Why care? There is no karma system. Just move on
If you’re moderating a small community, downvotes can bury posts and hurt its growth.
I still think downvotes (and upvotes!) should count for more when they come from subscribers. At least for sorting within the community
Can’t they just block the communities?
Already 2 steps ahead, 3 steps backwards, and 2 forwards. If one shows up on the “all” feed, I block it. Ain’t much left AFAIK.
It’s best for me to block them rather than just downvote a random post purely based on the community it’s in.
for some reason i literally can’t downvote anything
You’re on a no-downvote instance.
Sorry, sister. As others have said Blahaj Zone doesn’t do downvotes. I think it was to ensure a less negative space for The Community (in that you can still downvote things and brigade without being clocked as bigoted) but that’s a bit apocryphal.
Instances can disable this feature maybe blahaj has done so?
People even downvote legit news from fairly non-biased sources on Lemmy just because they don’t like what is being reported. It’s actually kinda wild.
It’s funny because several mods on that instance do ban people for downvotes.
I think people often use /all to browse, which makes sense for a fairly small site like Lemmy. But the downside is that people then upvote or downvote based on their preferences, not the community’s.
(Eg, the fellow below who has decided Apple and Nintendo are like Nazis and must always be downvoted.)
But the downside is that people then upvote or downvote based on their preferences, not the community’s.
This is only a downside for niche communites promoting positive topics like equality. Communities about for profit companies, that promote horrible ideas and people, etc are what downvotes are for.
If there was a community called “Nestlé is awesome” I would hope it gets downvoted into oblivion.
I don’t like linux, should I downvote all linux stuff? Does that make the fediverse better?
There are various philosophies about how fediverse participation should work. Some would say you should block a community you don’t like (but that is not harmful) rather than downvoting its posts (because downvoting is supposed to be a signal that the content doesn’t belong on the community where it’s posted)
Others vote on posts regardless of their communities, preferring to try to curate the fediverse at large rather than their own feeds
preferring to try to curate the fediverse at large
In my opinion, it is presumptuous and arrogant to attempt to curate the fediverse at large according to one’s own preferences.
Piefed has the answer:
It is arrogant to think the context of a community overrides anyone’s personal preferences on how to interact with the voting system.
I think there’s an argument to be made though, that if you’re a person who browses the “all” feed rather than subscriptions or individual communities, that there’s a point where you should block a particular community you don’t want to see rather than continuously downvoting it. When the content isn’t harmful but you merely dislike it, it seems reasonable to expect the user to curate their experience at least a little.
There is also an argument that expecting everyone to agree with and follow the unwritten rules of ‘voting correctly’ is just a vocal minority trying to impose their will on all users.
Generally I limit to subs but browse All occasionally to find new communities. Part of this process is upvoting and down voting stuff and seeing which communities has more stuff I want and less stuff I thought was worth downvoting. I then sub or block after that point.
That is how I notice spammed slop as part of blocking a community. No, I won’t be going back to remove down votes before blocking just because the community is about spamming slop and the posts fit the sub. Harm isn’t a down voting requirement.
Sure, go for it. I literally do not care how people use single accounts to vote on any topic.
When they use multiple accounts, yeah that is clearly terrible because they are artificially inflating their votes.
Weird thread to be commenting on if you literally don’t care but you do you!
I personally think this sort of stuff helps keep the fediverse from being awesome but you do you!
I care about voting freely, not the actual vote results.
I upvote a shit ton of stuff which makes it more visible. That helps the fediverse. The shitty posts and comments that I downvote are what I see keeping the fediverse from being awesome.
Except, and I’m stunned this is a surprise to some but here we are, not everyone agrees on what’s awesome and what’s shitty.
So, in OP’s case, the people who come here to talk about the nintendo games and then decide to take the plunge and post something are met with downvotes for having the audacity to post in a harmless community that others don’t like.
It’s lame and makes the fediverse less fun for folks, which is poison for somewhere that depends on network effects.
List of votes for spankmonkey@lemmy.world:
Total post upvotes/downvotes: 38206/883 [39089] 97.74% upvoted
Total comment upvotes/downvotes: 90499/9089 [99588] 90.87% upvoted
List of votes for mybrainhurts@lemmy.ca:
Total post upvotes/downvotes: 5591/171 [5752] 97.20% upvoted
Total comment upvotes: 1081/179 [1341] 80.61% upvoted
Maybe you shouldn’t be down voting so much?
Complaing about downvotes? Straight to jail.
Does it stay in the Apple and Nintendo communities or does it get cross-posted everywhere? I don’t downvote for dislike, but I don’t want to block a general community because some asshat is crossposting just under spam levels.
I downvote for verifiably false.
Same. I see upvotes, upvotes everywhere!
