facebook. Those who dislike the “dislike” button – including Mark Zuckerberg himself- criticize the potential for abuse of users through vote-brigading. Facebook, which operates with more hierarchy in their design of posts and comments, has went their own way in adding “reaction buttons” to posts and comments.
To date, YouTube, Reddit, Quora and Stack Exchange are the only prominent sites to use downvoting as a moderation tool (Quora only allows comments to be downvoted). None of these would be considered a microblogging site.
I could only see downvoting of microblogs as something better than a user-abusive tool if the downvoting were implemented in a different way than how it is implemented as thumbs up-thumbs down on Reddit or YouTube. There has to be more than that.
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