downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

I think it's the complete opposite. Platforms with downvotes tend to be less toxic because you don't have to reply to insane people to tell them they're wrong, whereas platforms like Twitter get really toxic because you only see the likes, so people tend to get into fights and "ratio" them which actually increases the attention they get and spreads their message to other people.

In general, platforms without upvotes/downvotes tend to be the most toxic imo. Platforms like old-school forums and 4chan are a complete mess because low-effort troll content is as loud as high effort thoughtful ones. It takes one person to de-rail a conversation and get people to fight about something else, but with downvotes included you just lower their visibility. It's basically crowdsourced moderation, and it works relatively well.

As for ways to reduce toxicity, shrug. Moderation is the only thing that really stops it but if you moderate too much then you'll be called out for censoring people too much, and telling them not to get mad is just not going to happen.

My idea for less toxicity is having better filtering options for things people want to see. Upon joining a platform it would give easy options to filter out communities that are political or controversial. That's what I'm doing on Lemmy, I'm here for entertainment, not arguing.

Every single time someone makes a post with this opinion, they're either a Nazi or a Nazi apologist. They don't want discourse, they just don't like it when people tell them to shut up. It makes it hard to take their arguments seriously because I know they're just excuses.

Lo and behold, you have a downvoted comment in your recent history where you argue Nazis should be allowed a safe space to talk in. The pattern continues.

Criticism is a part of public discourse as much as approval is. People who allow positive responses freely but put walls in the way of criticism tend to be the ones trying to silence all forms of criticism. They want a positive feedback loop so they can pretend people agree with them. Some people need to be told to shut up quickly and decisively.

God, no. Voting as a filter is soft moderation, and moderation is crucial.

Voting on a comment isn't sending someone to the cornfield. You can downvote a dumb post and upvote a good post from the same rando within the same minute. You might not even notice unless you pay attention to usernames.

Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. Reddit, for all its many, many flaws, is probably the closest humanity has come to "the free marketplace of ideas" actually working as-advertised. Frauds and fascists had to retreat to their own miserable boltholes... until they started crying to the moderators that every detailed disproof of their entire worldview came with G-rated insults. Was their insular and irrational behavior besides that? Yeah, of course, it's a mass of humans. We suck in predictable ways. But on average we can make things work. All that's usually necessary is that decent people are allowed to help.

I like the feature where a post's score is hidden for the first 30 minutes or so. People are very critical of posts with a score of 0 or -1, but if a post is new it really isn't hard to dip into the negatives. Hiding the score for the first few minutes prevents a post from being reflexively downvoted just because the first two people who seen it disagreed.

I'd rather get a meaningless downvote so that someone gets their frustration out than having to read a rant ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wouldn't nerving downvotes/dislikes make it harder to voice your option freely? It's the easiest way to signal if you dislike something (And ofc the other way around with upvotes). But if you make it harder to do that, you'll suddenly have a lot of people that just don't bother. That will create a false sense of acceptance of whatever has been said and will make it easier to create echo chambers.

Hacker news has a great system - downvoting is locked behind a karma threshold and flag (default on). It means that new accounts can't downvote swarm to shut down opinions and mature accounts have more care when downvoting. The ability to flag restrict does require a centralized trusted authority though... and HN is basically as good as it is because dang is fucking awesome at their job.

Upvotes/downvotes mean nothing. At least here. On reddit, if someone says something people don't like, their post will be downvoted below the threshold and automatically hidden. Lemmy doesn't do the automatic hiding, so the downvotes just mean nothing.

The only thing it really does is let people express their frustration or agreement without having to start a conversation. Like yelling boo or cheering at a performance. I'm not against that.

The simplest solution is dealing with visibility by changing default sorting settings.

Maybe the top three comments are always most upvoted, most upvoted new (i.e. 'hot'), and most controversial.

But really the upvote/downvote is just data, and it's up to each client to handle that data as seen fit.

Though yes, there's very often 'hivemind' where people will pile on top of whatever the trend of a comment is, upvoting ones that had a few initial upvotes or downvoting ones that had a few initial downvotes. It's less common to see a comment switch from the initial momentum, even when a very similar comment in a different place in the thread has a very different response from users.

So the solution there is to show relevant ranking/sorting data like "3rd most controversial" or "22nd most upvoted" but to hide the specific counts.

This was part of the whole Reddit thing of hiding votes on new comments to prevent bandwagoning like lemmings (pun intended).

Most posts I come across on lemmy/reddit, I do not vote on at all. I upvote when it is the same thing I was going to say, or when it is extraordinarily insightful or otherwise something more people need to see. I downvote when it is plainly objectively wrong or doesn't add to the discussion at all. The vast majority of posts and comments are neither of those. For example, I haven't voted on anything in this thread.

