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So what, what's wrong about expressing "I don't like this"? How's that different from expressing "I like this"?
The only "toxicity" is that it seems there are downvote trolls, so almost every post automatically gets a downvote immediately. But you can just ignore if you only have that one or two downvotes. If you can't handle that, you can't be surprised if you get called a snowflake.
More applicable to comments than posts... Used as "I don't like this" stifles conversation. For example, the comment that we're replying to has been downvoted two to one. It's a legitimate comment that is worthy of conversation but that won't happen because downvoting is being used as a "I don't like this" button. It inevitably creates an echo chamber.
I don't get that argument. Sometimes I just don't have the time or can't be bothered to write a comment, and a downvote serves as a perfect, fast replacement to indicate my disagreement.
Echo chambers are created exactly when you can't express youe disagreement easily. If all you need is an upvote to agree, but need to comment to disagree.
I hear there's this thing called ratio on Twitter, a comparison betwen something and something else, idk I don't use it. But you know what would be just as useful? Upvotes and downvotes.
I'm tired now, today I'll only be downvoting what I don't like :p
These are the same people who say "let people like things" but they don't want you to be able to dislike things and totally ignore that there are legitimate reasons to dislike some things. Then they call anything they dislike "toxic" and don't see any disconnect.
Being defederated from beehaw doesn't seem so bad as from what I've seen they represent the overly sensitive, are offended by everything crowd, who, while I largely agree with many of their views, are just exhausting to deal with.
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I'm not sure if Lemmy collapses heavily downvoted posts like Reddit does, but if it does it is also playing a part in creating an echo chamber.
I personally don't have a very strong opinion about up-/downvotes but in general I try to stick to only downvoting comments that are not contributing or down right hostile. I refuse to downvote a comment that is attempting to discuss something in a proper manner, even if I completely disagree.
I get your point about it being harder to agree than disagreeing with this type of mindset though, so it's not perfect.
A more perfect(*) solution would be separating sorting by relevance (formerly up-/downvote) from emotional reactions. There's the possibility of having a range of emoji reactions: agree, disagree, inaccurate, like it, bookmarked it, dislike it, find it funny, makes me happy, makes me sad, loveyou for this, what the fuck, find it's bullshit, (etc. but this is not necessarily a good selection). Some of the reactions (disagree, inaccurate ...) could also require a comment of at least (n) words to be left.
(*) oxymoron intentional
Edit: See here what people interested in development are opining about this idea: Add emoji reactions to posts, comments. #29
“Ratioed” on Twitter is when a post has more comments than likes/favorites/whatever. Twitter doesn’t have downvotes. So, more comments than heart things suggests the post is disliked or controversial, as it’s presumed that otherwise people commenting would have also “liked” it or whatever it’s called on Twitter.
Exactly, so at the end it's just comparing two numbers anyway.
Yeah, it’s just that Twitter has one less action. I guess there’s also retweets.
The echo chamber effect comes from mass downvoting of dissenting comments by a dedicated faction or the hive mind and mass upvoting by the same. The ticket to virtual popularity is popular soundbites.
Downvotes hide discussion, and upvotes make them more visible. That's not what you want if your goal is to eliminate the echo chamber. Perhaps we should change the default sort to sort by controversial (i.e. lots of votes on both ends).
For example, let's say there are two comments:
- funny comment largely unrelated to the topic
- detailed comment with extensive sources, but goes against the common opinion
The first comment is likely to be near the top, and the second will likely be buried near the bottom, and perhaps hidden (e.g. Reddit auto-hides if a comment goes too negative). That's not what you want if your goal is to have productive conversations.
From my experience, people are less likely to click the upvote when they agree with something or think it's relevant than they are to click the downvote button when they disagree. For some reason, disagreement is more likely to provoke a response than agreement. So if you eliminate the downvote as an option, you'll likely get people only voting on things that are relevant or really important to them. It doesn't solve the whole problem, but it at least seems to help a bit.
People can and will build botnets to artificially upvote their posts, and downvote opponents. It's too easily abused.
Ok so why keep upvotes? It's the exact same problem. I've seen so much crap with shittons of upvotes, but one downvote and it's suddenly an issue.
They shouldn't keep upvotes either honestly.
I can respect that consistency.
