I wish lemmy and piefed didn’t use downvotes. Just upvotes buttons.
But even then, an ideal forum imo would be one without any of that stuff. Like 4chan, except without the trash community that they have
Edit: Case in point, as soon I posted this comment, it got downvoted. Instead of having people engage and explain their points of view, maybe even have an interesting discussion about it, downvote buttons serve as an immediate “disagree” button. It’s a design that dicentivizes discussion
As someone who down voted your comment, allow me to explain both why I think you are wrong and why I wasn’t going to waste time replying.
Firstly, the problem with not showing down votes is that the posts below would look the same
10k 🔺 100k 🔻
10k 🔺 0🔻
But we obviously know that 100k down votes is considerably worse than 0.
And secondly, why I didn’t comment? You didn’t ask a question, you haven’t haven’t said why you think your version is better to drive the conversation forward. You just made a comment. I disagree with it so I down voted it. if someone agrees, they up vote. Over time the ratio will show what the general opinion is.
I have more respect for you for explaining and taking the time to reply. I have even upvoted your comment, despite disagreeing with it.
For me, upvotes and downvotes should not be used as agree/disagree buttons. Instead, they should be about “brings interesting points to the table”/“this comment adds nothing”.
But that’s not how the majority of people view them. Realizing that, that’s why I don’t believe this system works, as it dicentivizes discussions and - in my opinion - helps creating echo chambers.
A good example of a forum that uses only upvotes is Tildes. You need an invite to participate, but you can lurk and see what people do over there. Popular opinions still get to the top and get highlighted (resolving the issue of guaranteeing that the most helpful comments appear first, which is important for posts asking about tech issues and whatnot), and less popular opinions still appear down below. But here’s the thing: in my experience in that forum, those less popular opinions are engaged with far more than what I see in Reddit, piefed or lemmy. Why? Because you can’t downvote them. There’s no button for that. If you want to express disagreement, you actually have to do that.
Because otherwise, using my comment as example:
what did people disagree with?
The suggestion that the downvote button shouldn’t exist?
The suggestion that neither of them should exist?
Me calling 4chan community trash?
All of the above?
No discussion is added, no new insights appear, nothing. Without your comment, this comment that I’m writing now wouldn’t exist either.
Thus my point, we are discussing and bringing new insights to the table.
…both sum to -1k🔻, when the ratios are wildly different. If you really wanted to change the system, I would submit for consideration total votes and down:up ratio %:
31k 🔥 48% ⚖️
1.2k 🔥 0% ⚖️
In fact, you could easily do that at the client level if you wanted. I’d try it out for sure, I know I’ve seen it elsewhere.
There are some communities which have downvotes disabled, blahaj is one of them. I don’t know how many downvotes you have and I don’t care anymore. It’s way more interesting to engage. Also, since I’m on blahaj I comment and upvote much more. Downvotes kill discussion.
As another downvoter I will also take the time to explain:
I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.
If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.
The downvote button is a quick shortcut to let people know their comment is “bad”, with a lot less risk of raising attention to the level where someone might dig through post/comment history or worse doxx/swat someone.
Does that mean that downvoting is perfect? Of course not. I would say that probably downvotes should be weighted much lower than 1:1 with upvotes, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it makes sense to ignore them completely or maybe just a tiebreaker. Might also be important to distinguish comment-downvotes from post-downvotes, but I’ll gladly leave it to the software designers to worry about all that.
I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.
Considering the point of the comment - and the post being about downvotes - my edit was meant to illustrate the point, not to whine.
Regardless, about another thing that I feel is more relevant:
If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.
To me this is not… A healthy way to interact with forums. You don’t have to engage with every post or comment you come across, be it with commenting or voting. You’re “allowed” to be neutral, to not know, to not have an opinion, or to simply not want to engage.
And if you feel that someone is pulling you into a pointless argument, you can just walk away. Having the last word != being right, as a lot of people misunderstand.
And if people posting ragebaits becomes an issue, downvoting or replying to them won’t solve anything. The problem would need to be fixed on a more fundamental level, but that’s another can of worms that mods need to figure out on their own communities. As for me, I simply walked away, as I did with Reddit and others
I just find it very odd, the seeming beginning of a Lemmy culture of “you would downvote me? EXPLAIN YOURSELF SIR”
No, I should not need to explain myself, a downvote shouldn’t carry that much weight, it’s not that big of a deal. Less than a middle-finger or even a thumbs down. At most a disagreeing shake of the head in conversation.
Further, the reasons can be their own, maybe someone wants to downvote everyone with a username starting with “h” just for a fun gimmick.
It has nothing to do with explaining oneself, but more about fostering discussion. You can check my earlier reply to the other user where I explain it better.
