We’re squarely in our “good vibes only” era as a species.
You don’t have to like facts for them to be facts.
Careful son, you’re perilously close to saying “feelings”
I haven’t seen it that bad on this platform, but on reddit it’s so awful that I have to always check downvoted comments for the 50/50 chance that the comment is entirely reasonable and provides genuinely beneficial information, rather than being completely insane.
It’s also just really sad that people would often ask questions and then downvote an answer not for being wrong, but because it was something they didn’t want to hear. Then immediately after respond with, “You have so many downvotes, you must be wrong.” One of the old legal subreddits from around five years ago was infamous for this. Why yes, go ahead and trust the unverified user who didn’t link to any code. I’m sure they are absolutely correct.
With respect to Lemmy and Reddit (don’t have much experience with other social media platforms), it often just comes down to the audience.
Some users and some subs are just so fragile and so propagandized that any tiny bit of resistance or any comment slightly against the standard is met with down votes and negativity.
On Reddit, I think my most down voted comment that’s coming to mind was in an environmental sub. Someone mentioned that they didn’t see any “bugs” around their outdoor lights the night prior even though those lights would have been covered in bugs when that person was a kid.
I acknowledged that I am fully aware that insect populations are in collapse/decline. However, what the person was witnessing wasn’t a fair comparison because it was currently winter time where they lived (which was obvious from their other comments) and because modern LED lights don’t produce as much heat or ultraviolet light (both things are highly attractive to nocturnal insects) as previous technology.
I think I got something like -342 on my comment within a day or two.
It’s frustrating how many assumptions people make about your beliefs just because you are trying to make a purely fact-based correction. Like if I try to say something like “the victim was actually armed when they were shot by the police” (made up example) people just instantly assume I’m a fascist bootlicker when I’m really just trying to get the facts straight. It’s just that misinformation that goes against prevailing opinion gets instantly swatted down but misinformation that validates people’s opinions is tolerated way more than it should be.
We are in a purely vibes based media landscape. The left cares more about facts than does the right, but overall neither cares overly much about them.
If it was here on Lemmy, there’s a good chance many of the downvotes are the same person on multiple accounts engaging in vote manipulation. Probably true on Reddit, too, but much harder to confirm since none of that stuff is public.
I can’t believe that shit is a thing. I mean, don’t these ppl know about having a job, a favorite PC-game or at the very least smoking weed?
Touching grass (all interpretations)
(checks notes, statistically analyzing frequency patterns, outsourcing to consulting firm) Apparently not!
Also, downvotes are fun to collect! All of you’re grandmother’s r poopieheads!
I complained about this downvoting behavior in the past (on a different account), pointing out specific accounts, and the admins and mods don’t care. They told me not to complain, instead.
I wouldn’t put it past some instance admins to be the ones engaging in the vote manipulation themselves. There’s plenty of dickhead admins that spun up their own instances because their views aren’t welcome elsewhere and they can more easily control an echo chamber.
If it was on .world no, they don’t care.
The mods were on .world. The accounts were from several different instances.
I figured. They’d rather not rock the boat than do what’s right.
I’ve been accused of providing ai generated information then I’ve provided a wiki source and gotten more downvotes. I feel like the only possible way someone could be convinced that a fact is an ai hallucination is to have read the fact I provided, googled said fact, seen the fact in the ai summary and then decided “it’s in the summary it must be false.” That’s such a hypocritical thing to do after accusing someone of being wrong and using ai in my opinion.
There was this one magical time where posting a source got this one user to change their mind and I don’t know if I should be happy that it worked one time or sad that it’s only worked one time. Also still got downvoted, only after the person I replied to admitted they were wrong did people start coming around but the ratio was still fucked. Something like 50 votes of them saying I was wrong to my like 5 providing a source.
don’t forget that downvotes mostly help with sorting. they don’t mean “this is wrong”. they mean the reader didn’t like it and it should be sorted further down or even start collapsed. it can just be a highly unpopular or disgusting truth ppl want to swipe under the rug. it can also be totally irrelevant or link/quote sites ppl don’t like and want to reduce traffic to or be forgotten (reddit, xitter, fb come to mind)
it’s just a quick feedback that can help the community.
