Not every platform on the fediverse has a downvote system, but those that do (Lemmy, piefed) are heading down a bad path, imo. Downvoting is one of the worst features of reddit, leading to dogpiling, group think, and silencing of minority viewpoints. I do see the value of it, on the surface, and if you want to enable it for yourself to allow certain posts to be downvoted for your own information, I think you should be allowed to do so, but having it set as default for all posts just leads to a toxic and conformist environment, which is what I thought the fediverse was trying to get away from.
You must log in or # to comment.
I’d probably do less blocking if I could downvote instead. Not sure if that’s good or bad.
I really like the ability to downvote. It enables me to say “this was badly argumented and a waste of my time” without spending too much effort for that. I’d write it anyway, but probably using impolite words that would be worse for the Fediverse than my downvotes are.
I dont remember where I’ve seen the stats, but I make about 10 upvotes per one downvote. I strongly believe at least my downvoting behaviour does more good than bad for the Forumverse.
When I was looking for a good instance for myself, Blåhaj seemed like an excellent fit, but when I noticed the downvote button was missing, I changed my mind. I would be annoyed if that feature disappeared altogether.
At least on PieFed’s Matrix chat there has been very constructive conversations about whether and how to allow downvoting. To my eyes, the solutions they came up with seem very good.
Not that I’d remember off the back of my hand what the hell they decided in the end. Maybe someone will tell? :) @rimu@piefed.social @wjs018@piefed.social
Downvotes are to put a comment towards the bottom of the page for being irrelevant to the post, not to tell someone you disagree with them.
According to who?
Also, what’s the difference? If I down vote you to bury your comment for being irrelevant, poorly worded, bad faith, etc. or down vote you because I don’t like your comment, the result is the same.
To be fair, you accumulated most of the downvotes (I see) in a single post and the attached comments. You got two things at the same time: the unpopularopinions community tends to be harsh. From my experience I’d say you get way more downvotes there, than in other communities. And secondly, you picked one of the two super controversial topics. Brace for downvotes if you post about AI. Or Israel. Dunno if the latter toned down a bit, or if I’ve unsubscribed from enough communities since.
It’ll be better with almost all other topics.
Not sure if I’d go straight for “silencing”. I mean the post and most comments are still there. So it’s just that you got a lot of backlash. But I can still read what you wrote. And you got quite some engagement. But I get what you mean.
And down-votes are a bit weird. We never agree if they mean bury the content somewhere at the bottom. Or if it means " I disagree with what you wrote". That just gets lumped together. And some people use them sparingly, some hand out a lot of downvotes. Which I guess could be fine if they’re used to for the frontpage ranking to sort the posts. But the way we use them doesn’t really give them the right weight.
And by the way, I’m not sure if I like up-votes either. You’ll get 300 of them for re-posting a meme. And 3 upvotes for coming up with really good advice to someone’s question.
We never agree if they mean bury the content somewhere at the bottom. Or if it means " I disagree with what you wrote”.
I think this is a huge point and one thing I think is nice about Slashdot: you can indicate a reason for your vote.
@rabiezaater@piefed.social not all instances enable them. I think Piefed can restrict them in some manners (local users only, or something), and in NodeBB you can disable them completely.
It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition, if you think downvotes are not good, run a software (or join an instance) that doesn’t have them enabled.
I believe Piefed let’s you restrict downvotes to people that are subscribers. I think that’s a good solution to idiots downvoting from all just because they’re not interested in or understanding the post and/or the community it’s in. I also wonder if people even understand that they’re not training an algorithm, just dragging people’s posts down.
