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.
I’ve had plenty of times where a comment I made got downvoted like crazy, but a response I made to a comment asking for clarification got a lot of upvotes. It seems people really like to jump on that downvote button, especially if they see something already getting downvotes (i.e. maybe they don’t even read it, they just downvote on reflex).
Votes happen to be really easy to deal with in software, which is probably why they’re so commonly used. However, when it comes to people actually casting votes, they behave a lot differently than software creators expect.
So perhaps we should try something else, like maybe sort by “activity” (how many times the comment was replied to) to sort of counteract that reflex-like urge to use it as an agree/disagree button (if you agree or disagree strongly, you’re likely to comment).
+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.
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.