Do you know what else helps with sorting? Upvotes.
Do you know what else helps with hiding spam? Reports.
If you have upvotes and you have reports, then you already have all of the information you need as a platform. Downvotes are unnecessary.
Plus, speaking of sorting, accounts that use downvotes get double the votes for sorting than accounts do that only use upvotes. Yet, the types of people who downvote a lot are… well, they’re the assholes. So, you give assholes more control over the platform than good people by having downvotes.
So, downvotes are unnecessary and they give extra power to assholes, making the entire user experience worse.
“only upvotes” don’t help as much, because you get a gap where ppl don’t like it. you can only use ppl who like it to sort, which may be much less than ppl who dislike it.
also, once downvoted from many ppl, fewer ppl see the content and it gets less downvotes.
actually downvotes give less “power to aasholes”, because otherwise ppl can post their evil shit like on xitter and they and the algorithm assume silence=agreement, even though agreeing takes only one tap while disagreeing requires writing a comment. this emboldens the “assholes”. they get little to no feedback ppl don’t like it. on top of it, there are ways/algos to sort by number of comments. so if ppl actually dislike it so much to write a comment, it pushes the bad post up on these rankings, shoving the horrible stuff in even more ppls faces.
I disliked not being able to downvote when I moved to blahaj, but I kinda love it now. If I like the content I upvote, if I dislike it not I either respond (not for them really but for other readers), tag them or block/report. I upvote much more than before now.
If the comment isn’t deserving a block/report, is there any merit to downvote them really? If they are assholes just block/report, and if you just disagree, you can either respond in good faith or ignore them.
You either downvote because you disagree, which is a soft censorship since you are lowering the visibility of the comment you disagree, or you downvote because they are assholes, when you should have blocked/reported them to actually eliminate that comment if it’s actually bad.
Downvotes offer nothing of value.
I do think downvotes are universally a terrible idea, but for the part about reposting from xitter, which is the only point you made with any small merit, that is only relevant to post downvotes.
If they got rid of comment downvotes and left the post downvotes, you’d still have enough data to sort. People could still vote for comments strategically.
Comment downvotes are a clear case. If you’re making a valid argument, and talking about the topic, then the only people who would downvote you are raging assholes. Here’s the list of people who voted for my previous comment. As you can see, it’s got the full public list of downvoters. Strange. One of those usernames looks familiar. One might look at that and come to the conclusion that certain people here are not coming to this discussion in an honest manner.
that depends on what you think is honest. maybe the ppl think repeating this discussion again is boring and they dislike it. don’t take it personally. you are not your content.
btw mastodon and bluesky don’t have downvotes. i think ppl who are here instead on those, decided this way is better. i for one left mastodon in favor of lemmy.
maybe the ppl think repeating this discussion again is boring and they dislike it.
See? You don’t honestly believe that’s the reason for the previous comment being downvoted. The person I responded to was arguing the other side of that argument. If people were simply tired of the boring discussion, they’d have downvoted the parent, as well. You can use that same service I linked in the previous comment to see exactly how many people voted like that. This is what I’m talking about coming to the discussion in an honest manner.
btw mastodon and bluesky don’t have downvotes. i think ppl who are here instead on those, decided this way is better. i for one left mastodon in favor of lemmy.
I originally came from Reddit and never saw any appeal in Twitter or Twitter clones whenever I tried them out. Regardless, I don’t think the argument makes sense. Either it’s a good idea or it’s not. If it’s a good idea, then there is no reason why it shouldn’t be used on both platforms.
