Specifically applies to places like Lemmy and Reddit. But also other social media like Facebook with thumbs up and down reactions. I’m mostly talking about Lemmy here though.
There’s no benefit to having this system on Lemmy. It results in people who disagree with your content leaving a drive-by dookie on your doorstep. If you disagree with someone, you should actually have to leave a comment as to why, instead of just downvoting. If downvotes are removed, things would still be sorted by popularity correctly. The only thing we would lose is the “controversial” sort function, and could just be replaced with a “most comments” or “least upvotes”.
People are going to say, just ignore them they don’t mean anything. But they do mean something. If you see -13 on a thoughtful post you worked hard on, it makes you feel bad. That’s just the human condition.
Yes I know I can turn votes off in settings here, but many people only respond with an upvote to show they read and acknowledge your message, so you’re missing out on a whole stream of communication if you disable it.
Anyway, it doesn’t keep me up at night, but I think it’s lame when people just downvote and leave. It turns comments into this weird popularity contest where you feel unwelcome, especially on a discussion-heavy place like here.
Edit: here’s an interesting discussion a while ago that had some ideas: https://lemm.ee/post/30635232
Most of the time people just vote how it’s already going. If it’s -5 then it’s basically already decided that this is a comment everyone is going to downvote and they dogpile. Quite often it’s an audience problem; as in, the content is completely fine, but people have decided to take it the wrong way. I haven’t done anything wrong, but a bunch of people disagree and hate my opinion, and it’s unrecoverable because the damage is done. It’s like if someone throws a tomato at a play, it’s just over.
If you don’t want to feed a troll, just don’t interact, or report them if it’s that bad. We managed it on forums in the 90’s without voting systems. It’s not warning anybody off that content, it’s just quietly putting someone down and spreading even more negativity.
I’m not moving entire instances just for this one thing lol. Again, it doesn’t keep me up at night. I just point out when things could be better.
Do you think people can’t think for themselves and just vote the way other people are voting? I’m inclined to be insulted, but then again I live in a first-past-the-post “democracy” so you might be onto something there.
If there’s truly nothing wrong with your message, then downvotes are a badge of honour. When you catch downvotes for saying “everyone deserves food” or “don’t be so hard on the gays” then other people are telling on themselves when they downvote.
However, I definitely believe people are out there saying indefensible things and then blaming their audience for disagreeing with them. “I’m not racist, but…” can lead to a “Well you people are just too sensitive”
I believe on some front ends, a comment that collects a certain amount of downvotes is automatically collapsed. So it actually spreads less negativity, although you could probably see how brigading by trolls could abuse this.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight though, I can’t downvote from my instance.
You can see even in this thread that completely innocuous statements like explaining the reason I do something in response to a question are getting downvoted. The same 2–4 people keep coming back here to downvote everything I post. I’ve also had people going through my post history and just downvoting everything indiscriminately, across multiple communities.
That’s before we even get to the group think. Once a “side” is “winning”, there’s a real cognitive bias to continue that trend. That’s just human psychology. Most people look at the vote first, and that biases how they read the comment. If it’s -4, obviously there’s something wrong with it, otherwise why would it be negative? That makes you see negative things that weren’t there before. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
It doesn’t really have anything to do with improving the community’s content. Maybe a few people use it that way, but I think most people just use it as a dopamine button to “kick people while they’re down”, so to speak. You can check my post history yourself to see if I’m a racist or not.