You remember when Youtube neutered their downvote button? It’s still there but effectively useless? Now we can’t warn other users of AI slop, scams, or the other terribleness the web is full of.
i downvoted you bc i disagree with your stance on the existence of the downvote button. i think its a helpful tool for the quality of the site and user experience. i have no idea who you are, i havent even read your username.
Honestly, reading comments around, remove display of up/down votes entirely, but keep the system and instead add two tags “Popular” and “Unpopular”, both working on certain tresholds to both amount of votes and ratio of votes. Keep positioning mechanics with using votes to position content, but apply them only to tagged elements.
This way we enable discussion on most topics without problems and incentivise actually talking about topics, while still keeping the means to flag both bad will content and content most valued by community.
With Lemmy I’d say having minimum 50 votes total for comment and 100 for post sound good for total vote treshold, while having 75% of upvotes/downotes sounds good as a ratio treshold. But I am not sure on these, as I am honestly freeballin it right now.
Heck, leave the amount of total votes up to communities - some are bigger, some are smaller after all.
Reply explaining why their view is terrible so that then they can complain that they are getting dogpiled for having a opinion and not everyone needs to reply.
Enforced toxic positivity does not produce better conversations or better communities. It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there’s no other option. It’s the kind of yes-man thinking you get in corporate meetings that produce really bad ideas because “don’t be negative! there are no bad ideas here!”
The only Lemmy community I’m aware of that has actually removed downvotes is hexbear - because they were tired of having their pro-Maoist rhetoric downvoted to oblivion by sane people. Hexbear is not a healthy place.
I wouldn’t imply that the unhealthyness of hexbear is due to the disabled downvoting though, and I’m sure you aren’t either, but just to be clear.
No, I’m implying the reverse: disabling downvoting is a symptom of the unhealthy mentality of the people running that server. Disabling downvoting appeals to authoritarians - that is, the type of people who are interested in silencing dissent (QED).
You are the one implying that it’s enforced toxic positivity. It’s not.
I’m disagreeing with you perfectly fine, and I can block/report toxic people too.
While I agree with you that the concept of forced toxic positivity is bad, I don’t see the implication that blocking downvotes is it.
You downvote either when you disagree with a comment, which is a soft censorship and I don’t really like that, or when the other user is being an asshole, in which case the proper tool is the block/report, not downvoting.
If you disagree with a comment you can either respond or ignore, I feel like downvoting is a soft censorship that creates an unnecessary bias on new readers.
In any case, feel free to have your opinion that blocking downvotes sucks, but please don’t say that it’s forcing toxic positivity, that’s not true.
I don’t have much experience with that community, but from the little I’ve seen, agreed. It’s not good.
A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn’t matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.
The best communities I’ve been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don’t feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.
A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn’t matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.
Yes, well, the problem with hexbear was that it started with bad actors. As they made their true colors apparent to the lemmy community at large, they were increasingly defederated.
The best communities I’ve been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don’t feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.
Oh yes, my past experience is in old web forums as well. Those communities were more isolated though, they essentially existed inside their own bubbles. Unregistered users could read them, but not participate in any functional way, and typically the people that found them were looking for a community like that on purpose.
I’ve also experienced such communities becoming toxic due to the actions of individual moderators or admins, post voting not required.
Ultimately I think I agree this far - if you’re going to disable voting you should do all of it. Removing only the downvoting is the YouTube path, the authoritarian path, the toxic positivity path.
I agree with you. Internet forums were better before likes/etc.
Before you had to state an opinion to engage any idea. Which drives conversations. You had to stake your reputation via alias. Which is why forums built such strong communities.
There were certainly downsides and old style forums don’t scale well for modern user levels.
But I think the defaultism of likes/voting lowers the bar of participation and in doing so also fundamentally lowers the quality of any conclusions derived therein.
The average internet user unfortunately is a dumb person and if they come across something they do not understand, they downvote :/ it is that mentality, the bits and the propaganda which led me away from Reddit. Sad to see it here so soon
I wish lemmy and piefed didn’t use downvotes. Just upvotes buttons.
But even then, an ideal forum imo would be one without any of that stuff. Like 4chan, except without the trash community that they have
Edit: Case in point, as soon I posted this comment, it got downvoted. Instead of having people engage and explain their points of view, maybe even have an interesting discussion about it, downvote buttons serve as an immediate “disagree” button. It’s a design that dicentivizes discussion
As someone who down voted your comment, allow me to explain both why I think you are wrong and why I wasn’t going to waste time replying.
Firstly, the problem with not showing down votes is that the posts below would look the same
10k 🔺 100k 🔻
10k 🔺 0🔻
But we obviously know that 100k down votes is considerably worse than 0.