People misuse and misattribute Wikipedia sources all the time. source
The panels are out of sequence. The accusation goes after the Wikipedia post.
dislikes are certain when dealing with all the unreasonables. The tankies, the vegans and grammar nazis spring to mind. These groups will brigade in to stomp on any one who hurts their fragile feels. I enjoy a large number of dislikes just as much as a large number of likes. I know I’ve put my finger on the center of the subject either way.
sauce
Wikipedia
ISHYGDDT
1 bajillion likes
Remember now, every Lemmy user who is reading this currently is guilty of this. If you’re on Lemmy you’ve done this before
Let me check.
I have got some alternative facts that say otherwise.
Source? Trust me bro I made it up!
u
Downvote. Back.
Has to be. Just got -10 downvoted on a post for no apparent reason whatsoever unless one person didn’t understand what I was saying and went on a downvote spree
Nah dude, I just looked at the comment you were talking about. You were bagging on someone else for a minor grammar mistake that everyone else understood just fine. You got down voted because you were being a pedantic dick, then did the thing that always guarantees down votes: editing your comment to call everyone idiots for down voting you.
Lmao one of them followed me here and brought the army.
I’ll be blocking you so our paths don’t cross again because fuck me, it must be exhausting being one of you
havent looked in your profile to look up your past comments because you already provided all the evidence needed to prove you’re just an asshole.
Wauw, da zegt genoeg over u, randdebiel
Nope, just assumed based off your comment here that you’re one of that special brand of internet douchebag that gets down votes and immediately cries foul. There’s no one following you, there’s no army of people waiting in the wings to downvote you, you are not important. You’re just a little baby trump trying to shield your fragile ego.
Some bad news for you there chief, blocking someone only stops you from seeing their posts/comments, they can still see what you’ve posted/commented and vote/reply as normal. It’s less “our paths won’t cross again” and more “I’ll be putting my head in the sand now so I don’t see you approaching”
Awe you think you’re important enough to follow and downvote lol
I wish lemmy and piefed didn’t use downvotes. Just upvotes buttons.
But even then, an ideal forum imo would be one without any of that stuff. Like 4chan, except without the trash community that they have
Edit: Case in point, as soon I posted this comment, it got downvoted. Instead of having people engage and explain their points of view, maybe even have an interesting discussion about it, downvote buttons serve as an immediate “disagree” button. It’s a design that dicentivizes discussion
As someone who down voted your comment, allow me to explain both why I think you are wrong and why I wasn’t going to waste time replying.
Firstly, the problem with not showing down votes is that the posts below would look the same
10k 🔺 100k 🔻
10k 🔺 0🔻
But we obviously know that 100k down votes is considerably worse than 0.
And secondly, why I didn’t comment? You didn’t ask a question, you haven’t haven’t said why you think your version is better to drive the conversation forward. You just made a comment. I disagree with it so I down voted it. if someone agrees, they up vote. Over time the ratio will show what the general opinion is.
I have more respect for you for explaining and taking the time to reply. I have even upvoted your comment, despite disagreeing with it.
For me, upvotes and downvotes should not be used as agree/disagree buttons. Instead, they should be about “brings interesting points to the table”/“this comment adds nothing”.
But that’s not how the majority of people view them. Realizing that, that’s why I don’t believe this system works, as it dicentivizes discussions and - in my opinion - helps creating echo chambers.
A good example of a forum that uses only upvotes is Tildes. You need an invite to participate, but you can lurk and see what people do over there. Popular opinions still get to the top and get highlighted (resolving the issue of guaranteeing that the most helpful comments appear first, which is important for posts asking about tech issues and whatnot), and less popular opinions still appear down below. But here’s the thing: in my experience in that forum, those less popular opinions are engaged with far more than what I see in Reddit, piefed or lemmy. Why? Because you can’t downvote them. There’s no button for that. If you want to express disagreement, you actually have to do that.
Because otherwise, using my comment as example:
- what did people disagree with?
-
The suggestion that the downvote button shouldn’t exist?