Even if Apple/Nintendo are completely different, that’s still not quite the entire fediverse, right?verifiably false
Can you provide a link to show that? I went looking but the cross-posts that I saw were in !Apple@lemmy.world and !Apple@lemmy.zip. Since both have “Apple” in the name, that does not seem entirely like spam to me - unless you mean the content is low quality?
I meant that’s how I personally downvote. I don’t subscribe to either Apple or Nintendo communities but I do see the cross posting spam in other communities and suggested it as a possible reason other people are downvoting.
Thank you for the explanation - upvoting btw (unless you cross-post your explanation where it does not belong, then I guess we should downvote it? :-P)
If you’re modding a small community trying to get off the ground and you’re suffering from downvoters who aren’t participants in your comm, ban the downvoters.
Edit: Hilarious that I got downvoted by an account with 0 comments
You have two downvoters, probably the same person
flyingsquirrel a sockpuppet with 0 comment / 0 posts
https://lemvotes.org/user/flyingsquirrel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
nothis a vote manipulation account with 0 comment / 0 posts
someone I’ve had to remove from my communities https://lemvotes.org/user/nothis@sh.itjust.works
Probably a real person’s main account, but just really combative with nothing to say
I worked at a site with a karma system years before reddit and the like ever came into being. There will always be people who just downvote anything they don’t like. Unless you start finding and removing those users, nothing is going to change with them. And if you start removing chunks of your community, you have fewer posters, less interaction, etc.
A good chunk of active Lemmy users are interested in open source and digital freedom. Apple and Nintendo are the opposite, very big on vendor lockin and anti consumer practices.
Valve is exempt from this for some reason however. It’s more like stereotypical basement dwellers treat this like a game where you win by accumulating more imaginary internet points. This kind of tribal behaviour is why threadiverse seems to be failing but at least some people get to feel superior to others in the meantime.
Valve isn’t perfect but they’ve gotten a lot of community good will by not being shitty and vindictive. Nintendo has been just really shitty to their own fans for a long time, with unnecessary litigation and criminal prosecution.
I do agree that tribalism is pretty extreme within the fediverse, but I also don’t think that’s anything new for any small internet community.
There are plenty of reasons to be shitty at valve but my understanding is the steam deck is modable without breaking warranty
Upvotes/downvotes are unfortunately a fundamentally flawed concept. They originally served as an superior alternative to forums’ previous sorting method of most-recently commented, but they are far from flawless themselves.
My ideal alternative would be some kind of customisable sort order chosen by the user that uses some kind of sentiment analysis of the text to find the kind of posts the user is interested in. For example, you could sort by whether post look serious or joking, how long they are, ratio of words to hyperlinks, etc. Could also filter out ragebait and similar rubbish.
Of course I can see downsides - performance considerations, and it would only work for text posts and comments, but it’s just an idea off the top of my head.
Slashdot style.
Hopefully one day we’ll get there. Up/downvotes are too limited.
Not just fediverse, I think any site that allows “downvotes” has this issue.
Personally, I don’t see why the ability to downvote needs to exist. If someone is trolling, ignore it or report it. A troll post with a score of 1 and no comments is better than one with a score of -100 and no comments. The downvotes probably encourages the troll. They know they’ve upset a bunch of people. All their posts getting no interaction will bore them.
On the other hand, downvotes existing leads to things being hated on for no reason. Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines. Now sardines isn’t looking so bad even though the number of people who like it hasn’t changed. What does the downvoting add? It just makes the people who like sardines feel bad. They might end up not contributing in the future and then every answer to asklemmy ends up being identical.
Downvotes are useful to make bad content sink. Without them, the bad content has the exact same score as fresh new content, content that failed the Fluff Principle, etc. And you do want the bad content to sink; if you don’t reduce its visibility, some clueless muppet is bound to interact with it, usually generating more bad content.
That’s why I’m not sure if the best solution is to outright remove downvotes. It feels to me like throwing the baby out with the dirty water.
Instead I feel like splitting its role into 2+ buttons might alleviate the issue. Perhaps a simple “disagree” button, or a more complex Slashdot-like system, dunno. Either way, giving people way to say “I disagree!” without interfering on the main purpose of the button - sorting content.
This could also solve another issue with downvotes I don’t see people mentioning often: you’re often downvoted without knowing why.
Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines.
At least in the default interface, the sardines comment would show +12 -62, so you know at least 11 people upvoted it.
If we’re using votes to rank content then downvotes are redundant because now you have to upvote „right” stuff and downvote „wrong” stuff. Assuming everyone is waging the same kind of information warfare then downvotes won’t anything… but we’re not. Those that downvote willy nilly just want to have more say in things than others who don’t have energy to religiously clean website from „wrong” content. You’re not responsible for safeguarding users from „wrong” content unless you’re reporting rule breaking one. If you don’t like what’s being said but it doesn’t break rules then reply and explain why is it wrong, let others upvote if they agree.
