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It does. I will never use an instance without downvotes. Nobody liked it when youtube downvotes were hidden.
I think there should be an option (unless there is) for mods to turn off (or hide) voting as needed. That might be an effective way to cancel any downvote brigades. Lemmy really doesn't have the population for mass vote manipulation now, but it will soon enough.
Hiding all votes can also help mitigate some superficial bias, but not all. I believe that if a person sees a comment with a few dozen downvotes first, they tend not to read the post objectively. After being on Reddit for such a long time (12 years or so), I found that it was super easy to manipulate voting trends if I caught a post or comment at just the right time.
Hiding only downvotes is just silly though. Some register of public opinion, positive or negative, still has its uses, IMHO.
I dont see any issue with the user choosing weather upvotes or downvotes are visible or not. Not in favor of moderators or admins having a choice on this matter.
I left lemmy.one because of this.
yes
Eh depends, general purpose instance? Yeah. Instance for porn or "controversial" content, thats different.
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(5 replies)
I have a very controversal piece of software for managing Lemmy that I posted about. It's mainly for personal instances to sync defederated lists from larger entities. I.E. I want to own my account (or small group), and while I would use this larger site, I will use my own to spread the load, but trust the admins' judgment.
If it weren't for down votes, from the post listing page users would think it was a huge hit, and not realize there is a healthy debate about how to use it, why, and when.
IIRC the removal of the upvote is also federated.
When you change it to a downvote you first need to remove the upvote, that's why it changed from 11 to 9.
So, in instances B and C you'll end up with 10 score.
Yes, but if you then downvoted the post it would still show a score of 10 in B and C instead of 9. This is the first of the two advantages I described. Even worse, if the post received 2 downvotes from ten different instances it would still show a score of 10 or 8 instead of -10.
Keep in mind that not everyone is using the upvotes weighting, so it's not just about "those who allow downvotes and those who don't".
Personally, I find the whole upvoting/downvoting thing to be a very toxic feature that encourages hive mind and blaming divergence, so I hide scores and I sort posts and comments by chronological order. I would not use Lemmy if I was forced to be under the influence of social scoring, so defederating from instances which do not apply the same rules on downvoting would feel very detrimental to me.
Upvotes/downvotes were implemented by websites like Reddit as a scaling trick, so they can get millions of users without the need to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators. But it turned out that adding subreddits with volunteer moderators worked better anyway, and this is already what we have on Lemmy, with instance owners and community moderators, so there is really no need for some dystopian scoring of everything someone says.
I've been coming to realize how much votes affect the way I interact on Lemmy (and not in a good way). They have their utility of course, but if you're sorting by new anyway they don't really have an effect other than, like you said, giving a score to everything everyone says - which I'd really rather not be a part of my interactions as I find it does more harm than good. I hadn't considered just hiding them entirely though, thanks for bringing that up as a possibility. What do you use to do that? Don't suppose it's anything that would work on mobile too?
You're welcome. I don't use mobile myself : do you use an app, or it's just about opening your Lemmy instance url in a browser? If it's the later, you can go in the settings and there is a "Show Scores" checkbox. Just uncheck it, hit the "save" button and you're done. :) This is also where you find the "Sort Type" select box which allows to define default sorting and put it to "New". It only works for posts on the homepage, though, you have to take the habit to manually click "new" after reading a post to sort its comments (I could have swear it was using the "Sort Type" option before, or maybe just remembering last sort, but it's not the case anymore).
I use the mobile site, so this is perfect! I'd been through the settings but totally missed that checkbox. Thank you!
It's funny, I vaguely remember having comments sorted differently by default too, but I can't seem to find any actual record of it. Mandela effect? Anyway, I'm hoping the option will be added soon, since I can't get it to work quite right with a script:
window.addEventListener("load", function(event) {
document.querySelector('[id$="-new"]').click();
})
This only seems to work when the page is refreshed for some reason. If you or anyone else happens to know a solution that'd be greatly appreciated, I don't know javascript well.
Thanks, that's a good idea.
The reason why it only works on page reload is because Lemmy is a SPA : it makes it look like you're browsing several pages, but it's actually always the same, and it uses javascript to change the url and load new content. So the "load" event, triggered when the current page is done loading, is only triggered once because the page is only changed once. If you wonder why : SPA became commonplace in the 2010s because javascript applications started to get way bigger than previously, and it was helping with page load speed. For a time… because when you make page load faster, people just make it load more things until it's slow again. :)
My first reaction was that additionally to binding to the load event, we probably just can bind to the popstate event, which happens when the url is programmatically changed. But my first tests were not successful in doing that. I'll have a quick look at the source code of Lemmy later today to see if I can solve this.
Thank you for the explanation! That's wild, I've certainly visited SPA sites but I've never given much thought to what must be happening under the hood there. I guess it has its use cases but from a user's pov the quirks can be kinda annoying. Case in point, I see why load wouldn't do the trick - hope you can find why popstate wouldn't either (and thanks again)!
You're welcome. :) Oh yeah, you probably use a lot of them, they are everywhere, although it's not obvious to the user. One way to figure it out is to open the browser inspector (usually control + shift + i, same to close it) and look on the "network" tab, which lists all network requests made by the page, to see if this list gets emptied when you click a link (if it's a real new page, the list is emptied and new requests appear).
My apologies, I spent an hour on the popstate problem before losing interest and calling it a day. Lemmy uses the inferno frontend framework (a clone of react), which uses the inferno-router router to handle page changes, which uses the history lib to do it, which… uses pushState as I expected it would. And yet, binding on popstate won't work. 🤷 Maybe I'll have an other look at it one day if it bugs me enough. :)
Voting doesn't seem to affect visibility very much.
It depends how you sort. I'm currently browsing "Top 6 hour" and it's numerically sorted by number of votes
Technically, yes. But you seem to have missed the point of a social network. (Too absorbed by the commercial ones?)
If it mattered at all, the platform would be worthless. There is nothing stopping an instance from just lying about those numbers anyway.
Outright lying about the numbers is very different from just not allowing downvotes though.
Yes. We should get rid of upvotes too to make it fair.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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