Problem with that, is then you have to wade through every piece of trash that gets posted. The system isn't perfect, but I can't think of a genuine solution, so until there is one, this is what we have.
Eh, you could sort them higher if they have a ton of discussion under them. I think that could work pretty well. Maybe prioritize number of direct child comments over number of descendant comments (i.e. one long comment chain between two people shouldn't push it to the top).
If you think a topic is interesting, you'd comment under it. That says nothing about whether you like or dislike the comment, it just means that comment provoked some kind of response. That's also not perfect because there are plenty of times where I don't think I have anything valuable to add, but maybe it's an interesting metric to try.
You are attacking me personally when I am talking about how to best make a forum function. If you want to go that direction then I'm happy to just end the conversation man.
The point is if downvotes are meant to tell us something meaningful or sort content in a way that we want, then it is currently not accomplishing these goals. Would you be happy with downvotes that strictly sort for you and are never visible to people? Because it's the latter component that truly causes issues when engaging in discourse.
If your objective is "I want to publicly express my displeasure as loudly and with as much impact as possible in an effort to sway public opinion" then great, the system works for you. But most people who care about dialogue and conversations not descending into flame wars constantly don't want that.
Oh ffs, I wasn't even talking about you specifically, the "you" was just generally addressing anyone, but yea I see it applies you completely.
Don't worry, I won't bother you with my "attacks" any longer, in fact I'll rather block you outright, because I can't stand people like you who scream "attack" or other bullshit accusations whenever someone is just in their vicinity. So I'll never reply to you ever again, win-win!
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I don't see anything in the comment that I see as a personal attack. The person you replied to used "you," but I think that was meant as a general "you" (i.e. other people reading this) rather than you specifically.
I generally agree with you, but only for popular subs. In more niche communities, downvotes seem to do a better job of showing which posts are useful and which aren't, but once you get enough people involved, it seems to devolve into a popularity contest.
I would like to try something a bit different, more akin to what Twitter does. Basically, if a comment gets a ton of comments under it, it should be sorted more highly than one that doesn't. Maybe that way we can eliminate votes entirely, or keep upvotes and downvotes as a form of agree/disagree but reduce their impact on sorting.
I would say it’s pretty thinly veiled. Regardless, he’s incredibly hostile and angry. The conversation was well past its usefulness.
While in very formal English "one" is the generic pronoun and "you" is addressed to you personally, in casual English "you" is the generic pronoun with the same meaning as formal written French "on".
So the post above wasn't a personal attack. It used "you" to mean "one".
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
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I was trying to be charitable by assuming you badly misunderstood the comment because English was your second language. The alternatives are that you, in your own words, lack "the basic literacy of at least a second grader" or that you misread it on purpose to give yourself an excuse to pick a fight.
Enjoy the fight that you sacrificed your own dignity to start.
Wow.
All the votes are tracked. You can’t hide behind the guise of anonymity. You could also ban users for abusing it. So I am sorry but I don’t agree to your point.
Anyone who cares about downvotes needs to get their head examined. A downvote can mean the person doesn't agree with your comment, doesn't like your tone, thinks you are incorrect, thinks the comment doesn't add to the discussion, hell they could downvote you just because they don't like your username. None of that matters. All it does is show you if your comment goes against the zeitgeist or not.
All it does is show you if your comment goes against the zeitgeist or not.
Exactly
The whole point is that people can downvote you for any stupid reason and doesn't accurately reflect why a post is being rejected by the community. People will do it simply because they want to silence you.
And it causes issues with brigading, botnets, etc. It's why hexbear and lemmygrad are being defederated -- and their members are able to get around it simply by making accounts on other servers and going right back to the brigading. Removing the voting option and giving admins tools to IP ban everyone from an instance upon defederation would go a long way toward fixing the problem. Just putting the hurdle of needing a VPN to regain access alone will deter a lot of idiots.
and their members are able to get around it simply by making accounts on other servers and going right back to the brigading.
At least this is, like you said with VPN's, a hurdle. A lot of angry people won't bother creating extra accounts just to continue, even if many will. Anything that meaningfully decreases the former is generally a good idea lol
That’s my biggest problem with downvotes. I want to know why someone disagrees. That can initiate an interesting conversation.
