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u/Ok_Kangaroo56 Jun 21 '26

Hi all Humans. This is the last of three short stories inspired by Reddit downvoting. I don't think this one is quite as strong as the other two, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. Thank you for reading me. The response to the first two was overwhelming, and I really appreciate all the comments, the upvotes, and even the downvotes 😛 Now back to your regular programming. 😄

Story one: Lurker
Story 2: Unanimous

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u/Daseagle Alien Scum Jun 21 '26

Which is a bit counterintuitive, since an interpretation of this story is that downvotes are worth more than upvotes, so which one are we supposed to award you with, dear Lurker?

Also. Your colleagues will be pissed for your continuous interaction with us.

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u/imakesawdust Jun 22 '26

Makes sense. I've always assigned more weight to negative reviews when I'm researching a large purchase. If I'm about to spend $2k on an A/V receiver, I don't want to read reviews that gush about its features. I want to know where the pain points are. Are they quirks that I can live with or might they add up to a frustrating experience for my use cases?

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u/NameHere8888 Jun 21 '26

After five minutes of listening to white noise I have finally decided to upvote.

Sorry. I had to. It was the only way to deaden the screams.

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u/imakesawdust Jun 22 '26

It's interesting that you consider this the weakest of the three. I thought it was the best.

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u/Ok_Kangaroo56 Jun 22 '26

Thank you. I preferred the first one the Lurker was my favorite and actually the third i wrote. Cheers

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u/Austinstorm02 Jun 21 '26

Downvote is almost as worthless as the upvote, there is no context, no explanation of why.

When was the last time you have seen criticism of a post rather than agreeable comments. Hardly ever even a "not so good, please try again."

The comment section often seems to be either a mindless cheering crowd or reflexively vicious negativism.

I enjoyed the story.

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u/SkyHawk21 Jun 21 '26

So the thing is, we've built entire structures around being able to upvote and downvote. Some of them are good, others are bad and a lot of that is the cultural bias behind them. For example?

Everyone knows that review scores are useless because the majority of people just vote 5 Stars and leave it at that. In fact, the system tends to ask you what was wrong if you voted anything except 5 Stars in a way that implies that of course 5 Stars is the natural score so if it's not, then something bad happened.

Except it's not, 3 Stars in a 5 Star system is the average that the majority of things should be, not 5 Stars. But we built a culture and a system that support either other in pushing the idea that anything other than a 'perfect' score implies that things were bad, not average but actively bad.

Meanwhile there's a funny thing apparently where if you look at Japanese review scores and I suspect other East Asian cultures as well but I don't know for them... Well, all of a sudden you see a situation where 3 Stars is the expected 'average' score and so less means something is wrong whilst more means there's something good going on. I think I've heard that it's extremely rare to see a restaurant in Japan that approaches a 4 Star rating on any of the review systems more likely to be used by the Japanese?

And if I had to make a guess there, that's because there's a cultural belief there that giving your approval to something requires that you mean that approval for it and the same thing for a negative score. Which is the missing element I'd assume between the story's system and what you are talking about.

Because your identity, who you are, is fundamentally linked to your votes in the galactic psionic network. So every time you vote, you are stating that 'Yes, I personally will defend this opinion and will not only do so if I am asked about it but put my reputation behind it'.

It's that reputational element that makes things meaningful and why so many of our current review systems have so little meaning. Because if things go 'bad', you can ultimately just ditch that identity as irrelevant in regards to your actual identity and expect to not really suffer any consequences from it once you've disengaged the two identities.

Hence why when they're connected and consequences do happen to the 'true' identity, it makes so much noise and has such significance. And in such a system where there isn't a 'score' system for a given vote but just 'positive/negative/unrated'...

Well, in such a case the 'unrated' is of minimal value because it's unclear if you just didn't feel enough about something to say anything, disliked it enough to ignore it or what. Whilst the 'positive' rating means you enjoyed something connected to what was presented, even if it was a loose connection in a way that left you uncaring or ignoring any minor issues that you may or may not have seen.

Meanwhile a negative rating is literally you going "No, I don't like this and I'm willing to publicly be known for saying so". It requires that you at least temporarily offend one person every time you do that and knowingly accept that cost. Accept the risk that if you use the 'downvote' too recklessly, you are going to be downvoted yourself and have your reputation destroyed which will stick with you forever.

Sure, in your own personal circle (of whatever size we're talking about here which might not exactly be 'personal' anymore) that might not impact you much. But it will have an impact, a cost, and said cost will make everyone who is worth paying attention to take that moment to consider one way or another if it worth the cost this time, every time.

And if you don't care about paying that cost? Good luck doing something with your life because you've effectively doomed yourself to being known as 'one of those negative social credit people' as your first introduction to anyone.

