Here's an idea.
Upvotes might be democratic, but that
doesn't mean that they work.
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You probably already know, but I'm
going to explain anyway, because it's my job.
Reddit, Yik Yak, Hacker News, and a few other websites are
built on voting systems, meaning people post things, links,
photos, text, comments, and other people vote on those
things, up if they like it, down if they don't.
Lots of upvotes means something is good,
and therefore made more visible.
Bad posts with low or negative tallies
sink or disappear completely so they don't
pollute your precious eyeballs.
My eyes.
The goggles do nothing.
In a phrase, the people decide.
Yik Yak's founders recently told "The New York Times"
that their goal was to create a more democratic social network,
to quote, "level the playing field and connect everyone."
Even if it's not always made that explicit,
there's a common idea that sites like reddit, Yik Yak, et
al. are democratic.
I mean, there's voting, just like when
we do our civic duty, which happens in democracy.
There are no curators, kings, editors, or oligarchs.
There are no titles passed between people or lauding
of posts not conferred by the community.
Such is the basic idea of both reddit
and governmental democracy.
Ideally, outside of a few mediators,
there is no undeposable ruling class.
The people are in control, and everyone
is capable of making it.
In internet terms, that means users and content,
two of my least favorite words, are all equal.
Each user is capable of posting and having their post succeed.
Each user's votes count equally.
In government, this means citizens have equal rights.
Each citizen is equal before the law,
is equally capable of political action,
and each citizen's vote counts equally.
But, huh, unfortunately, mmm, not everyone
is equal before the law, or in government.
Citizens and even the democratically elected
have a bias that they act on, often unintentionally,
that undoes the potential for true, perfect equality.
So we get things like structural oppression
or disenfranchisement, and keepers
at basically all of the gates because
of regulation or oversight or paradoxically freedom.
And there are democratic dynasties.
They're just harder to spot, because they're often
the consequence of inherited or exchanged
wealth and influence that is often
considered the point of a system that allows anyone to make it.
People who can trade influence, they made it.
That's what making it is.
So the playing field may start level, but it gets bumpy.
Anything can succeed, but attitudes, expectations,
and norms develop which make it much more likely
that certain things succeed.
If you need proof of this in America,
just think about the lobbying process,
the cash required to run in a major election, the race
and gender of most government officials,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The field is bumpy.
Things go similarly on the internet as well.
Like, any post can become impossibly popular
and make it to the front page of reddit,
but its chances are much better if it is an image, not text,
and it starts on r/aww, gif, funny, pics, wtf, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera.
Through their hard work, redditors like [BEEP]
Watercolour and AWildSketchAppeared
have amassed considerable audiences and influence.
But influence can also be ported to reddit
from YouTube, television, publishing, and so on.
Since after an amount of time, net votes
are displayed basically accurately next to every post,
you can get a sense of how your peers are reacting.
And it's been shown that seeing upvotes
before the content being upvoted can result in a 25% to 32%
increase in the likelihood of additional upvotes.
In other words, the upvoted get upvoted-ier.
But OK.
Where, you might ask, do those first few popularity-spawning
upvotes come from?
And surely it's not just early popularity
that begets later popularity.
And you'd be right.
Now, we are getting to the meat of democracy's matter, which
I'm pretty sure is hot dogs.
So, many of us have seen something like this situation.
A friend posts an update on Facebook
that says something like "I just got mugged, but I'm OK.
They got my phone, but I'm not hurt, just a little shaken up."
A mutual friend then clicks the Like button
and clarifies in a comment "sympathy like.
Glad to hear you're OK."
It's weird, but it makes perfect sense.
So much of internet communication
is fast-paced, short and sweet, following our gut.
And much of that communication is
carried by technology not built to convey nuance.
There are a lot of shortcuts, partial meanings,
and streams working in concert.
reddit's voting system, the most powerful action
one can take in determining the popularity of a post,
is no different.
It requires that one boil down their reaction
to positive, negative, or none.
You could to leave a nuanced comment,
but comments are secondary to the post and its score,
both in design and effect.
Candidates for popular reddit posts
then are the ones inspiring easy reactions
that create the most clear and distinct feel, ideally
positive.
Upvotes to the left.
A very successful reddit post is mostly, not always,
but mostly one that is easy to understand
and aligns with the expectations of its intended audience.
That should sound familiar.
The unfortunate truth seems to be
that a system built to accommodate anything
can provide a tyranny of choice, and so we develop
easy ways to make decisions.
I'm not saying that democratic systems need
to be more restrictive, but for no shortage of reasons,
some within the systems themselves, some
having to do with the way people interact with them,
they do tend to round off edges, especially
the edges likely to present challenges to the system itself
or the people within it.
Or as David Banks puts it in writing for "The New Inquiry,"
the site promotes mundanity and repetition
over experimentation and diversity
by providing the user with a too accurate picture of what
appeals to the entrenched user base.