If I’m factually incorrect, I want to know. Same goes if I expressed myself poorly. A downvote alone doesn’t tell me anything.
I've had plenty of times where a comment I made got downvoted like crazy, but a response I made to a comment asking for clarification got a lot of upvotes. It seems people really like to jump on that downvote button, especially if they see something already getting downvotes (i.e. maybe they don't even read it, they just downvote on reflex).
Votes happen to be really easy to deal with in software, which is probably why they're so commonly used. However, when it comes to people actually casting votes, they behave a lot differently than software creators expect.
So perhaps we should try something else, like maybe sort by "activity" (how many times the comment was replied to) to sort of counteract that reflex-like urge to use it as an agree/disagree button (if you agree or disagree strongly, you're likely to comment).
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You can’t hide behind the guise of anonymity.
Actually, on Beehaw, you can. If Beehaw has the equivalent of kbin’s “activity” info, I haven’t found it.
Votes still get federated. Even if not exposed via UI anyone running their own (federated) instance can query for who voted on beehaw posts. Only a matter of time before that's directly exposed as a mod tool.
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+80/-20 +50/-50 +20/-80 +1/-99 +100/-0
Just from those vote counts, I can be pretty sure the first comment is insightful, the second controversial, the third a troll, and the fourth is definitely spam. The fifth is probably a cat pic, relevant xkcd, meme, or a single-sentence comment that everyone loves, but doesn't actually add anything important to the topic. If I'm looking for an interesting conversation, I'm focused on the first two, maybe the third. If I'm looking to be pissed off, the third and fourth. And if I'm looking for an easy read, the fifth.
+80, +50, +20, +1, and +100 doesn't provide the same information. It's the downvotes that provide the relative context.
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You can also be "downvoted into oblivion" if you're 100%, objectively correct, but your conclusion goes against the "hive mind." I have had comments with a ton of sources and detailed analysis that got downvoted like crazy, and then the top comment is like "X group, amirite?"
You're 100% correct that reddit rewards snark far more than constructive discussion. That's part of why I'm here, and why I'll probably be perennially disappointed with social media.
I value the ability to view the community sentiment more than I value artificial manipulation of the voting system to make the community seem more fair and open minded than it actually is.
When my opinion is not well received by the community, either I am wrong, or I have not presented it in a way they can understand and accept.
"Downvoting to oblivion" is not an inherently bad thing, even when it is due to a mistake or misconception. Just because that particular conversation has ended and 99.9% of the traffic has passed through does not mean the topic is finished. It will come back up in the future, and I know I will need to focus on that mistake or misconception when it does.
I also reject your characterization that upvotes are a "reward".
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For instance, r/conservative on Reddit famously bans
That's a moderation issue, not a community voting issue.
The problem is that second part is incredibly broad. It can simply be because somebody didn’t like that you use a certain source, even if it’s completely valid.
I disagree that this is a "problem". Votes are opinions, not objective fact.
There is a very specific zeitgeist/mentality there that must be adhered to, regardless of the quality of what you say. That is not a virtue, that is a problem.
Again, that's primarily a moderation issue, not a community voting issue. The moderators enforcing a zeitgeist is certainly a problem; the community, not nearly so much.
For the community, it's really only a problem if we assume upvotes are "good" and downvotes are "bad". You have thus far completely ignored my point that the 80/20, 50/50, and even the 20/80 comment threads are consistently superior to the 100/0 threads. You need disagreement and conflict to have debate. Without the downvotes, you just have a weakly upvoted comment. With the downvotes, you have an immediate indication of a divisive position, ripe for a lively debate.
I disagree that this is a “problem”. Votes are opinions, not objective fact.
So what is the desired end result of a voting system, to promote popular opinions, or to promote interesting opinions? Because as implemented, voting-based SM tends to promote the former, and I think many people prefer the latter.
So to me, it is a problem because it's not meeting the goals that presumably most people have.
With the downvotes, you have an immediate indication of a divisive position, ripe for a lively debate.
Many platforms, like Reddit, hide comments that get too many downvotes. So many people just won't see the interesting, controversial discussion, and I think that's a problem.
We should be sorting based on likeliness of being interesting, not popularity.
So what is the desired end result of a voting system, to promote popular opinions, or to promote interesting opinions?