And secondly, why I didn’t comment? You didn’t ask a question, you haven’t haven’t said why you think your version is better to drive the conversation forward. You just made a comment. I disagree with it so I down voted it. if someone agrees, they up vote. Over time the ratio will show what the general opinion is.
I have more respect for you for explaining and taking the time to reply. I have even upvoted your comment, despite disagreeing with it.
For me, upvotes and downvotes should not be used as agree/disagree buttons. Instead, they should be about “brings interesting points to the table”/“this comment adds nothing”.
But that’s not how the majority of people view them. Realizing that, that’s why I don’t believe this system works, as it dicentivizes discussions and - in my opinion - helps creating echo chambers.
A good example of a forum that uses only upvotes is Tildes. You need an invite to participate, but you can lurk and see what people do over there. Popular opinions still get to the top and get highlighted (resolving the issue of guaranteeing that the most helpful comments appear first, which is important for posts asking about tech issues and whatnot), and less popular opinions still appear down below. But here’s the thing: in my experience in that forum, those less popular opinions are engaged with far more than what I see in Reddit, piefed or lemmy. Why? Because you can’t downvote them. There’s no button for that. If you want to express disagreement, you actually have to do that.
Because otherwise, using my comment as example:
The suggestion that the downvote button shouldn’t exist?
The suggestion that neither of them should exist?
Me calling 4chan community trash?
All of the above?
No discussion is added, no new insights appear, nothing. Without your comment, this comment that I’m writing now wouldn’t exist either.
Thus my point, we are discussing and bringing new insights to the table.
You forgot that it often looks like:
-90k🔻
In some cases I might prefer the 10k/-100k one to be honest.
Yes, but then these…
15k🔺 16k🔻 81 🔺1,096🔻
…both sum to -1k🔻, when the ratios are wildly different. If you really wanted to change the system, I would submit for consideration
total votesanddown:up ratio %:31k 🔥 48% ⚖️ 1.2k 🔥 0% ⚖️
In fact, you could easily do that at the client level if you wanted. I’d try it out for sure, I know I’ve seen it elsewhere.
-1k looks awful
but +15k/-16k makes it look pretty neutral.
There are some communities which have downvotes disabled, blahaj is one of them. I don’t know how many downvotes you have and I don’t care anymore. It’s way more interesting to engage. Also, since I’m on blahaj I comment and upvote much more. Downvotes kill discussion.
As another downvoter I will also take the time to explain:
I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.
If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.
The downvote button is a quick shortcut to let people know their comment is “bad”, with a lot less risk of raising attention to the level where someone might dig through post/comment history or worse doxx/swat someone.
Does that mean that downvoting is perfect? Of course not. I would say that probably downvotes should be weighted much lower than 1:1 with upvotes, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it makes sense to ignore them completely or maybe just a tiebreaker. Might also be important to distinguish comment-downvotes from post-downvotes, but I’ll gladly leave it to the software designers to worry about all that.
Considering the point of the comment - and the post being about downvotes - my edit was meant to illustrate the point, not to whine.
Regardless, about another thing that I feel is more relevant:
To me this is not… A healthy way to interact with forums. You don’t have to engage with every post or comment you come across, be it with commenting or voting. You’re “allowed” to be neutral, to not know, to not have an opinion, or to simply not want to engage.
And if you feel that someone is pulling you into a pointless argument, you can just walk away. Having the last word != being right, as a lot of people misunderstand.
And if people posting ragebaits becomes an issue, downvoting or replying to them won’t solve anything. The problem would need to be fixed on a more fundamental level, but that’s another can of worms that mods need to figure out on their own communities. As for me, I simply walked away, as I did with Reddit and others
I just find it very odd, the seeming beginning of a Lemmy culture of “you would downvote me? EXPLAIN YOURSELF SIR”
No, I should not need to explain myself, a downvote shouldn’t carry that much weight, it’s not that big of a deal. Less than a middle-finger or even a thumbs down. At most a disagreeing shake of the head in conversation.
Further, the reasons can be their own, maybe someone wants to downvote everyone with a username starting with “h” just for a fun gimmick.
It has nothing to do with explaining oneself, but more about fostering discussion. You can check my earlier reply to the other user where I explain it better.
Sure but not every opinion needs to be a discussion. There’s nothing wrong with downvoting or upvoting and moving on.
You remember when Youtube neutered their downvote button? It’s still there but effectively useless? Now we can’t warn other users of AI slop, scams, or the other terribleness the web is full of.
But sure let’s do that to Lemmy.
i downvoted you bc i disagree with your stance on the existence of the downvote button. i think its a helpful tool for the quality of the site and user experience. i have no idea who you are, i havent even read your username.
