this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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Reddit has long had an issue with confidently providing false statements as fact. Sometimes I would come along a question that I was well educated on, and the top voted responses were all very clearly wrong, but sounded correct to someone who didn't know better. This made me question all the other posts that I had believed without knowing enough to tell otherwise.
Llms also have the same issue of confidently telling lies that sound true. Training on Reddit will only make this worse.
This can be said to https://news.ycombinator.com/ as well. I wonder how much of this is due to sock puppets and bots.
specious /spē′shəs/ adjective
and then the real answer will be hidden or something silly, or in some cases where money is involved the correct answer might have been removed
@Fubarberry yes I saw this a lot too. Highly upvoted confidently incorrect comments, with the real answer or an answer debunking them with links to factual sources less upvoted.
Happened to me as well.
I am a lawyer and I would get down voted for posts explaining the law that contained citations to the actual applicable statute if people didn't like the statute. Using reddit up votes as a measure of correctness is fundamentally a dumb idea.
@collapse_already yeah Reddit also tended to mistake explanation for agreement and savagely downvote it.
The problem is that SEO has made it impossible to find accurate information easily, since even "old, trustworthy brands" can't be trusted online. [This is an excellent article that explains the problem thoroughly, and brings receipts] (https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/).
Great article, thanks for mentioning it!
That's a really good article, and it does a good job of highlighting the issues with modern day search results.
I've been guilty to use "best x" pages before, but if the website with the "best of page" doesn't have specific reviews linked I usually look up individual product reviews for the good sounding items on other websites.
This is a great example of why it's so important to emphasize teaching critical thinking in school right now. Misinformation and disinformation is just going to continue to grow.
Literally why I bookmarked it. I'm an online teacher, so I'm going to advocate for adding that article to a grade 10 course that's used by thousands of students each year.
I'm a student teacher right now in elementary! I try to get my kids to think critically whenever I can. I hear kids talk about insane shit they saw/heard on tiktok (I got into an argument with a student who thought Slenderman was 100% real because of something they saw on tiktok) and I try to really get them to think and actually justify why they believe things.
Somewhat related:
A recommendation about teaching controversial topics: you need to build connection first.
I mean, that's true of all teaching, but when you start to question the (prejudiced) things they're hearing from trusted adults at home, you really need to have a strong relationship with the students.
Being an anti-racist pro-SOGI educator in conservative communities is hard.
I wish you success in your career! Teachers have such an opportunity to make a huge impact on the world.
An uphill battle for sure. I wish you the best of luck.
Yeah all of my most down voted reddit comments were the ones where I replied about something I'm an actual expert in. Scary stuff
I spent 20 years as a producer, developer, and project manager in the lottery and games industry.
Trying to explain how lottery and games work to people and have them hear me makes me want to cry.
Fascinating! I’d love to hear a little about it, if you don’t mind.
Certainly, I'm always happy to share with inquisitive minds.
Is there any particular question you'd like me to address?
Not really, I never paid much mind to it. I’m curious about the whole industry I guess, or anything you’d like to share or set the record straight about.
Oh there's lots I have to set the record straight about and there's lots I could talk about, but without being asked a specific question that would just leave me to write an open-ended essay and I'm not up for it right now
Downvoting was always just fast food validation that you're better than someone else without having to actually back it up.
The voting system let's people push comments to the top that they want to be true, not necessarily things that are true.
I strongly agree with this comment. To show my appreciation, you have my upvote. Had I only agreed a little bit, I might have not voted at all. If that comment had made me angry, I might have downvoted.
Actually calling these things votes instead of likes makes a lot of sense. I might not like a comment, but I might want it to be higher. I might not hate another comment, but I might want it to be lower because of other reasons.
There's also the issue of reddit comment sorting being entirely dominated by time. In something like 90% of posts, the top comment is one of the first five. Literally all you have to do is just comment first, and it'll likely be the top.
This tends to give more influence to people who spend more time on it and write more. And they are less likely to be subject matter experts.
I noticed from the beginning that Lemmy's default comment sorting improves visibility of a variety of comments including newer ones. Gee, I wonder who could have helped make it that way ;)
Over the years I ended up getting a Reddit habit of replying to one of the top comments so that it could attain some visibility. I still do sometimes but less often on Lemmy.
Because it's like old forums where the first person to comment gets engagement
Some of the better subreddits tried to mix it up and change how this affected upvotes. There was Muxing,..etc etc.. But then,.. Spez came in (back) and didn’t give af about anything at all except money.
First time I'm hearing about this, can you give any links? Maybe we could use something similar in lemmy
Muxing upvotes , “balances”, etc.
Even hiding all upvotes of every comment thread until ~12 hrs after posting.
I'm still not sure what those first two mean.
Hiding vote counts is a good idea imo however, having the info visible can influence people's judgement of the comment and cause people to also vote based on the existing score rather than just the comment itself.