-
The suggestion that neither of them should exist?
-
Me calling 4chan community trash?
-
All of the above?
No discussion is added, no new insights appear, nothing. Without your comment, this comment that I’m writing now wouldn’t exist either.
Thus my point, we are discussing and bringing new insights to the table.
10k 🔺 100k 🔻
10k 🔺 0🔻You forgot that it often looks like:
-90k🔻
In some cases I might prefer the 10k/-100k one to be honest.
Yes, but then these…
15k🔺 16k🔻 81 🔺1,096🔻
…both sum to -1k🔻, when the ratios are wildly different. If you really wanted to change the system, I would submit for consideration
total votesanddown:up ratio %:31k 🔥 48% ⚖️ 1.2k 🔥 0% ⚖️
In fact, you could easily do that at the client level if you wanted. I’d try it out for sure, I know I’ve seen it elsewhere.
-1k looks awful
but +15k/-16k makes it look pretty neutral.
As another downvoter I will also take the time to explain:
I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.
If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.
The downvote button is a quick shortcut to let people know their comment is “bad”, with a lot less risk of raising attention to the level where someone might dig through post/comment history or worse doxx/swat someone.
Does that mean that downvoting is perfect? Of course not. I would say that probably downvotes should be weighted much lower than 1:1 with upvotes, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it makes sense to ignore them completely or maybe just a tiebreaker. Might also be important to distinguish comment-downvotes from post-downvotes, but I’ll gladly leave it to the software designers to worry about all that.
I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.
Considering the point of the comment - and the post being about downvotes - my edit was meant to illustrate the point, not to whine.
Regardless, about another thing that I feel is more relevant:
If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.
To me this is not… A healthy way to interact with forums. You don’t have to engage with every post or comment you come across, be it with commenting or voting. You’re “allowed” to be neutral, to not know, to not have an opinion, or to simply not want to engage.
And if you feel that someone is pulling you into a pointless argument, you can just walk away. Having the last word != being right, as a lot of people misunderstand.
And if people posting ragebaits becomes an issue, downvoting or replying to them won’t solve anything. The problem would need to be fixed on a more fundamental level, but that’s another can of worms that mods need to figure out on their own communities. As for me, I simply walked away, as I did with Reddit and others
I just find it very odd, the seeming beginning of a Lemmy culture of “you would downvote me? EXPLAIN YOURSELF SIR”
No, I should not need to explain myself, a downvote shouldn’t carry that much weight, it’s not that big of a deal. Less than a middle-finger or even a thumbs down. At most a disagreeing shake of the head in conversation.
Further, the reasons can be their own, maybe someone wants to downvote everyone with a username starting with “h” just for a fun gimmick.
It has nothing to do with explaining oneself, but more about fostering discussion. You can check my earlier reply to the other user where I explain it better.
Sure but not every opinion needs to be a discussion. There’s nothing wrong with downvoting or upvoting and moving on.
You remember when Youtube neutered their downvote button? It’s still there but effectively useless? Now we can’t warn other users of AI slop, scams, or the other terribleness the web is full of.
But sure let’s do that to Lemmy.
There are some communities which have downvotes disabled, blahaj is one of them. I don’t know how many downvotes you have and I don’t care anymore. It’s way more interesting to engage. Also, since I’m on blahaj I comment and upvote much more. Downvotes kill discussion.
i downvoted you bc i disagree with your stance on the existence of the downvote button. i think its a helpful tool for the quality of the site and user experience. i have no idea who you are, i havent even read your username.
Disliking must be highly addictive 😂
If they got rid of downvotes then what are we supposed to do when tankies post their slop?
Ignore, block, report. Maybe leave a comment so others that join have an anchor to read.
Idk, it’s not the end of the world.
