Use case for predicate rating system: Discussion board multidimensional sort

Main article: Applications

Probably the most prolific discussion forum in today’s world, or at least a very successful one, is Reddit. We examine Reddit and some of its shortcomings below, and attempt to use the predicate rating system to suggest a better solution.

General overview

Reddit is a discussion board which consists of several separate user-created, user-moderated boards called “subreddits.” Although site administration has the ultimate say in what is allowed to be posted and who is allowed to post and moderate, much of this control is delegated to the user-moderators of individual subreddits. Senior user-moderators can promote and demote other users to and from moderator status, and moderation activities have very little oversight or input from site administration.

Within any particular subreddit, “posts” can be made by users according to that subreddit’s topic and rules. Comments can be made on these posts as well as on the comments themselves. What results is a sort of tree structure, with the subreddit at the root, with top-level posts as immediate child nodes, and comments as children of those children and so on.

Post and comment sorting

On Reddit, posts and comments are sorted by a simple, dichotomous upvote-downvote system. Comments are given a score, with each upvote adding 1 to the score, and each downvote subtracting 1. Significantly negative scores result in comments being hidden by default. There are multiple sorting algorithms provided, and users may switch between them, but the default and most popular sort is “best”, which for all intents and purposes behaves mostly like a simple sort on the aforementioned score.

The actual meaning of the upvote and downvote is subjective to each particular situation, subreddit, and user. The most prevalant interpretation of upvotes and downvotes is, respectively, “I liked this” and “I did not like this.” This presents one obvious issue: unpopular opinions will sink to the bottom, and popular opinions will rise to the top, resulting in a lack of effective discourse: whichever opinion is most popular will be the only one visible, along with all the encouraging sub-comments and so on.

Various alternative interpretations are suggested by different communities. r/AmITheAsshole loudly announces: “don’t downvote the assholes!” Similarly, /r/unpopularopinion implores users to consider the topic of the subreddit when making their voting decisions, lest the front pages of the subreddit be flooded with popular opinions. These suggestions seem to fall upon deaf ears.

Donald Trump thread case study

As an example of the failure of the upvote/downvote system to enable discourse, let’s look at a question that comes up on /r/AskReddit from time to time: some variation of, “those of you who support Donald Trump, why?”

This question has potential. Regardless of anyone’s personal opinion on the person in question, it could be a useful exercise for everyone involved: those who do not support Donald Trump might use such a thread to relate to their opponents and see which issues they may be able to have a discussion on; those who do would have an opportunity to make their case.

Instead, what invariably happens is, since /r/AskReddit and most mainstream subreddits in general have a strong leftward bias, any responses from actual Trump supporters are immediately downvoted en masse. Using the “controversial” sort algorithm is then somewhat helpful at finding what one might be looking for in this kind of thread; however, one will find mostly low-quality or ingenuine responses, with some actually helpful responses in between.

A multidimensional alternative

Instead of simply relying on upvotes and downvotes, a predicate could be rated for each comment in such a thread for one of any number of criteria. For example:

• This response is on-topic.
• This response was made in good faith.
• This response is serious.
• This response is funny.
• This is a high-quality response.
• This response shows a [liberal/conservative] bias.
• The author of this response is a real human being.

The set of predicates to be rated could vary based on the individual thread in question. There could be some which were attached to certain users, and those would colour sorting of that user’s responses everywhere they went. For example, a user who is commonly believed to be a robot may be an undesirable contributor according to many human users, so such users could be assigned a lower sort priority.

Applying this approach to the case study above, we could for example ask the same question: “Who still supports Donald Trump, and why?” We could then suggest the following predicates to rate on responses to this question:

• This response was made in good faith.
• This response does not make any personal attacks.
• This response is in support of Donald Trump as a political figure.
• The author of this response shows a conservative bias.

It could be argued that a comment sort made on these criteria would be far more likely to result in useful discourse.