Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
Without downvotes, you get Twitter where even obvious rage bait drowns out everything. Downvotes aren’t perfect, but they’re much better than not having them.
Downvotes can be useful in certain contexts, like when you visit a thread and are looking for factual information, such as the answer to a tech question. I don’t want to accidentally follow someone’s bad advice because the bad advice didn’t have any downvotes nor any responses as to why it was wrong.
It’s not perfect, but voting is a quick, often effective method of fact checking.
It’s more of a vibe check than a fact check. But I think it’s definitely useful for the network to self moderate since mods are pretty much entirely voluntary on Lemmy.
Just to give a concrete example, there are a couple blatantly political posts on !fediverse. Do they belong there? Absolutely not. But by the time I saw them days later, the damage was done and they were already taken care of by downvotes. Should I really mod remove a week old post with 50 downvotes? The discussion there about why it didn’t belong was fine, and didn’t need to be hidden further.
I’m against making votes visible. I don’t want to make myself a target because I don’t vote with the hivemenind.
Automatically removing downvoted posts is a bad idea, because you basically can censor any post when you have a couple of people.
I didn’t switch from reddit because of the voting system, I switched because my app stopped functioning.
We don’t have to be contrarian.
The problem with seeing people’s votes is you don’t have context for why they voted that way. Did they upvote because they agreed, or because they thought it was an engaging counterpoint in an interesting discussion? Maybe they just thought it was funny or wanted the thread it was part of to be more visible. Someone looking at your votes could choose whatever perception they want if they decide to go after you for it.
It is different in that the barrier to a user looking at your votes and choosing whatever perception they want is currently much higher.
You can’t have accountability and anonymity. There are people that post, not just upvote, garbage all day long. There’s also plenty of occasions where people have been shamed for past posts in completely unrelated threads. I don’t disagree with those things being public, otherwise we might as well use Pastebin, but we don’t need one more way to judge people. It’s also the simplest of acts. I’ve upvoted right-wing posts before but not because I agree but because they were making valid points and not resorting to personal attacks or demagoguery.
What did it do to YouTube? I remember there being a huge uproar over it…but I don’t use it much but totally forgot that this even happened as it has made no difference for my light use.
I’ve been looking for someone to touch on this. I didn’t like youtube getting rid of the downvotes but…what did it change? The only incidents I can think of is when there’s vote bombing on a really bad video. Lemmynsfw got rid of downvotes and they’re better for it. The only exception I can think of is a technical video that is just factually wrong but then there’s always a comment highlighting that with upvotes. Seems like the only thing we lost was sensational downvoting and the thrill of jumping on a like-minded group dislike.
I’m of the opinion that downvotes are useful for self moderation of troll/off-topic comments or posts.
People also use it as a disagree button. That use doesn’t bother me personally but I see a lot of users get upset about having a negative score on a comment.
I think the best method is to keep the votes and either hide the score total or to not visibly show any score that’s less than 1
From what I can see, people will downvote shitposts even if they agree with it. But the downvote is used as the disagree button the majority of the time.
I will upvote any comment that seems to be made in good faith but I don’t have any illusions of that being how the majority of the network uses their votes. I think a higher percentage of people use their vote that way compared to Reddit but not much to make a difference.
That’s why I suggested hiding votes entirely. I think that would be unpopular because people like the dopamine hit of seeing your comment score go up, and so my compromise was to only hide 0 or negative scores.
Exactly, if you see troll, just block him and declare “damnatio memoriae”. It works exactly like this in fms usenet like forum for old freenet / hyphanet. You can even subscribe block / allow lists ( -100 to 100 weight lists ). In my opinion, it’s very good mechanism. One of the best I ever saw
I partially agree with you, the voting system as a whole should be removed in my opinion or upvotes publicized but down vote should not. It’s far too easy for down vote which is used commonly as in off topic or disagree to be taken the wrong way and cause targeted harassment. Making the whole thing public as a whole is just going to make dissants refuse to give their opinion strengthening echo chamber issues
I agree, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to make voting not at the very least semi-public anyway so just stop a) pretending the information is protected and b) remove the not-a-disagree-button-but-totally-a-disagree-button. There is a report link for rules violations, maybe a separate one for spam would be good as well, otherwise, I don’t know, just allow people to add an actual poll to comments if they want to?
