This is a general proposal that concerns Lemmy specifically, but also other forum-alike software that uses ActivityPub, such as Piefed.
For me, the original sin of social media is downvoting (rant incoming). Specifically, its rampant misuse as a “Me no like!!” button. Apart from conveying totally uninteresting information (i.e. a subjective binary opinion), downvoting encourages schoolyard social dynamics and discourages heterodox views (and therefore debate). The nearest in-person equivalent (saying “shut up”) is universally considered rude. At scale, the effect of downvoting is to brutalize a community that might otherwise be pleasant and welcoming. I believe this practice is almost always toxic and poisonous. Those who defend it (in good faith, I do not doubt) need to consider the possibility that it has helped to homogenize their communities into people like them (to caricature: insensitive males). Most ordinary people do not participate actively in social media. There’s a reason for that.
No, this is not a popular position here (cf. selection bias) and so it will of course be… downvoted. But it’s how I see it. I like to think that I’ve added some value to the fediverse with my contributions, but if there’s one thing that regularly causes me to consider leaving, it’s this. Going to Beehiv or Blahaj-whatsit is not a solution, because the communities I’m interested in are not there. Hiding downvote scores does not work because… it does not hide the downvoters.
Which gave me an idea. Given that the identity of downvoters is technically public, I propose a new setting: “Auto-block downvoters”. That’s it. Automatically hide comments (or posts, or anything) by users who have downvoted your contributions. Logical, no? They don’t care for what I have to say, and I don’t care for their inane negativity. It’s win-win! Lots of possible variants:
- Hide [ subsequent | all ] comments by users who have downvoted [ a post | a comment | anything ] by you [ in this thread | on this post | in this community | everywhere]
- Hide [etc] by users with an upvote-downvote ratio lower than [ X ]% etc
Such a setting (especially #1) would immeasurably improve my experience of Lemmy. No exaggeration. I like to think it might also serve as a subtle incentive for users to be more generous and tolerant in their behavior towards others, but that is secondary.
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The only time I think it would be appropriate to take action against any user for their downvotes is if it is a bot account that 100% or primarily just downvotes.
And these do exist. I have seen a number of user accounts on Lemvotes that have 0 upvotes on anything, 0 posts, 0 comments and thousands of downvotes. Often on multiple posts with the same exact timestamp for their vore.
Fair enough (indeed, I agree) but that is not what I am asking for here.
If this was just for personal blocks, I don’t see why you couldn’t write a script/bot for yourself to do so. Unless you don’t know how.
Yeah, I’d be in favour of this.
So
Let me see if I understand you
You only want to see
-
opinions you like, or
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no opinions at all
Let me see if I can do my small part to help you
Bye…
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You know, I could see a feature where if someone mass downvotes a certain percentage of your posts, then block them in some manner.
Like if someone made a script to downvote ALL your posts or something of that nature. But I personally havent seen something like that in the fedi before. But it was something reddit had a problem with. Bots downvoting so their own posts got to the top before anyone else.
I dont think blanket blocking downvoting people is a good thing though. As others have said,it will undermine the purpose of the voting, for visibility.
As others have said,it will undermine the purpose of the voting, for visibility.
First, this is premised on the shaky idea that a bunch of randos agreeing or not agreeing with a title makes for a useful metric for visibility. Second, I don’t see how it would undermine anything at all. Essentially what I’m asking for is just more sophisticated blocking functionality, so I can get a breather from all the hate and vituperation here.
Things that your community wants to see get upvoted.
Things your community does not want to see get downvoted.
If you get rid downvoting you get rid of the vehicle for removing things your communities dont want to see.
If you dont want to see what a bunch of randos are agreeing/disagreeing on, maybe try to find a site that does? Because this is the internet in a nutshell. I dont hate you by downvoting you, im saying to others, hey this person has nothing to say that is important here. And the website pushes that content away from that community via the score. I think lemmy still lets you see the downvoted comments but other fedi services just remove the comments/posts OR hide them automatically. I know some software even removes the post/comment before it even hits the servers. Fedi is powerful in that we can do what we want with the data we get.
I just dont understand your point of view sorry. Maybe if you implement the solution I can better understand.
Its pretty easy to fork Piefed and other such fedi services. Give it a go!
I made mastodon clone where the hashtags are organized like they were lemmy/piefed/threadiverse communities. It worked really well! GL!
My point of view is explained above. I consider downvoting toxic. Everything about it. I have never been entirely comfortable in a community where people are doing it to each other (and me). Just as I’m not comfortable in a room where people are booing and jeering each other. It’s not that weird or even unusual a point of view. It’s the reason not all community software has this “feature”. Lemmy has it and I had an idea of opt-in functionality that would work around it completely. But most users here seem very protective of their right to downvote and to inflict their downvoting on others and they are very clear that they do not want users to have any option to escape from it.