In other words, because they know
what appeals to the user base, users
will consider only things that will most likely appeal
to the user base as candidates for posting, because karma.
It's easy to see this as mostly harmless.
But when provocative content becomes
the most likely to be rewarded with
karma in certain communities, it becomes the most likely
candidate for posting in the minds of users,
which then leads to more more provocative content.
Reddit has had no shortage of struggles
with this very problem.
Yik Yak is dealing with it right now.
Philosopher Jacques Ranciere talks
about a great misunderstanding of modern democracy,
the collapsing of the space between politically-active
citizen and consumer of goods, that we
think about these democratic systems not as ways
to responsibly divide power so that we may prosper or benefit,
but as systems which help us pursue
quote, "intimate pleasures."
We think, oh, pssh, the market will decide.
But then we drive the market based on our own whims.
So while reddit and Yik Yak might be perfectly democratic,
that doesn't mean they're egalitarian or not hedonistic.
I apologize for nothing.
What do you guys think?
Are all upvotes created equal?
Do these democratic systems encourage bad behavior?
Let us know in the comments.
And Idea Channel is not a democracy, but rather
a rise-o-mocracy.
Please subscribe and become a part of the network.
Roll for comment.
Let's see what you guys have to say about D&D and comics.
darthboolean writes a really great comment
on the subreddit about the importance of permanent death
in both tabletop role-playing games and comics, and talks
about how it's something you can actually do in a tabletop
role-playing game and that when you kill a character,
it gives their actions and their achievements meaning
and importance.
And I totally agree with this.
I just want to say that it's not my position, even a little bit,
that player-characters should be immortal,
that, you know, I think killing player-characters is,
like darth says, an important part of playing tabletop
role-playing games.
The question I think is that what's
the tension between allowing them
to exist long enough to embody a great story so that when
you kill them it has meaning.
And so darth sort of takes this idea and applies it to comics
and says that, you know, when there
is an issue of a comic coming up where it claims that Batman's
going to die or Wolverine's going to die,
there's a part of us that knows they're not.
They're going to come back later and it
will return to the status quo and that's not exciting
and it causes us to be cynical, and that maybe comics have
given over too much to one side of that tension of allowing
something to embody a great story but then not giving it
meaning by allowing the story to end.
And I think that this comment is so good and great.
And I wish that I had read this comment
before writing the episode.
So good.
ArdentDrops put some of those ideas another way
by talking about the trivialization of characters
or saying that if you're not threatening them
with actual, real consequences, you are not respecting
their power in the world, and then asks whether or not
by not permanently killing certain comic book
characters, are we trivializing their struggles,
which is, yeah, I think that that's a really great way
to put that.
Makutakanuva puts this into more certain terms
by talking about the distinction between narrative that's
meant to comfort versus narrative that
is meant to immerse at the cost of comfort,
and provides the Red Wedding as an example of something
where the comfort of the audience
was not really maybe considered.
And um, yeah, this makes me wonder
sort of like how long does a character have to be around
before something like the Red Wedding
has the maximum amount of meaning.
That I think is maybe the big question
for me related to all of these elements.
Kayla Haffley writes a really insightful comment
about how this idea might hold water but not really until you
approach this like complicated taxonomy of player styles, GM
styles, writer styles, and that the way that these things
relate to one another is not a simple one-to-one related
to like their sort of creative station
as it exists in the two different mediums,
but also the way that they orient themselves
towards those characters.
And yeah, I totally agree.
And this makes me want to like sit down
and sort of draw this out.
This is a great comment.
Links to this one and all the others in the doobly-doo.
Merav Ulyansky brings up a really important point
that there are clear economic and commercial factors that
determine the way multi-author, longstanding characters
are treated in comic books, and that this conversation sort of
treated comics as a monolith and that we
didn't talk about how this relates
to indie comics or short-run comic stuff like that.
And yeah, I agree.
I think that we were coming at this--
the premise is that we're talking
about these massive, larger than life comics characters.
But there was room for nuance there, absolutely.
And finally, I should have known that this video would
be used to justify whiny comic bro tears,
and I'm really disappointed in myself
that I didn't catch that in the writing process.
We have a video about Thor in the works,
so I don't want to say too much, because I'm
going to talk about it for seven straight minutes in a couple
weeks.
But I will say that I don't think that the new Thor-- also
Thorina, come on, man-- is in any way
a violation of the free will or the authority
or the value of Thor as a character,
not the least of the reasons being
that the old Thor still exists and is in the book
and is reacting the way that I would expect
him to react to the situa-- this is-- like I said,
I got a lot to say.
I disagree with you, sir.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these player-characters.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
You can still mail us records.
Links to all of those things in the doobly-doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from @IvoryOasis,
who points us towards an article about how
feminist Thor is selling way more comic books
than dude Thor.
How's that for comeuppance?
And hey, in case you were wondering,
this episode of Idea Channel was brought you by Squarespace.
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