Votes are pointless if they can't be filtered

I'm not running to be the next red or blue Fuhrer, I'm trying to discuss topics online.

So I don't need a majority. I don't need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's not an election. I only need people with the mental health to discuss things in good faith.

The voting system on reddit and piefed is designed to heavily amplify the terror of how stupid people are.

I already have to try to figure out how to not die while people sabotage the atmosphere with climate change and sabotage modern medicine with anti-intellectualism. So upvotes and downvotes shouldn't make much difference, and intuitively, I would say upvotes and downvotes aren't a big deal. They're just reminders of how denialists and anti-intellectuals that want to kill themselves and me are much more common than friendly people, which is the much bigger problem in itself than reminders of it.

But I was on reddit from a young age, and I never spent time away from it until the past couple years of adulthood, and now I've learned my intuition is wrong. Being buried in downvotes and spammed with lies that get upvotes, while telling the truth, has a very different psychological effect from just being spammed with lies while telling the truth. Now that I can see how different it actually feels, it seems like it's damaged me deeply over the years.

And there's a very easy fix for the psychological factors: filtering. The same way you can remove replies from your view if they come from me in good faith, I should be able to remove votes from my view if they come from people I know act in bad faith. In fact, filtering replies is basically useless and overserved already (allowing people to manipulate the feed by removing other people's posts from everyone's view instead of just their own). Whereas filtering votes would actually be useful.

This would require being able to see who's voted on a post, obviously. In all my years on reddit, I never had a strong opinion on whether reddit votes should be anonymous but now I do - they should not. They should be pseudonymous, meaning someone could still Sybil attack me if they really felt like it, but I would still detect it and deal with it pretty quickly.

There are at least 3 major benefits to this:

• I can find out if people whose opinions are actually worth caring about hate one of my posts (they probably do sometimes, but I'd probably have no idea with the current system)
• Instead of being frustrated or angry when people flood me with downvotes or flood those abusing me with upvotes, I can take it as an opportunity to identify more bad-faith voters to filter, which would feel completely different psychologically. The reminder of being outnumbered by idiots no longer comes with a reminder that they systemically make it impossible to fight back against them in many ways; instead, it becomes a reminder of the ways intelligent people can fight back with superiority.
• Sorting could also be implemented, so my front page could include any posts that were buried in downvotes by known lie supporters / honesty haters

The Nazis will pretend the point of this is to play pretend and enjoy positive vote scores by pretending they're not from filtering negative votes. But no, that is not really a benefit for adults and it is also none of the benefits I listed above, and it's sad that this paragraph is needed.

But people are childish, and that paragraph was needed, because people somehow struggle with the difference between looking for people to discuss topics with online, and debating for an election. It should be pretty simple to comprehend me saying those are 2 different things, but people struggle with stuff like that.

I previously had a post about piefed's design and community making me want to stop viewing / commenting on other people's content and just use it as a place to dump my own, with minimal discussion. I was talked out of it and deleted that post, but I'm back to it now. As long as the voting system is designed to psychologically traumatize me, while I'm surrounded by people who will laugh at that statement and abuse me more over it, it seems like the only point to this place is to drive traffic to my nostr key, and commenting on other people's posts isn't an effective enough traffic driver here.

It seems like it's probably more worthwhile to comment on reddit, because reddit has a bigger audience and more chance someone is impacted or learns something from a discussion, at the cost of the psychological impact on me.