Downvotes are integral to keeping communities safe and clean. Bad faith posts and people just being assholes are downvoted to the bottom significantly faster than mods can remove them.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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Unpopular Opinion
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I agree. I also think that combining votes into a single score is disingenuous. A post with 20 downvotes is perceived very different than a post with 60 upvotes and 80 downvotes. When you only show the combined score it gives the appearance of a singular opinion
The combination of up and down votes serve little purpose other than to enforce popular opinions because they ultimately boil down to like and dislike buttons most of the time. Combine that with a dumb karma system (or people paying attention to a summation score) and you get tons of reposts guaranteed to farm upvotes, bot farms using up and down votes to make their opinions look more popular and opposing opinions look less popular, and vapid le ebic meme posts that add nothing to the conversation but make people blow air through their nose and thus "have my upboat".
Like it or not, people often get swayed seeing numbers go in either direction. I'd rather not see people try to conform to popular sentiment just to play it safe in case they care about this silly score. Disabling downvotes at least means that a post receiving few upvotes could've done so for a variety of reasons so people can't assume more upvotes automatically means better and there's no red number that people use to automatically disregard an unpopular opinion. If you wish to point out that a post is bad, you can do so with words, then you actually have to provide a reason instead of "I don't like this post".
It makes the upvotes meaningless. Just like on youtube.
The problem with downvotes in LemmyNSFW was very specific to that instance and its sexual nature. It boils down to the typical user doing the following:
- people use downvotes to signal "I don't want to see this"
- most people want to see naked women, not naked men
- the instance is supposed to be inclusive towards people who want to see either
As a result, content geared towards gay+bi men, hetero+bi women, and plenty non-binary people was consistently downvoted - and it was discouraging genuine OC for those demographics.
It was totally a band-aid measure, mind you. But it kind of worked?
An actual solution for that issue would be to require people to tag their content, and allow posters to pick what they want to see based on those tags. But for that you'd need further improvement of the software.
Porn should definitely be separated into categories, because there is a lot of content that a lot of people don’t want to see.
Problem with downvotes is people assume they feed the algorithm. They use them to say " I personally don't want to see this". When they're really meant as " this is inappropriate for this community".
I think Lemmy needs to create an algorithm that would help with downloads acting as expected. And then allow people to flag separately if something is not appropriate for a community.
It's simpler just to say "androphiles"
Sounds like they should have more LGBT ~~subreddits~~ (communities? Is that the term?)
They do, but once you hop into the "local" view you see all of those posts. And the users, instead of blocking those communities as "content that is not relevant for me, but might be for someone else", simply downvote the posts as a knee-jerk reaction.
(Yup, communities. I typically shorten it to comms.)
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(7 replies)
The sellers were also a big part of the problem, people were downvoting and reporting them constantly, which was turning them away... Which... I mean it's fucking Lemmy, such response against sellers should have been expected.
And they are still a problem, you can see them being very aggressive with their multiple posts (I call that spamming).
I think the other part of the problem is that a lot of people came expecting some sort of safe space/echo chamber where they could control everything from their instance, but the fediverse is way too open and diverse to achieve that (specially Lemmy with at least 3 big troll instances).
As a huge doomer, I don't think tags would have worked because we are talking about people who went out of their way to troll that content, not normal users who might downvote or not and then block the community or user. I don't know if removing the downvotes actually discouraged those trolls or if they are still going at it, but I am sure it didn't help to increase the quality of the content.
Sellers being also part of the problem is a fair point. But it isn't just about Lemmy being Lemmy; it's that unless a community disallows sellers, amateurs eventually leave.
This would probably need a different approach, like different comms for sellers vs. amateurs. Or, if the tag system were to be implemented, forcing people to tag their content accordingly.
About sexuality: the reason why I think that tags would've worked is that, once legitimate-but-shortsighted users stop downvoting things based on their sexuality, the trolls stick out like a sore thumb. And then you can simply kick the trolls out.
Sellers being also part of the problem is a fair point. But it isn’t just about Lemmy being Lemmy; it’s that unless a community disallows sellers, amateurs eventually leave.
I usually browse top 12 hours or scaled and I haven't seen an actual amateur post in a long time, so I think you must be right.
This would probably need a different approach, like different comms for sellers vs. amateurs. Or, if the tag system were to be implemented, forcing people to tag their content accordingly.
I think the sellers would get upset of not being able to mix their spam outside their comms, but I agree.
Altough I don't have hopes for a tag system for a while, being careful of the tags not overlapping accross instances sounds like a pain.
About sexuality: the reason why I think that tags would’ve worked is that, once legitimate-but-shortsighted users stop downvoting things based on their sexuality, the trolls stick out like a sore thumb. And then you can simply kick the trolls out.
At this point, I think everyone has blocked whatever they don't like (based on sexuality), so if that hasn't worked enough to stop the massive downvotes I doubt a tag system would work for that (since they don't only come from one instance and sometimes they create instances for that purpose).
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Forced positivity is toxic positivity.
Removing an interaction choice from users can only result in lower quality user interaction.
Removing the capacity for downvotes harms the community.
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I do not care enough, because here on lemmy.world it isn't a thing. But I see you're from lemmynsfw. I vaguely remember a thread where the disabling of downvotes was discussed and to this day I do not understand why people are afraid of downvotes on their wanking material.
They disabled downvotes because they want to encourage people to post porn of themselves not just to repost stuff. Getting downvoted for posting your own work isn't encouraging and essentially kills communities before they even start.
This actually makes sense. Thanks.
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(4 replies)
They said it was discouraging men and lgbt+ users since they were constantly getting downvoted.
Also the sellers were getting constantly downvoted... If I had to guess, I'd say that was actually the reason, but that's mere speculation.
I agree it doesn't make sense, the fediverse is a public space but some people act like if it was a private forum or a closed space.
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Downvotes on lemmynsfw were being used to bully people who posted pictures of themselves. They weren't always disabled. But they became a problem and the instance felt that downvotes didn't belong in a porn instance.
There was no reason to downvotes a porn post. Ever.
If it breaks the rules, report it. If you don't like it, keep scrolling.
It would make sense if the end result was to prevent downvotes on NSFW posts by any user, but that's not how it works in practice. My lemmynsfw account can't downvote anything, but my other accounts can downvote anything (federated).
I like being able to downvote using my main account, but on lemmynsfw it really needed to be removed. People were downvoting literally everything that didn't fit into their fetishes, so anything that wasn't straight and and vanilla would go into the negatives. Like, I'm not into mascs, but I still think they should be able to post to gonewild. Even posts in gay-specific subs were getting downvoted en masse.
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