The voting system just presents the community opinion on the comment. There are any number of ways to weigh those opinions. The other metrics I would want to see are number of threads, average length of threads, average word count in replies, etc. But raw upvoted and downvote counts go a long way toward finding good content.
It only really works in smaller communities imo, as the community gets larger, it just reflects what's popular, and that's a separate scale from good vs bad, especially once your community has self-selected itself into a common way of thinking.
So the question is, how do we mitigate that self selection? How do we promote diversity? Voting doesn't seem to cut it, and I don't think moderation is the way either (we just need the "right people" argument). So yeah, I'd like to see a lot more experimentation with different ways of sorting comments and posts, because I think promoting diverse content is better long term.
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it isn’t sorting by “contribute/doesn’t contribute,” that’s for sure.
It's both. You're not wrong with the groupthink thing, but they absolutely do help to combat disinformation and useless comments. I get that you've made a decision, but you don't need to rationalize away the negatives.
I'm not rationalizing away the negatives. I think the pros simply outweigh the cons by a large margin re: getting rid of downvotes vs. allowing them. I didn't say it was a perfect, airtight solution with literally no flaws.
I upvoted this post even though I don’t agree with it. See the downvoted pic of the girl taking a shit to see why I think downvotes are needed at times.
Isn't that something that mods need to take care of though? Why should that burden be on the community members?
The word "community" goes a long way in answering that question imo.
If we look to the mods take care of everything, we're a group of content consumers, not a community.
If we look to the mods take care of everything, we’re a group of content consumers, not a community.
And then we have to deal with the community collectively adopting shitty or evil ideas and enforcing them, shutting down victims or anyone who opposes them. So who checks the community? Who protects the individual?
Does the individual need such protection?
Am I supposed to be spoon-fed only those ideas that some nameless, faceless entity deems appropriate for me to receive? Do I need someone to hold my hand and guide me around the fediverse, like a toddler in a grocery store?
If a community collectively adopts shitty or evil ideas, why would I want to continue to associate with that community? Why would I not simply leave that particular community, and focus instead on the dozens of others of which I am already a member?
Who better to protect the individual than the individual themself?
Exactly!
I left Reddit because I felt it was toxic and I really didn't like the direction the platform was going. If a community here on Lemmy goes bad, I can leave for another. It's not hard.
Moderation, IMO, should largely focus on removing trolls and reminding people to be civil. That's really about it. It's not their job to police a community, it's merely their job to respond to consistent complaints from users. I.e. it's your job to report people and posts, and mods should only step in if there are multiple complaints for the same thing.
Or if it clearly violates the rules set up by the mod.
Precisely.
But it should be on the users to report rules violations. I don't expect a mod to read through every comment in every post looking for rule violations, I expect them to mostly read reports and step in if something looks credible.
We're a community, so we should all help out.
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There's a reason I'm here and not on Reddit, and that's one of the biggies.
I want to be somewhere where the community takes responsibility, not one where they just dump it all on unpaid mods.
This is not just on reddit. That is one example of how many forums are run.
There is no moral imperative or rulebook that says things have to be run the way you're describing. As you yourself said, the community takes responsibility. If they want to give mods more or less latitude that is entirely their prerogative. Likewise if someone creates their own community, it's up to them to decide how they want it run. We don't have them bound by some system out the gate.
I want to be somewhere where the community takes responsibility, not one where they just dump it all on unpaid mods.
Instances are so far run by unpaid volunteers. There just isn't a corporation at the top. And those unpaid volunteers who are taking on the work for us do have a say in how their instances are run.
Well yeah, I'm describing what I want.
There are certainly instances (like Beehaw, Lemmygrad, and Exploding Heads) that are managed in a way that I'm not interested in, so I don't associate with them. If others want to, that's completely fine, and it's completely in line with other forums and whatnot.
I personally think that if lemmy is to truly succeed, it needs to be different from those other SM sites. If we're just a poor copy of Reddit or an overly complicated alternative to forums, what value does it truly offer? It needs to be different in some meaningful way, and imo that meaningful way is through community investment in the platform.
So that's what I try to do. I have contributed code to lemmy-adjacent projects, I have contributed constructive posts and comments, etc. I want this to be a real community instead of just another place to argue about pointless things. We probably won't get there, but that's what I want.
