I am literally here, now, commenting on this because I am reading the article to this on reddit and ..... I can't believe they are going to start punishing upvotes! That is the final stray for Reddit. Its dead. Gone the way of Digg. I am literally here now to start moving over to Lemmy.
I just realized - and must keep in mind, with a federated platform like lemmy, all of your upvotes and downvotes are broadcasted across the network. ANYONE could track your upvotes and downvotes in THIS system.
If an instance becomes oppressive, nothing is stopping you from going to a new one. You can’t do that with Reddit. Let’s say my instance Lemmy.ca becomes awful, I can make a new account on another and still comment on this community. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
If I post to a public website in a plaintext protocol and my ISP also intercepts+logs that transmission, is it spying since the post was public anyhow?
So keep that in mind when interacting with the fediverse
These are public forums, it's almost the point for things to be public. You could argue that votes shouldn't be part of it, but ultimately due to the decentralized nature they must be communicated to all servers
I mean any organization that's a risk to use my data maliciously is one that can afford buying it, so I actually prefer this to my data being equally easy to access but reddit gets paid for it.
My comment isn't too say that Reddit is good, but rather that we might be able to do things on Lemmy a bit better for user safety/privacy. Aggregating upvotes to an origin seems good to me
Honestly, I don't even like the downvote/upvote system because it promotes censorship and a lot of the times it's just an agree/disagree button. I feel that no matter how right or wrong someone is, they should always be able to express their opinion in a civil manner (obviously there are mods for removing rule breaking posts/comments). Downvoting just kills any discussion.
Not really, it's removing the comments that isn't violating is the real problem. There are definitely comments that should be downvoted for many reasons
Well, I don't disagree with you. All I'm saying is that I've personally seen the downvote function being abused a lot. It kinda works for making interesting posts visible but in the comments it usually leads to certain arguments (even civil ones without insulting or trolling) being downvoted and hiding the comment. Karma is honestly meaningless to me, I just enjoy conversations and seeing different opinions even if I disagree with them. I see why it exists and in a perfect world it's a great way to make moderation manageable on bigger platforms (like reddit and lemmy). Sadly we don't live in a perfect world.
Trolling and insults usually break rules and can be reported. Comments like that deserve all the downvotes they get since they detract from discussion and don't add to it. Although honestly most forums I visit deal with that pretty well too (with no karma system in place).
I've been places without upvotes and downvotes and they're just garbage piles of spam and useless replies.
The Steam Comminity Forms for instance: if you're trying to get any useful information on a recent release go somewhere else, as half of what you'll find is people complaining that the game is *woke" (because there is a woman or a minority in it somewhere), and the other half is people complaining that the game isn't a completely different genre.
With downvotes the useless, troll, and off topic comments can be filtered out to not clutter up the useful posts.
There are upsides and downsides to everything. Open votes means it's harder to manufacture consent. That's something someone on Reddit could do, where they bot vote their own content to the top of the feed and nobody would be none the wiser because you don't know how and when someone voted. And it's not really a "could do", it's something that (at least a few years ago) happened regularly.
But on Lemmy voting is open so if someone starts up a bot farm to push their content to the top it is (relatively) easy to discover.
Banning for mentioning Luigi is just absurd. Up voting has been a thing for a while , they just extended what it violated. Before this, up voting excessively or so soon after account creation flags you as a bot