So what, what’s wrong about expressing “I don’t like this”? How’s that different from expressing “I like this”?
The only “toxicity” is that it seems there are downvote trolls, so almost every post automatically gets a downvote immediately. But you can just ignore if you only have that one or two downvotes. If you can’t handle that, you can’t be surprised if you get called a snowflake.
More applicable to comments than posts… Used as “I don’t like this” stifles conversation. For example, the comment that we’re replying to has been downvoted two to one. It’s a legitimate comment that is worthy of conversation but that won’t happen because downvoting is being used as a “I don’t like this” button. It inevitably creates an echo chamber.
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
People can and will build botnets to artificially upvote their posts, and downvote opponents. It’s too easily abused.
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
Anyone who cares about downvotes needs to get their head examined. A downvote can mean the person doesn’t agree with your comment, doesn’t like your tone, thinks you are incorrect, thinks the comment doesn’t add to the discussion, hell they could downvote you just because they don’t like your username. None of that matters. All it does is show you if your comment goes against the zeitgeist or not.
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.
You can’t hide behind the guise of anonymity.
Actually, on Beehaw, you can. If Beehaw has the equivalent of kbin’s “activity” info, I haven’t found it.
+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.
I upvoted this post even though I don’t agree with it. See the downvoted pic of the girl taking a shit to see why I think downvotes are needed at times.
Isn’t that something that mods need to take care of though? Why should that burden be on the community members?
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.
Nah, we just need to interpret downvotes differently. If we count the votes the right way, it doesn’t really matter if we use downvotes to indicate disagreement.
Reddit used to provide a tally of both upvotes and downvotes, rather than just the sum total of the two. The best top-level comments often had hundreds of both upvotes and downvotes, and vibrant discussions always followed. The quality of Reddit conversation dropped precipitously after they combined up and down votes into a sum total. They made it impossible to find the +500/-498 comments among the +4/-2 comments, calling each of them “+2” with a controversial tag, even though one was highly relevant, and the other was almost completely irrelevant.
A “vote” indicates a strong opinion on the subject, and is the more important metric to consider than the specific composition of the votes. Up or down, any vote is saying “check out this opinion”.
I totally agree here. And I want to take it a step further and instead of sorting by average votes, we should merely be including it as one of many indicators, such as:
- number of direct child comments
- number of total descendant comments
- maybe length of direct child comments - a longer response is more likely to be an interesting rebuttal than a “go away troll” comment
- number of independent users among total descendant comments - if it’s just the same two people going back and forth, that’s just a good, old-fashioned argument that most won’t care to read
And so on. But instead, we seem to just sort by upvotes - downvotes and call it a day.
It is functionally a “I don’t like this” or “I’m right” button.
Sometimes comments are just wrong, and detract from the community. Downvotes (plus an interface that hides negative voted comments) clean things up without need for formal moderation.
Whatever can be said about downvotes (an automated system for marking one’s disapproval) is probably true of reporting (a human reviewed system for marking one’s extreme disapproval), too.
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.
