People are not allowed to disagree or not like? What’s the downvote button even for then?
I also read a post about downvoted content being “buried”, so I guess most people have their feed by Hot and that’s why? And what would be wrong with that anyway?
New gang till death, I like my content chronologically.
ps: What was that site you could see your upvotes/downvotes? I’m curious about my ratio and how grumpy I have become.
Yeah, in that manor it’s somewhat like Reddit. Even if you have a clear and explained opinion that isn’t the narrarive the masses are trying to push you get down voted into oblivion. Once you get a few down votes, then everyone just goes with the mob mentality that it’s automwticqlly bad regardless.
An example would be abortion. I’m pro choice, but I could see how you could argue pro life as a valid opinion, even though I don’t agree with it. I’d get lambasted because I’m not hard pushing that pro life is the worst thing in the world ect.
Lemmy reflects real life, I taught for 20+ years and I can tell you in my experience most people think they’re incredibly smart and have the solution to everything. Once you challenge them with a valid question or give any pushback, you’re called racist, fascist, islamiphobe, ect usually because they’re just repeating something they heard from someone, possibly a lot smarter than them (sometimes not), and they never really formed that idea/opinion on their own and don’t actually understand it beyond parroting it.
I am a Piefed user. My default settings auto-hide things downvoted by a certain threshold. I have notice that this by default hides a lot of bigotry or cruelty from me, so I don’t bother changing the setting that collapses replies downvoted past a certain threshold. I think a lot of other are the same, or they just never change it because a lot of people do not mess with default settings.
I know that some people downvote as a simple dislike button. Alright, irrelevant, I don’t care. But I also know that some do it because you broke the norms of the community or the rules or did something mean and cruel. There are enough trolls and dislike-downvoters out there that the most uncontroversial and on-topic post will still get downvotes. 10 downvotes to 200 upvotes is nothing to worry about. But 20 downvotes to 20 upvotes? Hmm, did I just post an unpopular thing and so I can ignore the downvotes, or did I make a big faux pas and was 1) unintentionally but unfortunately bigoted 2) cruel to another user 3) breaking a community norm/rule I failed to notice 4) perceived as spamming/self-promoing/LLM output (I write my em dashes with my own two hands on my keyboard) 5) anything else that people give deserved downvotes for because you’re mucking up the discussion? Time to do some self-examination. There is noise in downvotes, but there’s some meaningful signal too.
And the people who seem too sensitive about downvotes might be picking up on the signal, going “what did I do? I didn’t do anything wrong, why are you mad at me?” and getting upset over that. I can certainly understand where they might be coming from if they poured their heart out and got a bunch of unexpected downvotes. Or if they are having a really rough day or something. “Is my picture of a pear really that offensive that people would downvote it? Or did I just get my post collapsed and hidden from everyone in !pears or !photography because enough people on All didn’t like it, figured that downvote = dislike, and hit the downvote button? Man, (assuming !pears and !photography are moderately active) having the reasonable expectation that people would see and interact with my post, but having that frustrated because it is auto-hidden as if it were spam sure is frustrating.” And if this is one of your first posts, at least on Piefed, I think if you get enough downvotes you might get marked with two exclamation points by your username for lots of downvotes. Kind of a caution sign, controversial content or spam or cruel or something. Nobody wants to be slapped with the “take care around this person” sign for doing nothing wrong but posting something the hivemind dislikes but that didn’t actually do anything harmful beyond make someone look at a picture they thought was ugly.
I do not care about the fake internet points, but I do care about the consequences voting has on whether your post will get seen or not, and about the humans trying, in some small way, to judge my post through those votes in case I have actually done something objectionable.
What downvotes?
I thought we are above Reddit with petty clamouring for points.
I don’t see public voting as usefull. so I don’t care on the whole. would love if I could rate everything for me personally and it would adjust my feed based on what I like. bonus if it can take my ratings of users and integrate what they highly rate. maybe drop down things users I rate low highly rate. still would be good to have checkboxes or stuff for how advanced a level it should use the ratings.
I mean both in reddit and lemmy the concept of downvotes was never meant to be a “agree” or “disagree”, even “like or dislike”. It’s meant to be a “good for discussion” vs “hinderance of discussion”. AKA lets say we’re discussing linux distributions, I come across this.
Person A: I like linux mint, it’s much easier to install, I like the defaults and my printer just works with no setup.
Person B: “Linux mint is for noobs, arch ftw”
Within that, as I am personally a die hard fan of archlinux, so in the agree vs disagree system, I should downvote A and upvote B.
But in a discussion based voting, I’d perhaps respond to A with my pro’s or cons of arch (though in this situation probably agree if the user in question sounds to be a newer user, though I may still make a case for possibly the pro’s of using arch even as a starting distro.
