Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
"Echo chambers" are incredibly common in our daily lives. I even really don’t get the whole “anti-echo chamber” thing. We select people to be friends we generally like and agree with. We often don’t associate with people we don’t like or disagree with. Why should social media be some totally egalitarian social exposure? That’s literally never been the case ever. We read what we want to read. We talk to who we want to talk to. I’m not going to be shamed into listening to some jerk who thinks gay people shouldn’t marry and belong in hell or whatever. I don’t want to share a beer with them, I would never invite them to dinner in my home, so why should I have to deal with them living rent free in my mind because I saw some ignorant post on social media yet again?
It's not like I don't know homophobia exists, so I definitely don't need their particular brand of reminder and I know I shouldn't engage them because it's a pointless flame war.
I have plenty of work colleagues and family I disagree with, I read sources I don’t always love. I get plenty of exposure to other ways of thinking and ideas. Do I think people can go too far and literally only surround themselves with “yes men” socially? Sure. But come on. How many of us actually spend equal time with people we both agree and disagree ideologically with?
To be perfectly frank: the "echo chamber" argument is mostly just a cudgel used by the right to obliquely say a space is too liberal for their tastes. It's not a moral imperative and they are demanding everyone else conform better to their ideals while also saying it's immoral to leave.
environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.
"Voting" and "discussion" are separate things. The old forums did not have voting but still had polarization, personal attacks, hellthreads, etc.
The problem is that Reddit/Facebook turned "voting" from a tool meant to measure "quality" (e.g, this post is relevant to the community, this comment does not add to the discussion) into a tool to measure "popularity" (I agree with this, so I vote up. I don't like this, so I downvote).
Either get rid of voting altogether, or let's bring back a culture where "votes" are meant to signal quality.
If users are the problem and the platform encourages/enables them to behave like that, then the problem is the platform. Redditors act that way because the system incentivizes it.
We can fix that by having moderators that can establish clear guidelines and show enough authority and can be trusted by the community. And yes, if the guidelines include something like:
Downvotes are not for disagreement. It's fine to downvote if the argument is false or deliberately misleading, but if someone is making a good faith argument that you disagree with, either make a constructive response or simply let it go
Then the mods would be completely justified to call out users who are drive-by downvoting.
If you did it would not be rent free, or would it, einstein. But no worry, i don't think about you, just this topic and your enthusiasm for it triggered my reply :)
Have a downvote for going off topic and "personal".
Lemmy admins can already see the votes (up and down). Used to just be in the database (select * from comment_like where person_id = ?), but since some 19.x update, it's a menu item with a GUI popup:
Apparently, non-admins can already do this on platforms like kbin.