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how anyone is silenced by downvotes
My comment:
I don't think downvotes should be a thing at all tbh. Just silences
anyonediscussion..
you have no idea if those people who downvoted were ever going to respond
That's not what I said:
People have a tendency to ... dismiss any opinion ... with -1 votes or less instead of properly responding to it
People dismiss it either because it has low visibility since it's downvoted so people wouldn't see it, or because of our tendency for big numbers.
Taking out downvotes would allow for less popular opinions (that do not break rules by being hateful or spam; you'd report it in those cases) to have higher visibility and discussion since the majority can't just downvote it, just because they slightly disagree with it or are biased against it, and silence discussion.
People who do agree would also be able to show it through upvotes, and it wouldn't be eaten by the downvotes.
Thanks for your comments actually. Got me to think about the benefits more clearly. Discussions are great.
People dismiss it either because it has low visibility since it’s downvoted so people wouldn’t see it, or because of our tendency for big numbers.
That is absolutely not how Lemmy works. Downvoting has no effect whatsoever. This is not Reddit.
That is absolutely not how Lemmy works. Downvoting has no effect whatsoever.
I assume you're talking about the 'active' and 'hot' sorting?
From the Lemmy docs:
- Active uses the post votes, and latest comment time (limited to two days).
- Hot uses the post votes, and the post published time.
You'd also notice this if you use Lemmy for any length of time lmao
You know what's weird? What's weird is that, despite your claim that people aren't having discussions with people who get downvoted, my reply to you was part of a huge amount of discussion with someone who was downvoted. And that is true of multiple other discussions in this post.
Is this post special? Is it the exception?
Is this post special? Is it the exception?
I am the exception because I keep the less visibility thing in mind
That does not explain why this post contradicts your claim multiple times, but your massive ego is noted.
Look, with nearly 100 comments a day, we realize that no amount of downvotes is going to silence you from commenting in every post. However, for us mere mortals, can you not see how a dogpile of downvotes from the local majority opinion might dissuade some individuals from wanting to engage in discussion?
Nope. I don't see why it matters when it didn't even matter on Reddit except that comments with enough downvotes were hidden. They aren't hidden here.
It's clearly psychological. It's not that it quantitatively "matters." I suspect very few people are going around using the downvote button with the intent of statistically decreasing the view count of a particular comment. On these politically charged posts, it's used as a litmus test for whether or not you are part of the 'right side' or 'the other side.'