I don’t get that argument. Sometimes I just don’t have the time or can’t be bothered to write a comment, and a downvote serves as a perfect, fast replacement to indicate my disagreement.

Echo chambers are created exactly when you can’t express youe disagreement easily. If all you need is an upvote to agree, but need to comment to disagree.

I hear there’s this thing called ratio on Twitter, a comparison betwen something and something else, idk I don’t use it. But you know what would be just as useful? Upvotes and downvotes.

I’m tired now, today I’ll only be downvoting what I don’t like :p

Ok so why keep upvotes? It’s the exact same problem. I’ve seen so much crap with shittons of upvotes, but one downvote and it’s suddenly an issue.

Oh ffs, I wasn’t even talking about you specifically, the “you” was just generally addressing anyone, but yea I see it applies you completely.

Don’t worry, I won’t bother you with my “attacks” any longer, in fact I’ll rather block you outright, because I can’t stand people like you who scream “attack” or other bullshit accusations whenever someone is just in their vicinity. So I’ll never reply to you ever again, win-win!

I don’t see anything in the comment that I see as a personal attack. The person you replied to used “you,” but I think that was meant as a general “you” (i.e. other people reading this) rather than you specifically.

I generally agree with you, but only for popular subs. In more niche communities, downvotes seem to do a better job of showing which posts are useful and which aren’t, but once you get enough people involved, it seems to devolve into a popularity contest.

I would like to try something a bit different, more akin to what Twitter does. Basically, if a comment gets a ton of comments under it, it should be sorted more highly than one that doesn’t. Maybe that way we can eliminate votes entirely, or keep upvotes and downvotes as a form of agree/disagree but reduce their impact on sorting.

While in very formal English “one” is the generic pronoun and “you” is addressed to you personally, in casual English “you” is the generic pronoun with the same meaning as formal written French “on”.

So the post above wasn’t a personal attack. It used “you” to mean “one”.

Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

The whole point is that people can downvote you for any stupid reason and doesn’t accurately reflect why a post is being rejected by the community. People will do it simply because they want to silence you.

And it causes issues with brigading, botnets, etc. It’s why hexbear and lemmygrad are being defederated – and their members are able to get around it simply by making accounts on other servers and going right back to the brigading. Removing the voting option and giving admins tools to IP ban everyone from an instance upon defederation would go a long way toward fixing the problem. Just putting the hurdle of needing a VPN to regain access alone will deter a lot of idiots.

That’s my biggest problem with downvotes. I want to know why someone disagrees. That can initiate an interesting conversation.

If I’m factually incorrect, I want to know. Same goes if I expressed myself poorly. A downvote alone doesn’t tell me anything.

+80/-20 +50/-50 +20/-80 +1/-99 +100/-0

Just from those vote counts, I can be pretty sure the first comment is insightful, the second controversial, the third a troll, and the fourth is definitely spam. The fifth is probably a cat pic, relevant xkcd, meme, or a single-sentence comment that everyone loves, but doesn’t actually add anything important to the topic. If I’m looking for an interesting conversation, I’m focused on the first two, maybe the third. If I’m looking to be pissed off, the third and fourth. And if I’m looking for an easy read, the fifth.

+80, +50, +20, +1, and +100 doesn’t provide the same information. It’s the downvotes that provide the relative context.

it isn’t sorting by “contribute/doesn’t contribute,” that’s for sure.

It’s both. You’re not wrong with the groupthink thing, but they absolutely do help to combat disinformation and useless comments. I get that you’ve made a decision, but you don’t need to rationalize away the negatives.

Votes still get federated. Even if not exposed via UI anyone running their own (federated) instance can query for who voted on beehaw posts. Only a matter of time before that’s directly exposed as a mod tool.

The word “community” goes a long way in answering that question imo.

If we look to the mods take care of everything, we’re a group of content consumers, not a community.

Sometimes mods are asleep or not locked to their desks. Downvotes help get shit like that (pun fully intended) out of most peoples feeds unless they are browsing by new or are way way way down on the hot scroll list.

All this does is bury comments regardless of quality

But if downvotes (and upvotes) are well correlated with quality, then what’s the problem? Your complaints are about community culture around downvotes, not about the mechanism itself.

I’d love to see a system where votes can be correlated between users so that the ranking algorithm weights like-minded voters and deemphasizes those voters you disagree with, but that would probably create a pretty significant overhead for the service.