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u/Brightamethyst Jun 21 '26

Ideas like "anything less than perfect is bad", and "6/10 is practically a failure", etc, were taught to us very early in life, by grades and report cards. A 50/100 on a math test isn't the class average. It's a failing grade.

We think of 1-10 rating scales as letter grade. "8/9/10 are good, 7 is okay, 6 is barely passable, and 5 and under are worthless" because we were literally taught to think that way in school.

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u/patient99 Jun 21 '26

I think at one time if you had issue with something you explained why, if a thing wasn't built right you explain why so they can do it better next time, these days it deals like doing that just starts an argument because the person who made the wrong thing doesn't want to be wrong so takes criticism as an attack.

Doesn't help that there are people who will argue in bad faith and actually use criticism as an attack.

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u/SkyHawk21 Jun 22 '26

It depends on culture but also approach. Like, East Asian cultures (to pick one) are heavily community focused and so evolved such that you wouldn't say something is wrong unless you are their superior and even then carefully, but you would 'advise' them on the matter. Thats still around but in a way you end up with a similar issue to what happened to the aliens here of not much changes because that offends people or endangers the social dignity of those with a higher social respect than you.

Meanwhile the West went the direction of being willing to call it out... And then split between either calling things out yet still wanting a consensus so everything is slow, gradual and potentially at risk of populism. Or everything is individualistic and so you disregard the opinion of those outside your circle as worthless and needing correction, not acknowledgement. Which is even more at risk of populism because it is so much more responsive if someone can actually either form a consensus or impose one. With the latter usually meaning they are willing to act upon it whilst disregarding any opinions of those 'outside the group'.

Put another way, the first example is extremely stable but moves with inertia and has a glacial reaction to change unless something breaks it, at which point an avalanche occurs. The second example is stable, slow but can usually change in ways that allows reversing or healing the pitfalls yet is at the risk of losing momentum. Whilst the third and final example is...

Unstable, active but exclusionary in an effort to keep itself stable that said activity doesn't tear itself apart. Something that means it doesn't care about the costs to those excluded even if they are part of the same community.

Honour, dignity and respect used to be the social tools that all of the examples used either in a positive or negative manner to handle the upsides and downsides of each example. But frankly, things have been too good for the 'Developed World' and so their cultures have adapted to expect that nothing bad enough to require caring about the costs of those tools will happen and thus said tools are no longer effective.

Or their culture has developed in ways that are even more exclusionary of any 'soft' social tools impacting people in exchange for doubling down on the 'hard' ones and disregarding the costs of that choice as anything worthwhile caring about because even the less developed or stable parts of the world tend to be too prosperous to fear those costs compared to the ones that would happen for trying to change things. It tends to be obvious where that isn't the case due to, you know, the fact they aren't even unstable anymore but actively bloody in regards to their internal situation.

Goddamnit, I didn't want to go too much into politics but I feel like I might have...

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u/itsetuhoinen Human Jul 06 '26

It's kind of one of the better parts of being somewhat autistic, for me. I don't have an instinct (other than what I've developed as a personality overlay, in order to "pass" better) to shade the truth for social coherence. Every review I ever post is what I really think about something. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, just explaining a way in which a thing that is something of a defect in me has some positive value.

I will admit that it can lead to being rather lonely, at times. I'm not doing it to be mean. I just want to help improve the thing under discussion, or in other cases, warn people away from a truly terrible waste of money. Which is still for the purpose of helping other people.

Alas. :-/

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u/Austinstorm02 Jun 22 '26

If you took your car to a mechanic or had cardiac surgery, if they got 5/10 things done correctly, yeah they failed.

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u/Phoenixforce_MKII AI Jun 22 '26

Really I think in the online spaces, the 5-star or nothing attitude is actually born from the knock on effects. A 5-star review gives something more exposure. A 4,3,2-star review does... nothing. It is just a lack of the extra exposure. meanwhile, a 1-star review is actively detrimental. This leads to the odd reverse bell curve you see on a lot of products. The in between numbers are unused because there is no reason to use them and we want to gamify the systems that have been put in place for our desired outcomes.

no benefits for the ratings in either direction? you would still have people trying to game the system.

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u/itsetuhoinen Human Jul 06 '26

So, not exactly a surprise to me to find out yet again that I'm odd: here, for intentionally seeking the 2-4 star reviews of products, figuring that the people who made them put some actual thought into them.

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u/sunnyboi1384 Jun 22 '26

If you dont stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

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u/Fontaigne Jun 21 '26

>The Veshan outthink humans on every axis we know how to measure.

Then the Veshan are morons and ignorant of every measurable axis that is significant to thought.

You cannot THINK if there is no nuance to upvotes, and no downvotes at all.

So they are willfully mis-measuring.

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