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  • Upvotes/downvotes are unfortunately a fundamentally flawed concept. They originally served as an superior alternative to forums' previous sorting method of most-recently commented, but they are far from flawless themselves.

    My ideal alternative would be some kind of customisable sort order chosen by the user that uses some kind of sentiment analysis of the text to find the kind of posts the user is interested in. For example, you could sort by whether post look serious or joking, how long they are, ratio of words to hyperlinks, etc. Could also filter out ragebait and similar rubbish.

    Of course I can see downsides - performance considerations, and it would only work for text posts and comments, but it's just an idea off the top of my head.

  • Not just fediverse, I think any site that allows "downvotes" has this issue.

    Personally, I don't see why the ability to downvote needs to exist. If someone is trolling, ignore it or report it. A troll post with a score of 1 and no comments is better than one with a score of -100 and no comments. The downvotes probably encourages the troll. They know they've upset a bunch of people. All their posts getting no interaction will bore them.

    On the other hand, downvotes existing leads to things being hated on for no reason. Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines. Now sardines isn't looking so bad even though the number of people who like it hasn't changed. What does the downvoting add? It just makes the people who like sardines feel bad. They might end up not contributing in the future and then every answer to asklemmy ends up being identical.

    • Downvotes are useful to make bad content sink. Without them, the bad content has the exact same score as fresh new content, content that failed the Fluff Principle, etc. And you do want the bad content to sink; if you don't reduce its visibility, some clueless muppet is bound to interact with it, usually generating more bad content.

      That's why I'm not sure if the best solution is to outright remove downvotes. It feels to me like throwing the baby out with the dirty water.

      Instead I feel like splitting its role into 2+ buttons might alleviate the issue. Perhaps a simple "disagree" button, or a more complex Slashdot-like system, dunno. Either way, giving people way to say "I disagree!" without interfering on the main purpose of the button - sorting content.

      This could also solve another issue with downvotes I don't see people mentioning often: you're often downvoted without knowing why.

      Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines.

      At least in the default interface, the sardines comment would show +12 -62, so you know at least 11 people upvoted it.

      • If we’re using votes to rank content then downvotes are redundant because now you have to upvote „right” stuff and downvote „wrong” stuff. Assuming everyone is waging the same kind of information warfare then downvotes won’t anything… but we’re not. Those that downvote willy nilly just want to have more say in things than others who don’t have energy to religiously clean website from „wrong” content. You’re not responsible for safeguarding users from „wrong” content unless you’re reporting rule breaking one. If you don’t like what’s being said but it doesn’t break rules then reply and explain why is it wrong, let others upvote if they agree.

        Tildes solved this already. They have regular upvotes and they have labels for offtopic/noise/malice. Being able to use labels is reserved to users with good standing and can be applied once only. Noise downranks things without removing them, malice is essentially same as reporting them. Notably, there is no label for „wrong”.

      • Downvotes are useful to make bad content sink. Without them, the bad content has the exact same score as fresh new content, content that failed the Fluff Principle, etc

        I don't see how downvotes help filter content. It makes sense at first, but either people are sorting content by New, in which case votes do not matter, or they are sorting by Top and will get only the "good" content. Several instances already have downvotes disabled. I don't see any complaints from their users about "bad" content having the same scores as "good" content.

        lemmynsfw had to disable downvotes because gay content posted in gay communities was being downvoted. It wasn't being downvoted for quality, but for not being what the majority of users wanted to see. That doesn't mean all users now have to see gay content they don't like because they can't downvote it. It's still easy to filter using the block feature. Again, I've never seen users there complaining about being unable to filter good from bad because they can't downvote.

        if you don't reduce its visibility, some clueless muppet is bound to interact with it, usually generating more bad content.

        I've seen posts and comments with -100 votes often get lots of interaction from people who can't stop themselves from arguing with a troll. Sometimes there's only 1 or 2 comments under a post so the score doesn't even change its visibility at all.

        Either way, giving people way to say "I disagree!" without interfering on the main purpose of the button - sorting content.

        The way to say "I disagree!" is with the reply button! Votes don't prove who is right and who is wrong. I've never changed my opinion because of downvotes. Sometimes I even agree with a downvoted comment because I form my opinion based on arguments, not votes.