Meanwhile person B, is hostile, gives zero details for WHY anyone should use arch, does absolutely nothing to open discussion or actually help anyone make an informed decision.
I mean both in reddit and lemmy the concept of downvotes was never meant to be a “agree” or “disagree”, even “like or dislike”. It’s meant to be a “good for discussion” vs “hinderance of discussion”.
“The purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID).
Voting increases or decreases visibility; thus, I vote to increase or decrease visibility.
I want good posts to be more visible.
Lots of people conflate good with what they like.
that’s a great quote, thanks for sharing
True and that’s why Reddit/Lemmy have flawed voting systems. Their intended and actual uses are quite different.
I still think SlashDot’s voting system was the best I’ve ever seen, where you could attach a reason to your upvote/down vote, and then sort by e.g. most funny, or most insightful…
I’d combine Slashdot’s voting system with the original iteration of the long defunct Facepunch Forums Smartness system. It was rather mean but I loved how it boosted overall communication quality because it forced users to spellcheck and avoid using slurs.
Facepunch also had emoticon reactions like Pylova/Piefed although our system is pretty shit with WAY too many emoticons, so much so that they’ll fail to all fully load in.
Basically a new account started with 5000 points. Different spelling or grammar mistakes along with slurs lost you differing amounts of points. You gained points with error free posts/replies, but it was balanced in such a way that you’d lose points and get auto banned when you hit 0 pretty quickly if you didn’t try to improve. Uncorrected errors would be underlined, colored red, and visible to everyone else. IIRC you could edit posts and correct them but you didn’t regain lost points by doing so, just avoided having shameful red errors.
Sounds interesting, I wonder how they deal with false positives? My autocorrect detects way too many words that it thinks doesn’t exist.
Interesting!
I think slashdots also most useful for if I recall, basically no ability to vote.
IE If I remember right, as a lurker you get no votes. You basically have to participate, and if you get votes on a post, you then get a handful of votes you can use on others. I do wonder how a system like that would work on other sites. If a modernized form of it could work on a reddit like site etc… Would on the surface appear to be a way to counteract bots, but also run the risk of say one bot getting votes and automating a circle jerk with it’s clones.
Or simply having bots copy top posts from a year earlier to get upvotes, like they did on Reddit.
Yep, when I was on there, I’d give +1 to funny and +2 to trolls. If someone showed up due to their high trolling votes, it was either the wildest or most hateful shit, but it was a hell of a read. Some of it was damned funny.
I think they call it “rejection sensitivity dysphoria”
I came here to say this
Maybe it’s the communities I’m in, but it sure seems like the fediverse skews autistic. Not only is RSD quite common in autistic people, but a lack of social grace is also pretty normal
Doesn’t bother me. In general I feel I’ve earned my downvotes. I can say stupid shit or phrase in an insensitive manner. Some cases can be good feedback and cause introspection.
By pattern I’ve think some individuals dislike something (or many things) I’ve said enough to downvote every post of mine they see. If downvoting me makes them feel good, I’m happy for them. The block button is right there though…
I only get pissed when people downvote when they’ve made their own dumbass assumption. The moments I have mentioned furries online come to mind, where I (as a furry) say something innocuous and have gotten these other dumbass furries who downvote and go “and? What’s wrong with being a furry”? Brother I am one.
I know it’s such a thing to be mad at, idk why it’s so irritating to me.
Remind yourself the opinions of dumbasses can be, well, dumb.
I’m gonna echo some stuff, so be aware.
I think it isn’t just lemmings/lemmites/lemmizens/piefudlians/mbingos. It’s anywhere humans can show support or non support via visible means. Like/dislike, star ratings, whatever. I’ve not seen any more or less butthurt over votes here than reddit. Maybe less in focused communities where folks tend to directly engage more anyway.
But it comes down to feeling disrespected. Talk to folks in meatspace and ask them about this kind of thing, and if they care about those points, that’s what it often is. They feel like some stranger was rude to them.
Secondary to that, there is also he contingent that has an emotional investment when they vote, so they assume the same in others. In other words, they use voting as a dislike button as opposed to a ranking system. So, they think anyone down voting them is just dismissing them via emotional reaction.
Anyway, as long as there’s a sorting method based on votes, it has an effect beyond that, so you kinda have to be careful to keep it in mind. Me? Other than fat thumb mistakes, my down voting is for off topic, non useful, off-vibe, or otherwise ill fitting comments and posts, usually. Low effort comments will get one sometimes, if the post matters.
Up votes are similarly doled out, though I’m not above throwing one purely because I like it.
