I used to downvote fairly often on Reddit as a sign to disagree or to push down really disgusting bigoted comments. And to be honest, it became a habit to just downvote without replying. However, now that I’m on lemmy and not Reddit I’ve been actively trying to not instantly downvote things and instead move on or take the time to reply. Has anyone else been trying to do this?
I’ve never changed my voting habits. I downvote trolls, hate, spam, and irrelevant content. I never downvote out of disagreement, nor do I use the upvote as an agreement button. I will upvote people I disagree with/am debating with if I believe they are promoting relevant discussion. That is how voting is intended to be used.
They should make it so that replying to a comment automatically disables your ability to downvote it.
Would simultaneously prevent people trading downvotes while they argue back and forth, and encourage people to simply ignore trolls and move on without replying.
If a post contains incorrect information that could be dangerous, you should be able to reply to it and also downvote it so that the incorrect information becomes less visible. For example, if someone said you should pinch your nose and lean your head back when you get a nosebleed. You should be able to correct them and still downvote to make the incorrect information less visible.
Wouldn’t the correction be sufficient? Other users could read it and decide to downvote
I like this idea. Make the karma irrelevant so we don’t get those awful bots or the tit-for-tat arguments
Same. For me, upvote = adding something to the conversation. That’s why I upvote most comments I come across, and rarely downvote people.
do bees be?
Yeah it wasn’t made for disagreement, it was meant for a crowd control form of moderation. That’s why they had the karma index and allow for subreddits to impose karma restrictions. (I guess there could be an argument about it being a form of social credit system if it were, which let’s be honest it became that anyway, whether or not it was intended to be that way from the beginning)
up/down voting is simply a way to help comments you think are good, or agree with, become more/less dominant in the thread.
In some cases, comments are useful to explain why - but often that’s just not the case.
I dislike using downvote as a disagree button. Makes me feel like I’m discouraging people from sharing an opinion that’s different than mine. Even if they are wrong (in good faith) I think I’d rather they feel it is a safe place to be wrong and just own the mistake with an edit or a reply. I know it makes me feel bad (I know I should have thicker skin) when I’m downvoted for having an opinion so I don’t want to make others feel that way.
I agree about not using it just to disagree with an opinion, but I do think the ability to downvote is very important. It just needs to be clear that it’s supposed to be used to reduce the impact of stuff this is either harmful or just distracts from the conversation.
If I’m in a thread talking about what the best flavor of milkshake is, I will absolutely upvote someone claiming that chocolate is the best even though they are “objectively” wrong. They are however engaging with the conversation. On the other hand, someone who comes in saying that they hate milkshakes and prefer lemonade, while they’re not exactly wrong in having that opinion, it would be worthy of a downvote because they’re in the wrong place for that comment.
And then there’s the bots/people that if they lost the ability to ever talk again, the world would be a better place. Never feel sorry for downvoting them.
You have a point. I did find myself downvoting much of what I disagreed with on Reddit. I wouldn’t mind seeing everyone break that habit here. Maybe that should be stickied in some official welcome to Lemmy etiquette post.
HackerNews has an interesting approach: You can’t downvote comments unless you reach a certain amount of “Karma”, and you can’t downvote posts at all, you can “flag” them, meaning you think they don’t belong here. Flagging doesn’t affect the vote count, but massive flagging does make the post appear lower in the feed, and alerts mods.
This, alongside the tight moderation and zero-tolerance towards flame wars in the comments makes HackerNews one of the best places on the internet imho.
Completely agree on all points.
An additional one I’d argue is a huge part of HN’s success is their employment of a full-time moderator, dang, who does a great job.
I don’t think I have downvoted anyone in Lemmy yet.
But post and comment quality is much higher than Reddit.
I downvoted that post that was an advertisement for crypto
if you don’t have downvote, you don’t have a tool to negatively select some content other than reporting. this way, if mods are overworked, which is always, you don’t see difference between content that is irrelevant to most people and content that is actively harmful
I think downvotes should be removed completely. They are useless, if a content is harmful or off topic you can just report it. With massive numbers of bots coming to Lemmy I think downvote brigades will be even more frequent. Why do we need to give a score to everything? Let’s just enjoy good content and try to answer to bad one
Come to beehaw, we don’t have downvotes.
deleted by creator
Well, I already am! Ahaha
I personally found the 5th reply to the same comment thread a little repetitive. Unless there is anything more to add to the conversation a simple upvote/downvote on an already existing thread is probably enough. I don’t think I ever downvoted a post though, just because I sorted by top/hot.
As time goes on I’ve been using the down vote more freely. Generally for anything I find low quality. I used to be more restrained with it but now I see it more as another tool that I have to shape the kind of content that gets promoted in the communities I interact with. It’s the only option beyond withholding an upvote to keep low effort posts, trolling, and bigotry out of your communities other than reporting, which shouldn’t do anything unless a post breaks the rules.
I barely voted at all on Reddit, trying to be more engaged here.
The habit I’m trying to break is writing out a response and then not posting it.
i don’t downvote if i disagree but if someone is insulting or something else
I think lemmy is too small at the moment to downvote in the same way people did on reddit. It’s still growing and we need people to post content to build the site and everyone’s engagement, downvotes for just disagreeing are going to discourage a whole new group of people who didn’t post on reddit because of getting drowned out in the noise. Look in all the question posts about how people are enjoying lemmy and you’ll see a bunch of them.
I’ve just been moving on and ignoring things I disagree with, no upvote is enough punishment in my eyes. Saying that I’ve been giving out upvotes to most things to encourage people to post and comment more. If something is clearly gross and offensive it’ll get a downvote and possibly a report, but that’s so rare in the communities I’m going to. If it’s a really off topic comment or whatever then yes it’s downvoted because it doesn’t belong.
If there’s something I really, really disagree with but don’t want to get into a conversation about it I’ll just block the user. That way I don’t have to see or deal with their opinions I disagree with anymore and can just move on with my life.
I guess that’s a really, really long winded way of agreeing with you lol. I’ve been a lot more liberal with the upvotes and have really changed my downvote behaviour too.
This is not a really good reply to to your nuanced comment lol, but I love your pfp 🥰
Ha ha! Thank you very much for noticing!
i think ive only downvoted 1 offtopic lame comment so far, on lemmy
its not something i do often
in general the process of downvoting should be reserved to offtopic content, poor quality content etc
on reddit the “norm” was to downvote things you disagree with, which is dumb. then you end up with the echochamber problem and such. I once asked a critical question on /r/conservative and i got banned. Asking questions where the answer make them seem … dumb, was apparently not acceptable. i got downvoted to hell, and eventually banned. for ONE comment :P
I don’t think downvotes, as they are now, are for any particular purpose other than showing the poster you don’t like the post. What I mean to say is that limiting downvotes for off topic stuff isn’t enforceable and poor quality content is pretty subjective. Not sure if you are aware of the bean posts recently, but I didn’t like them and would consider them poor quality memes. Almost everyone else loved them though, which is totally fine, but I still downvoted those.
Anyone armed with critical thinking skills will eventually reason themselves out of echo chambers, just like your story proves! Although I feel like the ban was more due to the admins of the sub than the downvotes. There are communities where downvoted content isn’t removed if it doesn’t break any rules, those are the ones people should look for.
