ShittyKopper, 3 months ago

What I’m more worried about are posts relating to news mainly. Where even if the immediate first level comments are fine, there are threads that get out of hand really quickly.

I agree that while posts inherently designed to be controversial may not benefit from Active considering the influences voting has (though me being on an instance that has downvotes disabled may be influencing my view here!), Active may make it significantly easier for an otherwise innocent post to devolve into a flame war.

The main excuse for this kind of algorithm seems to be around “promoting discussion”, but in my experience tech that’s intended to promote discussion does inherently promote flame wars too, as they’re extremely difficult if not impossible to distinguish without a human in the loop. I’ve attempted to write something about this on the microblogging side of the fedi, directly influenced by this post