It’s a bit of an unwinnable battle. People will always use it as disagree button
Earnest question- what is it supposed to be used for? I don’t downvote people very often, but I think I’ve only ever seen it used express approval or disapproval so that the score reflects community sentiment
How is it supposed to be used?
when a post doesn’t fit the community purpose or is generally inappropriate
Isn’t that where you use the report functionality?
I think this kind of voting system intentionally places the content people want to see (i.e. agree with), at the top which increases active users.
But it doesn’t stimulate healthy debate and definitely doesn’t encourage going against the mainstream.
Slashdot had a more interesting system that let only a select number of people rank quality and set a post category (like funny, informative, etc).
I think it’s a nice sentiment, but you can’t change emergent behavior just by saying “this is wrong”
This is wrong.
I always thought a downvote was just a silent “Booooooooooo!”
That’s what it should be, a “booo!” for lazy and willfully ignorant comments.
In practice most people downvote any take they disagree with, no matter if it was expressed well, written respectfully, and contributes to the conversation.
I’ll stop using the downvotes as a disagree button when everyone else stops using upvotes as an agree button.
I actually think up- and downvotes are inherently asymmetrical in this respect.
Upvoting things you agree with is fine and a main use of the function. Why then is downvoting things you disagree with wrong? Because the purpose of voting is visibility, you upvote things you want people to see, like arguments you agree with, and downvote those you don’t think people should see.
Now if you believe in having an open discussion you don’t want to suppress posts just because you disagree with them. Disagreeing is fine, so downvoting is reserved for posts that detract from the conversation.
Two wrongs do not make a right
As a rule of thumb I downvote any post that mentions being downvoted or complains about the reaction to a post or comment.
I will give this whole thread a pass, though 🙂
Well, just add a ‘disagree’ button so there’s no confusion.
That’s just the Uber disagree button now.
Apparently it’s the button you press to get banned from a community.
ASK ME HOW I KNOW
How I know?
So stuupid 😆
Downvotes are definitely a disagree button and anyone denying it is just coping or lying about their own usage of it. Reddiquette was the worst thing that ever happened to internet culture
Reddiquette was the worst thing that ever happened to internet culture
I can agree that they end up being a disagree button in practice, but you’re saying they should be a disagree button?
what else should it be?
Almost anything else or nonexistent. Maybe a way of filtering lazy, unhelpful, or uncivil comments. Downvotes being a disagree button just seems blatantly toxic. Expressing disagreements calls for using actual words.
Not sure about that last bit. Do you know how many people are wrong on the Internet? Lemmy isn’t my job, yo: I can’t engage in a dialogue with with them all.
A lot of those are joke downvotes, well mine was.
I downvote anyone complaining about downvote out of principle.
I first upvote it, so more people see it and it gets more downvotes, then i revisit later and downvote, which then decreases by 2.
Found Satan.
I’ll also down vote anyone using up votes as some kind of metric for their post/comment being inherently right/good
I’m the same! If the comment contains the word downvote in it, it’s a DV. I even downvote my own haha! It’s a silly little reminder to myself how little they matter
I even downvote my own haha!
You’ve upvoted this one though. 🤔
Mine wasn’t.
Communities trying to have alternate meanings for upvotes/downvotes must keep in mind that people scrolling posts across communities won’t generally notice the community and if they do they won’t read the rules and will vote however they want. Trying to force them to follow some silly community specific process is tilting at windmills and bitching about it is embarrassing.
Fr like if you don’t like the way people are using the downvote feature why make a post whinging about it and not just make your account on an instance that has it disabled???
aren’t they the instance admin themselves?
Even funnier tbh
Indeed, and this is a pinned post on Ye Power Trippin’ Bastards. Posters ask if their bans were justified. Downvotes bury the post, preventing an audience from making their opinion about it.
Because it has a legit use. It’s just also used to create an echo chamber.
If you believe that people can be just a little responsible, it’s better to have it around.
Sadly one can’t disable downvotes per community
Yeah if the problem is specific to a community I see how the software’s limitations could be an issue. I’m still unsure of what you were hoping to achieve with the post though.
Idk, it can be kinda exhausting but I guess I kinda just operate on the assumption that strangers online are gonna act like a bunch of insufferable contrarians (I’m not always above that sort of thing myself).
I disagree
I couldn’t even post an album there because the instance apparently sees external imgur albums as image spam or something stupid.
That’s not true. What kind of error are you getting?
It is true, you can literally check for yourself. And there is no error. I didn’t even see it as removed from my side on mbin, like with a mod removal, and thought it wasn’t federating as there was neither upvotes, nor downvotes, nor comments, until I checked the modlog on your instance.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog/961853?page=1&actionType=All&userId=7088902
This is because you linked multiple images in the same post and you got marked as spam. Just link one album link
I linked 1 album with IIRC 5 images as the thread submission, and a link to a screencap of the modlog, along with some links to the relevant posts and stuff in the body. What exactly was the spam part about this that deserved to be flagged?
The post links are badly formatted. Can you try reposting it but make each link be a proper hyperlink on the text? I want to see if it happen again. I think it’s because of too many @ signs, whbich was what the spam bot was doing to ping mastodon users
What do you mean by making it a proper hyperlink? I just posted the URL without any special formatting to make the URL itself visible, since they get automatically converted into hyperlinks. At least from my end on mbin. I’ve learned that Lemmy does not properly format line breaks / paragraphs so maybe that doesn’t even work either. But if I’d have to format them as hyperlinks I’d effectively double the @ signs in those URLs too, since I’d add them once as text and once as a link.
Though, I only had one user name with the @ signs in the title, but afaik titles do not ping users. The rest were the @ signs to the various community / instance links.
I can repost it as it was originally since I saved it before removing it myself. Although I also did a quick ninja edit in the title to include “(Album)” at the end, to make it clear that it is more than one image. Not sure if that triggered something too.
By just using markdown. like this
There was a persistent spam wave where they followed similar behaviour of posting too many image links. I can’t see the exact rule now but I’ll try to review later to see why you were caught as a false positive
We disabled downvotes on hexbear and it honestly made for much healthier discussion
That’s actually surprising to me, because I’d think that down voting whack stuff would make things better overall. What was happening? It’s not like people know who it was, or were down votes done out of spite?
I also couldn’t help but notice some super conservative instances I’ve seen have down votes disabled.
My perspective is that without them bad takes get called out, and if the poster is redeemable they can engage with constructive criticism and learn something from the replies
Rather than people downvoting and moving on which can lead to resentment on a posters behalf if they don’t understand why a position of theirs may be getting downvoted
Downvotes were disabled because posts that touched on trans issues were routinely downvoted, often by the same users. Those users were purged and downvotes disabled to good effect.
Uninformed posters are given information if they are sincere.
Malicious posters get dunked on before getting banned.
It has worked very well in my opinion.
Yea, great way to shut down dissenting opinions and keelhaul any potential for learning or growth.
Cheers