I always say you take the downs and the ups as they come. Don’t whine about it, don’t pretend ups mean anything about you or even the subject, it’s not like you win anything by virtue of votes. Hell, even mentioning them in a thread should be limited because it derails things more often than not.
I’m with you on sorting by new. It’s not the downside that you see posts in reverse order, so if there’s a dozen posts about the same thing, you won’t know it until after you’ve interacted with the newest, which may not be where the good interactions are. But it’s still better than the artificially placed sorting.
I’m on team Scaled myself. I’ve seen the most harmless, kindest, neutral comments down-voted. I assume some people think it is mandatory to vote. Personally, I try to only use upvotes and only when it is something that I strongly agree with or like. Otherwise, live and let live. I guess my philosophy is mostly “if you don’t have something kind to say, don’t say it” but more so transformed into my voting philosophy.
Downvotes are a digital shame button. They are community signals for what members consider inappropriate for the community. Like a lot of other shaming techniques, they are usually frustratingly lacking in nuance, prone to pile-ons, and are as often deployed in bad faith as good. Maybe more; I’m not sure how to measure or even define “good faith” and “bad faith”. I have a gut feeling for it, but my gut is sometimes wrong.
Getting a lot of downvotes is the social media equivalent of your community telling you “your behavior is unacceptable, be better, or at least different, or shut up”. That’s a difficult thing to hear from a community; some people handle it more gracefully than others.
downvotes are whatever you think they are for… which is why it’s totally random and shouldn’t be taken serious. there is no definite rule on them in an open global platform
downvotes are whatever you think they are for
agreed. they are subjective by design, occasionally accompanied by objective constraints like community rules" that attempt to guide how members deploy their downvotes. Sometimes rules work, sometimes they don’t.
which is why it’s totally random
disagree. They’re noisy, and hard to interpret, but they aren’t random. Something motivates a person (or bot, for that matter) to click the button when they could just as easily not.
and shouldn’t be taken serious
disagree here too, though this one is more a question of taste. I am so curious about what makes people act the way they do on the internet. Especially the meanies; the behavior of jerks on the internet is so puzzling to me, but I don’t think it’s impossible to understand better. Part of understanding it better is treating it as a subject worthy of serious inquiry, whether or not it deserves it.
there is no definite rule on them in an open global platform
agreed again, which is part of what makes them so tough to generalize about. There are definitely common patterns though.
Downvotes are alao: disagreement, ideological, political, or just “I don’t like that you called me out.”
I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think that all of those (generic disagreement, ideological disagreement, political disagreement, and retaliation) are reasons why someone might deploy the shame button, separate from the action itself. Plenty of people on the internet disagree all the time without using the downvote button too, so they must be separate even though there is overlap between them. One of the reasons I don’t like downvotes as a mechanic is that the reasoning behind the action is almost always obscure, if not unknowable. They’re very vague indicators, which incidentally is also true of most IRL shaming techniques. Shame is usually deployed when someone “should already know better” and usually does not accompany an explanation, unless the shamer is feeling instructive.
Shame is usually deployed when someone “should already know better” and usually does not accompany an explanation, unless the shamer is feeling instructive.
Used to lurk in communities online that mocked others(’ behavior). Sometimes, the “wow what a worthless human being, the world would be better off if they weren’t here” comments also add “couldn’t be bothered to [do good thing X], what a [bad trait Y]” or “what kind of monster does [bad thing X], how [bad trait Y] of them.” Socially inept teenage me found this very instructive on what was acceptable and what was not, especially since I was inadvertently provided the why. (I avoid these types of communities now as a hopefully more-well-adjusted adult.) People can absolutely use their words to explain why something is shameful… at least when they are pretty sure everyone else is on their side, and the person being shamed won’t be able to retaliate (I am sure whoever is filmed for r/noahgettheboat isn’t aware they were posted on Reddit) or will be downvoted a lot if they try to defend themselves, whether justifiably or not (people judged assholes on r/AmITheAsshole).
I say what I’m gonna say, and sometimes I get downvotes and other times I don’t. I downvote bad takes, trolls, or other things that I feel I strongly disagree with.
Use it as a barometer. If you’re constantly getting downvited for your posts, perhaps some introspection will tell you why. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. They’re fake Internet points and some people just won’t agree with you. You can’t please everyone.
There are only upsides to going into your settings and hiding downvotes entirely. It’s pure masochism to have people’s boos broadcast to you in real time.
I’ve no idea, man, I thought made up internet points were dumb on reddit and I thought if they weren’t counted cumulatively, here, people would be less dumb over them.
but that was a foolish expectation to have, however grounded in reason it may seem.