So be it. You’re right to say “just fork it” but I have neither the time nor the skills to fork forum software. So I’ll probably just continue to gradually leave the communities I participate in (now down to only about 3 that I value) and eventually I’ll leave altogether like I did with corporate social media. A bit of a shame but there are worse tragedies in the world.
Thanks for the advice and feedback, which was far more constructive and generous-spirited than most in this discussion.
Gl! It only gets better if you put in the work. We dont agree but hey thats life.
Have a good day.
I use a mobile client to browse, and it uses swipes for both voting and for navigation, which means sometimes I accidentally downvote stuff before going back and correcting it. That means that both myself and other people who use this client would accidentally get banned just for downvoting by mistake.
Why don’t you just be like Lemmy.world admins and stop federating specific users to avoid having their ban be in the modlog.
This sounds kind or ridiculous, maybe just don’t take people on the Internet so seriously?
First, perhaps read what I wrote rather than just the title, because I am guessing with 102% certainty that you didn’t.
Second, “seriously”: personally I prefer the idea of a world where people take each other seriously. Where they treat each other with respect, understanding, tolerance. No, that is not the world we have here, and in any case it seems you’ve given up on it already.
There are literally instances already that disable downvotes on them, like blahaj.zone. You don’t need to have an auto-block feature for it on top of that.
Please read my post more closely.
Oh man the people at .ml will love this reaffirmation of them being nice and nestled inside their echo chamber.
So if you think about this. Out of the people that downvote some will and will put an explanation for why they down vote. You want to not see these so that you will have less of an idea on why your post got downvoted. Do I understand the idea behind this?
But why should I care what someone who downvotes me thinks? They could just as easily have disagreed respectfully with my post, without downvoting it and so tagging it as BAD for everyone. As I am doing right now with you.
Well often downvotes will get a comment or edit from an OP along the lines of. Why the downvotes. So some want to know. Further someone who downvotes and comments may have something salient to say. A contstructive negative criticism. Those who down vote and move on just don’t care enough. Granted its always going to be a crap shoot like anything else. I mean why do we care about what anyone on the internet thinks? Its just two kinds of ways people are expressing themselves. Granted I find public voting to be useless myself. I would rather a system that allowed people to vote just for their own uses like modifying how their feed shows up without letting people know they voted it down or up or sideways.
I would rather a system that allowed people to vote just for their own uses like modifying how their feed shows up without letting people know they voted it down or up or sideways.
Excellent idea. Never thought of that.
so it basically is from trust cafe which is the social media by the wikipedia guy. Unfortunately he did not make it federated or worked with the concept to be brought into federated social media and I prefer the federated thing over it. With it the user can rate everything. users, communities, comments, posts, literally anything. You rate it 0-100 where 0 is essentially block and 100 subscribe and everything defaults to a ranking of 50. Then your feed takes into account your rankings for the order of it. Someone is a bit of a dick but don’t want to block him. rank him 25 and his stuff will be half as often as default. I mean I don’t know the exact thing it will do around ranking but love the concept.
At best something like that just lets people spout off all kinds of abusive noise and then ignore the feedback.
In theory, such a person could easily be blocked or banned. In practice, I don’t see such a person actively choosing not to see the results of their abuse.
Have one for the road.
You may want to edit your post body to include information you clarify later in comments, namely:
You don’t want to block users permanently, which is why the current block feature is unsuitable.
You don’t want to block users universally, that is, if someone downvotes you in one thread you still want to see their content in others.
You only want to stop seeing comment replies in a single thread (or subthread?) from users who have previously downvoted you in that thread.
Do I have that right? That wouldn’t be so bad, I think, though beats me how you’d implement it.
I too get irritated when users misuse the vote buttons, but to my mind the ranked-thread system doesn’t work without them. And in the end, they’re just numbers: No amount of votes has every made me delete an unpopular comment, either of my own or as a moderator.
Yep, you have it exactly right, thank you for reading more than the title. I’ve added a clarification to the top of the post.
to my mind the ranked-thread system doesn’t work without them.
IMO it would work just fine without the down button. In other words we get a button to clap but not to jeer.
And in the end, they’re just numbers: No amount of votes has every made me delete an unpopular comment, either of my own or as a moderator.
Sure, but then you are likely more thick-skinned than the average, being a moderator on social media. I don’t think I’m hypersensitive. After all, I guessed this would be taken down in flames but I posted it anyway. In person I’m fairly combative (though always respectful). I don’t think either of us is average, same for most others here. The average (see corporate social media) is to be much more sensitive to criticism, to delete if people push back, to delete if nobody upvotes, to shut up except when we know the herd will agree with us, basically to behave like the social animals we are. I’m convinced this is what most people here don’t fully grasp. For me the downvote button is like nitroglycerine for our worst herd-behavior instincts. Upvoting will be technically abused but it’s a pragmatic necessity, as you say. Downvoting serves no purpose except to spread bad vibes exactly where they’re least needed.