I liked the old structure of phpBB-style message boards where posts were just sorted chronologically and if there was a voting system, it didn't affect sorting. I found those a lot more engaging and they facilitate actual back-and-forth debate rather than naturally turning into one-sided circlejerks. I am not sure they can scale to current numbers of Internet users though; we would have to test in practice how to make that structure work nowadays.

Stack Exchange already has a system where if you downvote, you lose one reputation point, a small deterrent against downvoting.

Limiting downvotes forces other people to think about bad ideas more, at the cost of letting people with bad ideas think about their bad ideas less. Ideally the bad idea has some tangible rebuttal that the original poster can consider, but ultimately the onus is on you to understand why your ideas aren't landing. This is all presupposing an idea that is worthy of consideration. People aren't obligated to convince themselves you're right, you have the job of convincing others they are wrong, or realizing that you yourself are wrong.

I think a bigger issue is the acceptance of logical falicies leading to arguments that are nothing more than insult wars.

I can think of several instances but one that comes to the top was a long well reasoned argument for FM on phones. The writer put a great deal of effort into it then ended it with "do you know how stupid you sound [for taking the other position]." I made the mistake of pointing this out and was met with downvotes and told it was a very reddit thing to say.

I would love to see a platform where fallacious arguments were excluded until resubmitted or at least flagged. They do not encourage reasoned discourse.

Because the websites don't police content, there are no rules. This requires a far higher exercise of self discipline when engaging with Internet posts, which many forgo with the anonymity of the Internet and lazy thinking. In other words, there is no constraint to "debate" and ultimately, no agreement what people are even talking about.

Extract what you feel is useful, but only under a critical eye.

Yes.

My main gripe with Reddit was the voting system. I used it for several years but once my accounts got into the thousands of karma, I just started over again. Maybe it doesn't make sense to you, but worked for me. One of these accounts was only allowed to upvote, it was nice. First time I noticed the anxiety that the voting system caused on me, I went to askreddit and ask if there was a way to deactivate it, server side or client side. LOL, of course not.

Came to Lemmy: same problem. I used to browse Lemmy with Liftoff, but it doesn't hide the voting system. Recently tried Voyager, turns out it can hide the voting system. Now I feel immune to karens, white knights, bots, trolls and gatekeepers. It doesn't matter how unpopular my opinion is, I don't care if people doesn't agree, it shouldn't matter as long as my views are thoughtful and honest. I put my thoughts out there expecting other's may change mines, but I don't like being downvoted to hell with no discourse inbetween.

EDIT: TIL, in this thread that you can deactivate the vote system in your instance profile. Thanks.

If the problem is people upvoting and downvoting in vain, I'm surprised nobody has suggested a system only allowing people to make ten a day or something.

Either way, I can see right through the annoyance.

This is why hexbear disabled downvotes, because it requires the would-be downvoter to engage

Having experienced platforms with just upvotes, and platforms with up/downvotes, I really think downvotes are bad - for me at least.

I think it encourages laziness - much easier to just downvote someone than actually critique them. It also makes me hesitate to post something mildly controversial or against the grain through fear of being penalised. I'm speaking for myself here - I'm guilty of both of those things.

That's one of the reasons I'm on Beehaw, because Beehaw doesn't federate downvotes I can neither see them nor give them - and it just feels like a much nicer Lemmy experience - and I feel like it makes me automatically nicer to people as well.

(n.b. You can hide downvotes in settings on any instance, but you can still see them by hovering over the score and it still affects comment ranking - unless you're on Beehaw or something else that does similar)

downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

I would choose a different solution. Instead of always up or down voting by 1 point, everyone gets a fixed points budget per day, that is then distributed between each post you vote on. So if you only up vote one post, this vote counts more than the vote from someone who votes on 100 posts per day.

This would solve the mass down voting of legit content on YouTube or Facebook, where quite often conspiracy dipshits in their telegram channels post videos or Channels that should be down voted, while their own right wing propaganda gets upvoted. So the most active accounts who spent all day on the social would be muted, while average User would have a more important voice.

Ive always thought votes and scores should be completely hidden. Still sort the posts and comments by upvote/downvote scores, but don't show them. Then no one can obsess over their internet points and there wouldn't be dumb karma farming content.

absolutely yes

I think that human nature is not meant to be universally shared in all its communities and that indeed there will always be the desire to have divisions, this to bind more with single individuals who become then family or friends. Being friends of all, but also only friendly, is a counter-evolutionary fantasy. The Internet is inadequate for long-range relationships, this is evident to all those who frequent large virtual communities. I sugget (even to myself) to press x more often.