this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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It is baffling to me how many people want to copy Reddit voting system, including hiding voting history, despite having left Reddit. The entire voting system over there is a huge part of the toxicity problem.
Downvotes should be removed, all votes public. Accountability changes peoples’ behavior and I can tell you that before kbin.social went down you could definitely see the difference.
This is clearly an unpopular opinion and I will be downvoted like crazy for it, but it is so exhausting watching forum after forum make the exact same mistakes.
Without downvotes, you get Twitter where even obvious rage bait drowns out everything. Downvotes aren’t perfect, but they’re much better than not having them.
Microblogs and threaded forums are completely different platforms with completely different issues
Additionally, there is no underlying algorithm deciding content on your behalf here like there is on Twitter. And we all know those algorithms favor rage bait. Not having down votes doesn’t change that in the slightest. If anything informs the algorithm more. They don’t care about what you like or dislike, they just want engagement at all costs.
Downvotes can be useful in certain contexts, like when you visit a thread and are looking for factual information, such as the answer to a tech question. I don't want to accidentally follow someone's bad advice because the bad advice didn't have any downvotes nor any responses as to why it was wrong.
It's not perfect, but voting is a quick, often effective method of fact checking.
It’s more of a vibe check than a fact check. But I think it’s definitely useful for the network to self moderate since mods are pretty much entirely voluntary on Lemmy.
Just to give a concrete example, there are a couple blatantly political posts on !fediverse. Do they belong there? Absolutely not. But by the time I saw them days later, the damage was done and they were already taken care of by downvotes. Should I really mod remove a week old post with 50 downvotes? The discussion there about why it didn't belong was fine, and didn't need to be hidden further.
I'm against making votes visible. I don't want to make myself a target because I don't vote with the hivemenind.
Automatically removing downvoted posts is a bad idea, because you basically can censor any post when you have a couple of people.
I didn't switch from reddit because of the voting system, I switched because my app stopped functioning.
We don't have to be contrarian.
You can't have accountability and anonymity. There are people that post, not just upvote, garbage all day long. There's also plenty of occasions where people have been shamed for past posts in completely unrelated threads. I don't disagree with those things being public, otherwise we might as well use Pastebin, but we don't need one more way to judge people. It's also the simplest of acts. I've upvoted right-wing posts before but not because I agree but because they were making valid points and not resorting to personal attacks or demagoguery.
The problem with seeing people's votes is you don't have context for why they voted that way. Did they upvote because they agreed, or because they thought it was an engaging counterpoint in an interesting discussion? Maybe they just thought it was funny or wanted the thread it was part of to be more visible. Someone looking at your votes could choose whatever perception they want if they decide to go after you for it.
How is that any different than what we see currently? We have no clue why people vote on our posts and comments one way or another
It is different in that the barrier to a user looking at your votes and choosing whatever perception they want is currently much higher.
What barrier? There is no barrier. You see the number and you make a snap judgment. If someone wants to obsessively check my vote count they’re free to waste their time. If they stalk me I block them. I don’t see what this is solving .
This is about seeing what posts you voted on. Like if you upvote a post that someone disagrees with for whatever reason or you downvote someone's post they could see that and go after you for it. Regardless of why you did it.
People already do this based on people’s comments.
Shitty people are going to try and find ways to get under your skin all the time. None of these things we’re talking about solve that. What I am talking about is fostering a less toxic culture in the aggregate. Individuals will do what they do.
Right but we don't need to give them the tools to do it even more.
What tools are we giving them? If anything downvotes are a tool they abuse already. May as well take it away
The post is about giving everyone the ability to see how everyone else votes on individual posts/comments. For instance if you downvoted this I would be able to look it up somehow and see it was you as opposed to it being anonymous. I don't care if I get downvoted but there's a lot of wackjobs on the internet who might use that as a reason to harass someone.
Then block them. You think this is suddenly going to be a daily occurrence or something?
No I don't but there's no reason to give them the option at all. There's no positives to votes being public.
True, really wish that could just be a them problem though.
Removing down votes is a terrible idea. Look what that did to YouTube
What did it do to YouTube? I remember there being a huge uproar over it...but I don't use it much but totally forgot that this even happened as it has made no difference for my light use.
I've been looking for someone to touch on this. I didn't like youtube getting rid of the downvotes but....what did it change? The only incidents I can think of is when there's vote bombing on a really bad video. Lemmynsfw got rid of downvotes and they're better for it. The only exception I can think of is a technical video that is just factually wrong but then there's always a comment highlighting that with upvotes. Seems like the only thing we lost was sensational downvoting and the thrill of jumping on a like-minded group dislike.
I’m of the opinion that downvotes are useful for self moderation of troll/off-topic comments or posts.
People also use it as a disagree button. That use doesn’t bother me personally but I see a lot of users get upset about having a negative score on a comment.
I think the best method is to keep the votes and either hide the score total or to not visibly show any score that’s less than 1
Let me ask you this: do you think even a slight majority of people use upvotes and downvotes to delineate between high quality/poor comments and posts? Because I think we all know that the majority of people just use them as agree/disagree buttons to try to build momentum during arguments.
That is (often) the noble intention by those who programmed into forums, but we all know that is not how it shakes out. Removing downvotes still allows us to push the best to the top considerably more easily than allowing up upvotes and downvotes does.
Self-moderation doesn’t work at scale unless you have a team of mods at the top aggressively policing the content, which I am actually in favor of but people also get mad about that and call it “power tripping.“
From what I can see, people will downvote shitposts even if they agree with it. But the downvote is used as the disagree button the majority of the time.
I will upvote any comment that seems to be made in good faith but I don’t have any illusions of that being how the majority of the network uses their votes. I think a higher percentage of people use their vote that way compared to Reddit but not much to make a difference.
That’s why I suggested hiding votes entirely. I think that would be unpopular because people like the dopamine hit of seeing your comment score go up, and so my compromise was to only hide 0 or negative scores.
Exactly, if you see troll, just block him and declare "damnatio memoriae". It works exactly like this in fms usenet like forum for old freenet / hyphanet. You can even subscribe block / allow lists ( -100 to 100 weight lists ). In my opinion, it's very good mechanism. One of the best I ever saw
I partially agree with you, the voting system as a whole should be removed in my opinion or upvotes publicized but down vote should not. It's far too easy for down vote which is used commonly as in off topic or disagree to be taken the wrong way and cause targeted harassment. Making the whole thing public as a whole is just going to make dissants refuse to give their opinion strengthening echo chamber issues
I agree, there doesn't seem to be a good way to make voting not at the very least semi-public anyway so just stop a) pretending the information is protected and b) remove the not-a-disagree-button-but-totally-a-disagree-button. There is a report link for rules violations, maybe a separate one for spam would be good as well, otherwise, I don't know, just allow people to add an actual poll to comments if they want to?