Lemmings like you are what the block feature (as it exists) is perfect for - I’ll never have to read your tripe again! Winning.
This kind of comment just confirms the whole premise of my idea.
wouldn’t an option to ‘mute’ rather than ‘block’ people achieve the same outcome? that’s how it works on twitter iirc
Sure, that would work fine. Essentially the same thing as far as I can tell. The point is that it would be fine-tunable and automatic, neither of which the current block is.
Dont you think its inherendly dangerous to just automatically block anyone who disagrees with you?
If you see only comments that agree with you or interract only with people who have the same opinions, your views will never be challenged. Many of the societys problems has its roots in people living in their own bubble.
Totally agree, in principle. That’s why I don’t use that very feature, which already exists - i.e. blocking (permanently). Are you against it?
There’s a difference between manually blocking specific users and having a system set up so you will automatically block anyone who ever downvotes any of your posts or comments.
ever
I specifically did not ask for this (it was one of the options and the one I personally would never use).
You seem to have good intentions. But I think that you’re disregarding how most people would use such a feature if it was an option and what that would do to an ecosystem
How so? In functional terms this exact feature already exists: blocking. Essentially I’m just asking for more controls over it, because it’s too brutal (and fastidious) as things stand. Details could be discussed.
Even if you wouldn’t use that option, having an automated blocking system to that scale is absurd to me
Might indeed be hard to implement (congratulations for making approximately the 2nd piece of constructive feedback in this whole discussion BTW). The level of granularity would have to be limited. As described, it sounds like a front-end (i.e. Javascript-based) feature. But time-limited auto-blocks are definitely possible in theory. Not exactly what I asked for but I would definitely use it.
A time-limited manual block is doable and desirable.
I am afraid I simply don’t support your automatic block system time limited or not.
Im against auto-blocking.
The block feature we have now is fine for what it is, because user needs to review case by case if they want to block somebody or not and they will always keep seeing other peoples opinions even if they try to make a bubble for them self.
The auto-block would be context-specific and temporary, as I described. Essentially it’s a fine-tuning of the existing block feature, which I totally agree is excessively heavy-handed (and I don’t use it for that reason).
I disagree. Its not fine tuning. Its fundamentally changing it.
I firmly belive that if we are ready to write anything on to a public channel, in this case even with anonymity, we need to be ready to accept critique and the fact that people will sometimes disagree with you. Also there will always be irrelevant, or snarky comments, but as a adult we should be able to ignore those. If you are not ready to accept it, you should reflect with yourself, if you should even be writing anything.
Artificially making it seem like everybody agrees with you is just lying to yourself and skewing your own perception of the mattet.
Also as a another point. This whole discussion we have right now comes from disagreement. I have read your comments, it has made me ponder things i would not have tought without you and weighted things you have written. I hope you have done the same. Even when we clearly have different opinions i think we have argued in good spirit.
The system you are suggesting would remove these interactions completelly.
The difference between you and me is that I read your opinions and let them stand, while you vote mine down. Why should I be interested in what you think when you are declaring openly that my opinions are illegitimate and not worth considering? I’m not doing that to you. Because why should I? You’re being perfectly respectful, even interesting. Why would I downvote you? And why would you downvote me?
I am more than happy to deal with reasoned criticism. A downvote is “Shut up”.
Moreover (and this is really all that counts) this feature would not affect you. You would be free to go on downvoting and being downvoted. Those who don’t appreciate having their contributions shouted down could talk (and disagree) quietly and respectfully among themselves as adults. It’s my idea of social-media utopia and this small feature would make it possible.
Well i havent downvoted you during this conversation…
And you must be somewhat intrested in what im saying because you take your time and respond to my arguments.
And id like to think that given good enough argument i could change my mind.
I think we perceive the downvote differently. I dont think it means shut up. Its a binary choise. (Or ternary because no voting is choice too). There is hardly enough substance to interpret any intention behind it. Its just something people press, when somebody dont have anything to add to the discussion, or they dont have time to write their own comment.
It’s my idea of social-media utopia and this small feature would make it possible.
This is the fundamental part we seem to disagree with. I dont think its “utopia”, i think its facade, that only creates personal echochambers for people guarding them from seeing any opposing opinions.
Again, I promise you I have no problem with being contradicted. I have in-person friends who I disagree with on politics and it is not an issue. I have a problem with being told “I am publicly tagging your contribution as bad”. That is what downvoting is.
Anyway, I understand your take, I’ve heard it a hundred times. You don’t think it’s a big deal. You’re in the majority. I get it. I would just like the option not to have to see the content of people who are publicly declaring - even though nothing obliges them to - that what I have to say is worthless.