Dogpile on them
Reply explaining why their view is terrible so that then they can complain that they are getting dogpiled for having a opinion and not everyone needs to reply.
but they can’t read
Honestly, reading comments around, remove display of up/down votes entirely, but keep the system and instead add two tags “Popular” and “Unpopular”, both working on certain tresholds to both amount of votes and ratio of votes. Keep positioning mechanics with using votes to position content, but apply them only to tagged elements.
This way we enable discussion on most topics without problems and incentivise actually talking about topics, while still keeping the means to flag both bad will content and content most valued by community.
With Lemmy I’d say having minimum 50 votes total for comment and 100 for post sound good for total vote treshold, while having 75% of upvotes/downotes sounds good as a ratio treshold. But I am not sure on these, as I am honestly freeballin it right now.
Heck, leave the amount of total votes up to communities - some are bigger, some are smaller after all.
I agree with you. Internet forums were better before likes/etc.
Before you had to state an opinion to engage any idea. Which drives conversations. You had to stake your reputation via alias. Which is why forums built such strong communities.
There were certainly downsides and old style forums don’t scale well for modern user levels.
But I think the defaultism of likes/voting lowers the bar of participation and in doing so also fundamentally lowers the quality of any conclusions derived therein.
Yeah, something that is becoming very clear in these replies is that people got used to Reddit way of things.
Perhaps it’s one of those things that you have to experience for yourself.
Weird. Is it because I’m on the Voyager app I don’t see downvote options? Or the community my account is on?
It’s a setting, defaulted off I think.
Might be the community. Voyager here shows downvote buttons (in my lemmy.world account)
You can still click the ‘…’ for the downvote option
Enforced toxic positivity does not produce better conversations or better communities. It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there’s no other option. It’s the kind of yes-man thinking you get in corporate meetings that produce really bad ideas because “don’t be negative! there are no bad ideas here!”
It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there’s no other option
In my experience, that’s not what happens
The only Lemmy community I’m aware of that has actually removed downvotes is hexbear - because they were tired of having their pro-Maoist rhetoric downvoted to oblivion by sane people. Hexbear is not a healthy place.
Blahaj has then disabled too, and I’m sure there’s more.
I actually engage in more disagreements now because I don’t have the easy down button. I’m pretty anti downvote now tbh.
I wouldn’t imply that the unhealthyness of hexbear is due to the disabled downvoting though, and I’m sure you aren’t either, but just to be clear.
I wouldn’t imply that the unhealthyness of hexbear is due to the disabled downvoting though, and I’m sure you aren’t either, but just to be clear.
No, I’m implying the reverse: disabling downvoting is a symptom of the unhealthy mentality of the people running that server. Disabling downvoting appeals to authoritarians - that is, the type of people who are interested in silencing dissent (QED).
Oh, so you are actually implying that blahaj has an unhealthy mentality too since we don’t have downvoting?
Bruh. I was trying to give you an out, nvm.
Enforced toxic positivity is unhealthy, yes.
It’s not the cause, it’s a symptom of a larger problem.
What would I need an “out” for?
I don’t have much experience with that community, but from the little I’ve seen, agreed. It’s not good.
A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn’t matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.
The best communities I’ve been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don’t feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.
A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn’t matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.
Yes, well, the problem with hexbear was that it started with bad actors. As they made their true colors apparent to the lemmy community at large, they were increasingly defederated.
The best communities I’ve been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don’t feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.
Oh yes, my past experience is in old web forums as well. Those communities were more isolated though, they essentially existed inside their own bubbles. Unregistered users could read them, but not participate in any functional way, and typically the people that found them were looking for a community like that on purpose.
I’ve also experienced such communities becoming toxic due to the actions of individual moderators or admins, post voting not required.
Ultimately I think I agree this far - if you’re going to disable voting you should do all of it. Removing only the downvoting is the YouTube path, the authoritarian path, the toxic positivity path.
The average internet user unfortunately is a dumb person and if they come across something they do not understand, they downvote :/ it is that mentality, the bits and the propaganda which led me away from Reddit. Sad to see it here so soon
