There is a pull request which adds a new setting show_downvotes with these settings:
- Show (current behaviour)
- Hide (all downvotes hidden in ui)
- ShowForOthers (only downvotes on other user’s posts are visible)
Importantly the last option would become the new default, which means that users wont be aware that their post or comment was downvoted unless they manually change the setting. This may be good for mental health, but may also make it harder for users to realize that their content is unpopular. What do you think about it?
Why? Most posts that I’ve seen that have been downvoteed are because the comment in question is bad in some way. People who don’t realise that need a lesson in been appropriate.
What I would be in favor of, is downvotes been hidden to everyone to stop bandwagoning.
You want to be more welcoming to the people who freak out about downvotes? The people for whom the slightest criticism is a huge problem?
You’re conflating downvotes with criticism. Also if there’s no downvotes you’re more inclined to comment (and criticize) because you can’t lazily downvote
I think downvotes are criticism/judgment - even if it’s more of a silent type (in lieu of actually replying, as you pointed out).
Even from the standpoint of “You should only use downvotes to indicate that a comment/post is off topic for the community” that Reddit originally tried to (naively IMO, you can’t enforce it not being a “I disagree” button, but I digress) have is still what I’d consider to be criticism. Mainly because regardless of the vote being cast as that vs a general “I disagree”, it’s still an indication of disapproval of the commenter.
Criticism of course comes in a lot of forms, and can vary on the “level” of it - I wouldn’t say that downvotes are a high level of criticism, but one nonetheless.
That’s just my view of it, at least, I can’t see how they wouldn’t be a form of criticism - you shouldn’t use them as a “This breaks the rules” indicator because that should be a report instead of a vote IMO, otherwise it’s far less likely to be acted upon/handled.
I’ve seen countless good comments downvoted on reddit and .world with no engagement whatsoever just because it didn’t fit passing lurkers worldview, but is otherwise factually correct. Forcing you to comment instead of downvote, let’s lurkers vote based on the content of the comment (obv this lays a burden on moderation, but is worth the tradeoff as it can foster really good discussions and higher understandong of the topic at hand)
Mainly because regardless of the vote being cast as that vs a general “I disagree”, it’s still an indication of disapproval of the commenter.
Here’s the disagreement: one is a disagreement that allows you to vent without challenging yourself, the other is a disagreement where you know what the disagreement is about
The other side is:
- it challenges you to formulate your disagreement
- if the community holds awful takes they never get exposed to a differing opinion (although moderation can do that too)
- there’s people out there that believe: more upvotes = more true and Formulate their opinions based on that
- “dunking” and “ratio” only work if the content of the comment/criticism is valid. Otherwise its just showing your ass
No
To elaborate on why I’d like to add this, from the original issue:
This is to enable a user being able to still show downvotes for other people’s posts/comments, but hide downvotes to their own content.
Adding this exception for your user alone, is to promote a positive experience, and for users to not have their mental well-being negatively affected by downvotes to their own content.
To mitigate the mental health negatives of downvotes, many instances already have downvotes entirely removed (meaning not only are downvotes not shown, but its impossible to downvote anything).
Disabling downvotes globally (not just for your user), has a lot of negatives, such as:
- Highly negative / low score comments seem to still be upvoted, and so encourage twitter-style rage-bait engagement (instead of just downvoting and moving on).
- These combative threads then keep getting bumped to the top of the active sort, making hostile comments seem the norm.
- You don’t know which comments are actually unpopular or not, so like twitter, you have to “check the ratio”, of replies to upvotes, to see if something is actually unpopular.
By making ShowForOthers default, we mitigate the downsides above, while also promoting positive mental health.
Just to clarify:
- This is not removing the ability to downvote.
- This is only about adding a setting to hide downvotes to your own content.
- Users can always re-enable showing downvotes to their own content at any time in their settings.
I get why you want to add the option, but why are you proposing to change everyone’s settings by changing the default on something almost nobody changes?
If you insist this is a better default, at least have the courtesy to only change the default for new users, and ensure any DB migrations don’t change existing users’ settings.
Unpopular opinion, I know, but downvotes are an anti-feature, designed to excuse big, for-profit social media from actually moderating their platforms. They have no place in real social spaces.
Nearly all large social media platforms have removed dislikes / downvotes. Reddit is the last one to have them, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they remove them also.