Honestly, reading comments around, remove display of up/down votes entirely, but keep the system and instead add two tags “Popular” and “Unpopular”, both working on certain tresholds to both amount of votes and ratio of votes. Keep positioning mechanics with using votes to position content, but apply them only to tagged elements.
This way we enable discussion on most topics without problems and incentivise actually talking about topics, while still keeping the means to flag both bad will content and content most valued by community.
With Lemmy I’d say having minimum 50 votes total for comment and 100 for post sound good for total vote treshold, while having 75% of upvotes/downotes sounds good as a ratio treshold. But I am not sure on these, as I am honestly freeballin it right now.
Heck, leave the amount of total votes up to communities - some are bigger, some are smaller after all.
If they got rid of downvotes then what are we supposed to do when tankies post their slop?
Ignore, block, report. Maybe leave a comment so others that join have an anchor to read.
Idk, it’s not the end of the world.
Dogpile on them
Reply explaining why their view is terrible so that then they can complain that they are getting dogpiled for having a opinion and not everyone needs to reply.
but they can’t read
Disliking must be highly addictive 😂
Enforced toxic positivity does not produce better conversations or better communities. It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there’s no other option. It’s the kind of yes-man thinking you get in corporate meetings that produce really bad ideas because “don’t be negative! there are no bad ideas here!”
In my experience, that’s not what happens
The only Lemmy community I’m aware of that has actually removed downvotes is hexbear - because they were tired of having their pro-Maoist rhetoric downvoted to oblivion by sane people. Hexbear is not a healthy place.
Blahaj has then disabled too, and I’m sure there’s more.
I actually engage in more disagreements now because I don’t have the easy down button. I’m pretty anti downvote now tbh.
I wouldn’t imply that the unhealthyness of hexbear is due to the disabled downvoting though, and I’m sure you aren’t either, but just to be clear.
No, I’m implying the reverse: disabling downvoting is a symptom of the unhealthy mentality of the people running that server. Disabling downvoting appeals to authoritarians - that is, the type of people who are interested in silencing dissent (QED).
Oh, so you are actually implying that blahaj has an unhealthy mentality too since we don’t have downvoting?
Bruh. I was trying to give you an out, nvm.
Enforced toxic positivity is unhealthy, yes.
It’s not the cause, it’s a symptom of a larger problem.
What would I need an “out” for?
You are the one implying that it’s enforced toxic positivity. It’s not.
I’m disagreeing with you perfectly fine, and I can block/report toxic people too.
While I agree with you that the concept of forced toxic positivity is bad, I don’t see the implication that blocking downvotes is it.
You downvote either when you disagree with a comment, which is a soft censorship and I don’t really like that, or when the other user is being an asshole, in which case the proper tool is the block/report, not downvoting.
If you disagree with a comment you can either respond or ignore, I feel like downvoting is a soft censorship that creates an unnecessary bias on new readers.
In any case, feel free to have your opinion that blocking downvotes sucks, but please don’t say that it’s forcing toxic positivity, that’s not true.
I don’t have much experience with that community, but from the little I’ve seen, agreed. It’s not good.
A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn’t matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.
The best communities I’ve been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don’t feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.
Yes, well, the problem with hexbear was that it started with bad actors. As they made their true colors apparent to the lemmy community at large, they were increasingly defederated.
Oh yes, my past experience is in old web forums as well. Those communities were more isolated though, they essentially existed inside their own bubbles. Unregistered users could read them, but not participate in any functional way, and typically the people that found them were looking for a community like that on purpose.
I’ve also experienced such communities becoming toxic due to the actions of individual moderators or admins, post voting not required.
Ultimately I think I agree this far - if you’re going to disable voting you should do all of it. Removing only the downvoting is the YouTube path, the authoritarian path, the toxic positivity path.
I agree with you. Internet forums were better before likes/etc.
Before you had to state an opinion to engage any idea. Which drives conversations. You had to stake your reputation via alias. Which is why forums built such strong communities.
There were certainly downsides and old style forums don’t scale well for modern user levels.
But I think the defaultism of likes/voting lowers the bar of participation and in doing so also fundamentally lowers the quality of any conclusions derived therein.
Yeah, something that is becoming very clear in these replies is that people got used to Reddit way of things.
Perhaps it’s one of those things that you have to experience for yourself.
Weird. Is it because I’m on the Voyager app I don’t see downvote options? Or the community my account is on?
It’s a setting, defaulted off I think.
Might be the community. Voyager here shows downvote buttons (in my lemmy.world account)
You can still click the ‘…’ for the downvote option
The average internet user unfortunately is a dumb person and if they come across something they do not understand, they downvote :/ it is that mentality, the bits and the propaganda which led me away from Reddit. Sad to see it here so soon