If a post gets downvoted, it could be a geinuenly awful post. But another post that gets downvoted, but is actually empiracially scientifically true, then it is treated equivolent as the other even though they are the same.
I don’t think this is the answer but one idea is to add points to people, or products, who are verified to be awesome. So that would be a scientist or compassionate politician gets more votes or a healthy product gets a subsidy.
I assume you are quite young.
The whole point of using popularity as a measure is the realization that there is no objective way to assess quality in the scenarios where popularity is used. The world is complex and often times quality is highly subjective. That doesn’t mean popularity is a good measure, it’s just the one we have.
Some caveats: in areas like science there are better measures and popularity should not be used for selection. But again, things aren’t always that clear cut.
there are better measures
Like what? I assume you mean in social sciences and which is applicable to filtering/ranking content online
Quite the opposite: social sciences are still a pretty young field where repeatable, predictable results are not easy to come by and only work on a statistical level. Exciting stuff, but defining “objective” measures is not within our reach in this particular field.
Ranking social media is as subjective as it gets, I do not think there is a “right” way it could be implemented.
what are the better measures? Like scientific instruments? I’m lost now. It seems we have gotten in the weeds a bit.
In the market, that’s not “lack of nuance”. The market doesn’t “select” the best product, people just buy stuff. It was never claimed that the market could select the best product.
“The market” has two functions: it correctly finds an equilibrium for how much people want stuff, and how difficult it is to make or acquire. And the second is that through distribution of the supply problem, every participant can solve a small part of the supply problem, which would be harder if it was done in a centralized way, particularly without our modern communications technology.
When I say market, Imagine a farmers market. There’s typically booths and such. Now each vendor has a right to have a booth and sell products. Now, let’s pretend that the popular product at this farmers market is a tide pod. The shoppers love to buy the Tide pod and eat it. Even though people get sick, they just love the tide pods so much that they keep coming for more. From a bystander perspective, they would say, “wow you must have a great product! Everyone keeps buying from you!” but in reality the product is poison and the shoppers are irrational. Do you get what I’m giving out?
Do you get what I’m giving out?
Yes, but that’s not what “the market” is about, and nobody would ever make the claim that it is.
The market operates in whatever environment it’s in. It’s the job of the people running the market to set the rules, environment and make people follow the rules.
Now each vendor has a right to have a booth and sell products.
sidenote: That is not true btw. Market stalls cost money, there is limited space available and there are terms and conditions relating to the products you’re allowed to sell and your conduct on the market. If you violate those rules, you don’t get to participate, and the administration running the market doesn’t have to give you a stall. You don’t have an unconditional right to participate.
If and only if, e.g. safety of the customers is something that’s in those conditions, then it becomes a rule that’s part of the environment the market participants have to navigate. But the responsibility for setting those rules is on the administration, not on the market participants.
Define market
It’s an artificially created, partially abstract environment where people buy and sell goods and services, sometimes using money.
I read this as “a created environment where people buy/sell, typically with money”
and the shoppers are irrational
This is one of the first things addressed in econ classes: people are rational. In that case, the itdependsman’s comment is true. In the case you mentioned (and there are many similar cases), people make irrational choices, making the free market theories less realistic. Economists have to make these kinds of assumptions to make modeling the economy easier, but at the end people’s behaviour is chaotic and may be impossible to model at all.
Edit: behavioural economics is trying to understand the decision making process of individuals, and when they are more (or less) rational.
well then the whole model is wrong. Logically if your axioms are false then the whole argument is invalid.
Most of the time these models apply to the real world. Yes, in the cases where people act irrationally they don’t work. But a lot of economic phenomena can be explained through these simplified models.
“in the cases” makes it sound like irrationality is rare. It’s not rare. It’s always. Maybe the models have some sort of predictive power, but the explanation for why they work is faulty
But there might be some interesting aspects once you look at it the other way around: Maybe there’s something wrong (systemically) if bad things get popular. And good things become unpopular…
(But yeah, I rarely feel the urge to go for the popular option just for the sake of it. I’ll taste Dubai chocolate when it’s viral, but other than that I just buy food which I like. And I don’t use the most popular operating system, don’t vote for the most popular political party… I think it’s fine that things become popular, that’s just the way it is. But it doesn’t directly tell me what to do.)
like what and which system
Blatant example, once half the population starts to vote for fascists, there might be something wrong in the political system and/or society. If charlatans and lies are popular, maybe there’s an issue with education. But we have that with other things as well. If Lemmy’s votes don’t mean anything to me (they really don’t), maybe doing votes this way is far from the best option. If the majority of people use some products/services which come with severe downsides, maybe there’s a monopoly somewhere…
it seems like you’re saying it’s a problem with democracy (and possibly other systems). On my end, i have more a misanthropic bias where i think humans are fundamentally flawed. What do you think? is that where you are coming from or not?
Well, I didn’t specify the cause. Maybe it’s the humans themselves. Though if I look around, I have lots of nice neighbours with perfectly acceptable political opinions, friends and family, people who invite me to things or go above and beyond to accomodate me. I know many very intelligent people… And while politics is bad I’m still living a relatively free life. Sure humans are fundamentally flawed in ways? I mean we can be manipulated, we make mistakes. We prefer simple lies over complex truths… On the other hand we’re capable of love, do good things, collaborate…
I mean I refuse to reduce everything to misanthropy. I mean that’s the cheap way out… Society is getting worse… Well… boys will be boys… and then no one does anything about it. That’s not the solution to anything either.
fair enough, do you have optimistic ideas of a better system than democracy
Social democracy. And fostering a society where everyone is able to thrive. Universal basic income, crack down on neoliberalism, corruption, have a sane version of the free market and a sustainable economy, make education easy and available, cut down on crime and violence, have people unite instead of fight each other, we need some cohesion in a society…
I don’t think the voting process of a democracy is the issue here. I like to believe we have a broad majority of people who just want to be alright and live a relatively free life. It’s neoliberalism that causes 99% of our issues and we need to address that. Unfortunately democracy seems to be vulnerable to that, but I’m really unsure if that means we should scrap the entire idea. Maybe we should fix it instead because alternatives aren’t looking great. And currently lots of us aren’t trying very hard. Though it seems quality of life rises, the more “social” a democratic country is.
(And it doesn’t seem to me like neoliberalism was popular with the masses… That’s pushed by a minority of people, the rich and powerful. But I really don’t think it has anything to do with popularity. On the contrary… seems lots of people are not okay with the consequences.)
With lemmy votes being public, one could do clustering of accounts on voting behaviour, and display upvote/downvote count per cohort.
ok and the outcome would be what
It’s a methodology for achieving what you describe, without manually having to assign social scores to each person.
voting behaviour
can you define this? this seems like almost a semantic nightmare in practice. Like tagging all the the topics they up/downvote
Like tagging all the the topics they up/downvote
That’s what happens: every post one up or downvotes is public. You can just download that data.
Uh huh… like web scraping? There seems to be some confusion-making
You don’t need to scrape. The votes made on one instance need to be propagated to the others. So the information “person X up/downvoted post Y” is openly transmitted as part of the defederation protocol.
The short answers are a bit infuriating for me. I am tempted to ask more questions, but this is becoming an unfun game for me. I guess one could see the votes, but the categorizing the types of topics per user and/or cluster of users sounds like a difficult, combinatorically complex job.