Pavlos Maros
Well-Known Member
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I've recently been answering questions put by Quora, so this starts there.
You write something thoughtful. Not clickbait, not rage, just a considered answer. People like it, they upvote it, and Quora makes sure you know. A little notification arrives. This mattered. Do more of this. However when people dislike it, when they down-vote it, nothing happens. No signal. No message. No friction. The post is simply shown to fewer people, quietly stepped away from the light.
That is the moment the system reveals itself.
On the surface, it looks neutral. In reality, it is teaching you how to behave. Approval is loud. Disapproval is silent. You are rewarded for fitting the mood and gently erased for challenging it. Platforms train people to think in terms of audience, not exchange. Visibility, not relationship. Agreement, not dialogue.
On Quora (this is the same with most social media) you are not meant to learn from disagreement. You are meant to learn what keeps you visible. Downvotes often mean someone disagreed, not that you were wrong. However disagreement slows momentum, so the system treats it like something to smooth over rather than examine.
Over time, people adapt without realising it. They stop writing what they think and start writing what will be noticed. They aim for nods, not conversations. The silence around down-votes teaches them that friction equals disappearance.
This design is not accidental. Platforms are not neutral public squares, they are attention-capture machines funded by engagement metrics. Down-votes that spark reflection do not serve the business model. Upvotes that encourage more posting do. The architecture is working exactly as intended, which is why individual resistance feels so futile.
You are not meant to question it. You are meant to perform.
What is interesting is that people who still notice this are usually not playing the optimisation game at all. They are still expecting systems to behave like human spaces. They expect feedback to mean something. They expect connection to be mutual. They expect disagreement to be part of understanding.
That expectation now feels out of place online, which says more about the systems than it does about the people holding it.
In a strange way, not getting it is a kind of clarity. It means you have not internalised the training. You are still operating from values rather than incentives. Most people stop questioning because the system works on them.
The ones who pause and say this is odd are usually the ones still thinking for themselves.
You write something thoughtful. Not clickbait, not rage, just a considered answer. People like it, they upvote it, and Quora makes sure you know. A little notification arrives. This mattered. Do more of this. However when people dislike it, when they down-vote it, nothing happens. No signal. No message. No friction. The post is simply shown to fewer people, quietly stepped away from the light.
That is the moment the system reveals itself.
On the surface, it looks neutral. In reality, it is teaching you how to behave. Approval is loud. Disapproval is silent. You are rewarded for fitting the mood and gently erased for challenging it. Platforms train people to think in terms of audience, not exchange. Visibility, not relationship. Agreement, not dialogue.
On Quora (this is the same with most social media) you are not meant to learn from disagreement. You are meant to learn what keeps you visible. Downvotes often mean someone disagreed, not that you were wrong. However disagreement slows momentum, so the system treats it like something to smooth over rather than examine.
Over time, people adapt without realising it. They stop writing what they think and start writing what will be noticed. They aim for nods, not conversations. The silence around down-votes teaches them that friction equals disappearance.
This design is not accidental. Platforms are not neutral public squares, they are attention-capture machines funded by engagement metrics. Down-votes that spark reflection do not serve the business model. Upvotes that encourage more posting do. The architecture is working exactly as intended, which is why individual resistance feels so futile.
You are not meant to question it. You are meant to perform.
What is interesting is that people who still notice this are usually not playing the optimisation game at all. They are still expecting systems to behave like human spaces. They expect feedback to mean something. They expect connection to be mutual. They expect disagreement to be part of understanding.
That expectation now feels out of place online, which says more about the systems than it does about the people holding it.
In a strange way, not getting it is a kind of clarity. It means you have not internalised the training. You are still operating from values rather than incentives. Most people stop questioning because the system works on them.
The ones who pause and say this is odd are usually the ones still thinking for themselves.
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option was not available.