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.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • CallMeAl (like Alan)@piefed.zipEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      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.