So please, if you just want to post memes and whatnot, Reddit is probably the better option. If you want to argue, go to Twitter. If you want to promote yourself, go to Facebook, Instagram, or Facebook. But if you want to help out and build something special, please hang out here on lemmy.
Sometimes mods are asleep or not locked to their desks. Downvotes help get shit like that (pun fully intended) out of most peoples feeds unless they are browsing by new or are way way way down on the hot scroll list.
It is functionally a “I don’t like this” or “I’m right” button.
Sometimes comments are just wrong, and detract from the community. Downvotes (plus an interface that hides negative voted comments) clean things up without need for formal moderation.
Whatever can be said about downvotes (an automated system for marking one's disapproval) is probably true of reporting (a human reviewed system for marking one's extreme disapproval), too.
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All this does is bury comments regardless of quality
But if downvotes (and upvotes) are well correlated with quality, then what's the problem? Your complaints are about community culture around downvotes, not about the mechanism itself.
I'd love to see a system where votes can be correlated between users so that the ranking algorithm weights like-minded voters and deemphasizes those voters you disagree with, but that would probably create a pretty significant overhead for the service.
But if downvotes (and upvotes) are well correlated with qualit
They aren't. That's the entire problem. Performative snark is rewarded. Agreeing with the dominant mentality is rewarded.
Agreeing with the dominant mentality is rewarded.
And I'm saying that some communities have a "dominant mentality" that's pretty obviously correct. The only thing worse than a person who says "just because it's popular doesn't mean it's right" is the person who swings the pendulum too far in the other direction of saying "it's unpopular so it must be right."
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Oh come on you don’t actually believe we should structure the entire system around such a minority use case
Minority use case? I'm talking about how downvotes are useful for communities to enforce their own norms, or ensure that erroneous information is excluded. Someone who insists on a proof that the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180º is probably going to get downvoted, especially if he's being an asshole about it. Same with someone who insists that the common cold is caused by exposure to cold air, or that the earth is flat.
Or there are broad consensus beliefs about what is or isn't off topic for a discussion, what types of insults break the forum rules on civility, etc. When a community largely agrees that someone is being an asshole for using racial slurs, downvotes quickly sort that out. In other words, toxicity can get filtered out through the downvote/hide mechanism, as well.
Even for beliefs that are simply matters of opinion/taste/preference, the community can decide what's actually up for debate and what's not, within that space. A forum dedicated to fans of Real Madrid doesn't have to tolerate trolls coming in and saying "Real Madrid sucks" or "lol soccer is a stupid sport you Europeans are so stupid" or "sports are dumb." Same with a vegan forum downvoting someone's brisket recipe (or a BBQ forum downvoting a "meat is murder" manifesto). These "echo chambers" are just how people organize with people who share their interests, and it's weird not to be able to see that there's value in those communities.
So yeah, I think that you have a problem with people's desire to organize into groups of similar interests, not with the actual mechanism by which those groups enforce those norms. It wouldn't be any better with a mod-enforced echo chamber, either.
This is going nowhere. You aren't even talking to me anymore.
Nah, we just need to interpret downvotes differently. If we count the votes the right way, it doesn't really matter if we use downvotes to indicate disagreement.
Reddit used to provide a tally of both upvotes and downvotes, rather than just the sum total of the two. The best top-level comments often had hundreds of both upvotes and downvotes, and vibrant discussions always followed. The quality of Reddit conversation dropped precipitously after they combined up and down votes into a sum total. They made it impossible to find the +500/-498 comments among the +4/-2 comments, calling each of them "+2" with a controversial tag, even though one was highly relevant, and the other was almost completely irrelevant.
A "vote" indicates a strong opinion on the subject, and is the more important metric to consider than the specific composition of the votes. Up or down, any vote is saying "check out this opinion".
I totally agree here. And I want to take it a step further and instead of sorting by average votes, we should merely be including it as one of many indicators, such as:
- number of direct child comments
- number of total descendant comments
- maybe length of direct child comments - a longer response is more likely to be an interesting rebuttal than a "go away troll" comment
- number of independent users among total descendant comments - if it's just the same two people going back and forth, that's just a good, old-fashioned argument that most won't care to read
And so on. But instead, we seem to just sort by
upvotes - downvotesand call it a day.