Tildes solved this already. They have regular upvotes and they have labels for offtopic/noise/malice. Being able to use labels is reserved to users with good standing and can be applied once only. Noise downranks things without removing them, malice is essentially same as reporting them. Notably, there is no label for „wrong”.
downvotes are redundant
In practice they are redundant because most people vote based on opinion, so both become the same (agreement gauge). However ideally they aren’t redundant; upvotes are to be given to things that stand out, and downvotes to things that detract from the discussion (noise, trolling, etc.)
Those that downvote willy nilly just want to have more say in things than others who don’t have energy to religiously clean website from „wrong” content.
Some see this as an abuse of the system, not as its normal usage. I’m not sure on the dividing line between both things, though.
If you [=anyone] don’t like what’s being said but it doesn’t break rules then reply and explain why is it wrong, let others upvote if they agree.
The problem with that is Brandolini’s Law: even if we ignore “intention” (whatever this means), it takes far more effort to address bullshit, assumptions, oversimplifications, “ur sayin dat cuz ur…” etc. than to come up with it. And if it takes too much effort, people won’t do it.
As such, a system can’t rely solely on replies to let users show each other “hey, this post/comment is bad”.
You can rely on stricter moderation; but that comes with additional costs.
Tildes solved this already.
Incidentally my proposal to fix downvotes isn’t too different in spirit from what Tildes do.
So, people want to up/downvote based on opinion, right? Let them do it. But give people other ways to quickly show some piece of content is bad, and why. Effectively splitting the downvote button.
Downvotes are useful to make bad content sink. Without them, the bad content has the exact same score as fresh new content, content that failed the Fluff Principle, etc
I don’t see how downvotes help filter content. It makes sense at first, but either people are sorting content by New, in which case votes do not matter, or they are sorting by Top and will get only the “good” content. Several instances already have downvotes disabled. I don’t see any complaints from their users about “bad” content having the same scores as “good” content.
lemmynsfw had to disable downvotes because gay content posted in gay communities was being downvoted. It wasn’t being downvoted for quality, but for not being what the majority of users wanted to see. That doesn’t mean all users now have to see gay content they don’t like because they can’t downvote it. It’s still easy to filter using the block feature. Again, I’ve never seen users there complaining about being unable to filter good from bad because they can’t downvote.
if you don’t reduce its visibility, some clueless muppet is bound to interact with it, usually generating more bad content.
I’ve seen posts and comments with -100 votes often get lots of interaction from people who can’t stop themselves from arguing with a troll. Sometimes there’s only 1 or 2 comments under a post so the score doesn’t even change its visibility at all.
Either way, giving people way to say “I disagree!” without interfering on the main purpose of the button - sorting content.
The way to say “I disagree!” is with the reply button! Votes don’t prove who is right and who is wrong. I’ve never changed my opinion because of downvotes. Sometimes I even agree with a downvoted comment because I form my opinion based on arguments, not votes.
I also like seeing different opinions. Yours gave me a lot to think about! It’d be a shame if people didn’t post their thoughts because they feared being downvoted for it.
I don’t see how downvotes help filter content. It makes sense at first, but either people are sorting content by New, in which case votes do not matter, or they are sorting by Top and will get only the “good” content.
Think quantitatively. Ideally “meh” content should still be easier to see than the bad one.
lemmynsfw
In their situation (as admins of an instance where downvotes were consistently misused), I agree with their decision. However I still think something needs to be done on a software level.
Again, I’ve never seen users there complaining about being unable to filter good from bad because they can’t downvote.
Note this is prone to selection bias.
I’ve seen posts and comments with -100 votes often get lots of interaction from people who can’t stop themselves from arguing with a troll. Sometimes there’s only 1 or 2 comments under a post so the score doesn’t even change its visibility at all.
If it wasn’t downvoted, you probably would’ve seen way more interaction with it.
(Additionally I think people who argue with trolls should get 1d~3d bans. Just a “stop it, you baka!”. Including myself. But that’s an aside.)
The way to say “I disagree!” is with the reply button!
I mentioned this in the other comment, but basically: if the reason you disagree is due to some issue in the content (e.g. it’s an oversimplification, assumption, or plain bullshit), it takes more effort to address it in your reply than to generate that content with the issue. As such a quick-and-dirty way to voice “hey, something wrong with this” is necessary, even if some people abuse it.
I really liked how you explained this, thank you
Avoid „default” communities and instances, they tend to bring the worst of Reddit to Threadiverse. It’s slightly less of an issue if you stick to places that try to be different. You won’t avoid drive-by downvotes from /all but I don’t think it’s that much of an issue (there’s just too much crap there for anyone to browse it by time of posting).
I always browse by “new” but only with the subscribed communities. I see a pattern that some of my subscribed communities keep getting downvoted