        I also like seeing different opinions. Yours gave me a lot to think about! It'd be a shame if people didn't post their thoughts because they feared being downvoted for it.

    • I really liked how you explained this, thank you

  • posts on /all immediately get downvoted by bots and users who enjoy downvoting everything. You can use lemvotes or be a mod and see these accounts. I have seen accounts with many thousands of downvotes and zero comments or upvotes. Best to just ignore the votes or go to an instance that ignores them if you can't 🤷🏼‍♀️

  • Just stop allowing downvotes? That's how it is in hexbear instance. Problem solved.

    • Problem solved.

      Now you got another problem: people using cringe emotes instead of downvotes. Except they highlight bad content instead of sinking it.

  • Sadly... yes.

    Some people feel like (I would say "think" but that seems not entirely accurate:-P) their preferences are the only ones that should matter, and that their right to "speak" should triumph over ("trump"?) your right to not have to listen. Entirely without the slightest hint of awareness as to the irony that they are supporting the very right-wing fascist ideologies that they claim to be against!! (I have taken to calling these the "Alt-Left", since they act identically to the USA "Alt-Right" that uses "alternative facts" in lieu of real ones as the basis for their belief structures). e.g. if they do not like a certain book then it is not sufficient for them to simply never read it - instead, everyone else must be denied the opportunity to access it as well, regardless of the circumstances you may find yourself in (being required to read it as part of a college course, seeking a well-balanced viewpoint by examining all sides of an issue, even highly negative ones?).

    See also the phenomenon of "Eternal September". When people who act like children - of whatever physical age - flood the room, it becomes impossible for adults to have any kind of rational conversation. Put another way: respect is not something to be expected on the internet. When they go low... well, you have no choice but to take it and like it! Or you can leave.

    No seriously: if you can move to a PieFed community, that would provide the only realistic solution I can think of to that problem that you are describing. Lemmy provides none (well, there is one but it is enormously extreme: it would involve making a community visible only to people on the same instance as wherever it is located, blocking out the entire rest of the Fediverse by default and forcing people to have accounts on every instance that chose to do this, thereby invalidating the entire concept of federation itself; although note the concept itself has merit for narrowly discussing certain instance-specific matters where outside opinions are neither appropriate nor welcomed, at the behest of the instance owner + admins) - and I doubt that it ever will, given how far behind Lemmy is in terms of features and how slowly those are added (it uses the very difficult to learn Rust coding language), plus the authoritarian biases present in the current set of its developers (who seem to prefer an admin dealing with such at the instance level rather than granting that power to anyone below the admin level). However, PieFed allows communities to receive votes only from people who have actually subscribed to that exact community - others can view the content, but only if they click the subscribe button can they interact with it to sway its visibility in that manner.

    Yes, I am saying that PieFed might very well legitimately "save" the very concept of threaded social media, preventing it from being abandoned entirely by those of us who cannot stand the screaming cries of toddlers fucking literally fucking every fucking single fucking place that we fucking go. I would rather go read a book that I checked out from a library and never visit the Threadiverse again if I could not find such hope that no, somebody else's preferences do not get to dictate literally every tiny aspect of life that we all are allowed to live, which does not sound the tiniest bit like "freedom" to me.

    Though I admit that I may be too overly sensitive right now to the absolute tidal wave of emotional vomiting that goes on across the Threadiverse (I live in America where the "will of the people" is leading to ah... uh... "big changes" as of late, so sadly I am losing hope that the masses always know what is "best" at all times - especially when not articulated in a well-reasoned rebuttal but merely delivered as a drive-by downvoting spree).

  • Avoid „default” communities and instances, they tend to bring the worst of Reddit to Threadiverse. It’s slightly less of an issue if you stick to places that try to be different. You won’t avoid drive-by downvotes from /all but I don’t think it’s that much of an issue (there’s just too much crap there for anyone to browse it by time of posting).

    • I always browse by "new" but only with the subscribed communities. I see a pattern that some of my subscribed communities keep getting downvoted

  • That's typical reddit behavior, many of them brought their childish habits over to the fediverse.

142 comments