Old habits die hard, but there’s Reddiquette which needs to be revived, and some which needs to die.
Many “golden-age” redditors remember a time when downvoting was reserved for hostility, not a different opinion. For the sake of our growing community I would like to implore everyone to be awesome to each other.
However, this place is not Reddit.
- We don’t measure in bananas here.
- We don’t need to append “edit: typo” to edited posts and comments.
- if you see something which is worthy of a downvote: down vote and move on! Don’t engage with it and feed the algorithm/engament machine so other people are exposed to it when sorting by active.
As I just replied to another user, paraphrasing this: downvotes might be perceived as the community self-policing, but if you visit r/vegan you’ll see how that can make a community hostile. I’m a vegan and I can’t fucking stand that place. If you have an alternative opinion, prepare to wind up on the top of controversial, where the mob has a field day.
I think some sub’s had the right idea by limiting the lower voting karma to 0. Another downside is it essentially paints a target for the community before an individual has formed an opinion. It generate the hive mind we should be avoiding.
In that case, downvotes should be invisible. The sorting algorithm can see them but people can’t.
I don’t believe that tiny communities and instances should have them on until a threshold is reached and they become “sortable”.
Being visible is an aggressive moderation tool. It doesn’t foster discussion. reddit devolved into downvote heavy as time went on and I hated it, most of the time it didn’t make sense why things were downvoted. They work better for memes and pics, not comments (unless they are horrible) and discussions. Bad actors use the downvote for bad acting.
I got nothing more to say, you hit the nail on the head.
It reminds me of grading movies. If someone says to me its an 8/10, that is useless information. If they tell me it has some action, I’m intruged. Then they tell me it’s a Marvel movie, and I lose all interest.
However, I will say that it was entertaining as fuck to see /u/spez’s comment karma tank - but he’s not really a member of the reddit community, just the warden hearing the prisoners shout “fuck you!” before starting a riot and a partial breakout.
You’re being really thoughtful and this is a good discussion.
I read through all the other comments and I’m disagreeing with a few other viewpoints from others pretending like aggressive downvoting/brigading is an individual’s problem.
Perhaps a feature request to Lemmy could be an option. Rather than a binary choice.
Votes as is, upvotes visible/downvotes not visible but measured, up/down not visible but measured, no downvotes, no votes at all.
Discussion instances could work around what works best for sorting and discussion, general could work what’s best for them etc.
Forums didn’t have upvotes for years and it worked just fine.
