I seriously cannot have any degree of nuanced conversation here.
Like I get it, we all know capitalism is bad, but it feels like every time I or anyone go towards discussing the steps that need to be taken to address current looming problems in the short term, someone has to jump in and shut it down with "capitalism bad >:[ " and tear down any idea presented because its not complete and total destruction of the current economic model.
The result just feels like an echo chamber where no actual solutions get presented other than someone posting whole ass dissertations on their 33-step (where 30/33 steps are about as vague as “we’ll just handle it”) plan to fully convert the world to an anarchist commune.
Edit: I still vastly prefer Lemmy and the fediverse and a whole, my complaint here is that many of you are TOO INTENSE. You blow up small scale discussion.
Its not about the points, its about the weighted value.
Higher point posts go up higher snd are seen by more people. Lowering posts makes them less prominent.
You can go for a system of whoever posts first gets their comment to be first, leading to people rushing low quality crap to be at the top. Or most recent comment first, giving you a shit experience like browsing a discord for information. Or random post order, where high quality content gets buried under a sea of shit.
Ranked voting is the best option we’ve found that works online so far.
Personally I downvote shit all the time if i feel its not more worthy than other content. Everyone should be judging posts according to their own metric so we can average out content across a communities views.
The system was a lot more useful when it showed up votes and downvotes separately. I was stoked when Lemmy came out and that was the default display. Now they seem to have removed that even as a user config option, which is very disappointing. People perceive something with 20 downvotes very differently than they do something with 380 upvotes and 400 downvotes. Showing an average skews people’s perception and helps create a hive mind response approach. People don’t want to reply if their reply might be controversial, because it looks like they’re just being shouted down. And then people who agree don’t want to respond and say they agree, or they’re just jumping into the fire with the first person.
I still see separate counts in the web UI. And I agree that separate counts are essential information. I think the level of discourse on Reddit dropped significantly when they hid the separate up/down counts.
I think the config option is set per instance. Some of them have it, some of them don’t. And then a lot of the popular apps don’t support it, even if your instance has it.
I 100% agree that this is how it should work, and it doe work in more objective communities, particularly tech-oriented ones such as troubleshooting. The issue lies in subjective conversations, where people are debating their opinions, especially politics.
If the vote counts were hidden, it likely wouldn’t be an issue. But in practice, it turns conversations into an opinion popularity contest if the topic is of a more subjective nature (I’m right, you’re wrong, yada yada).
The other important metric to this is that a significant number of people simply lurk with no interaction whatsoever. While participation is key to determine a proper weighting of content quality, it’s not like there’s a mechanism for forcing participation. And if there was, a good number of people probably wouldn’t even bother if there were such a requirement. Ultimately with link aggregators and microblogging, people just want to consume content (including comments) while keeping to themselves.
