Did anyone else have the experience that two downvotes on Reddit hurt more than the good feeling from getting100 upvotes? Or was that just me?
One thing I definitely won’t miss is being downvoted for just asking a question!
Or when you comment something and you get a rain of downvotes without even one person saying why they downvoted you.
Yeah, I sometimes have stupid opinions. But how will I know why it’s stupid if all y’all do is downvote me? People here are very different and would actually talk to you and explain stuff. This is mainly why I’m much more active here.
This has a lot to do with the size of the community, at least for me. Often on Reddit I would have no idea if you were ever going to stick around to make the effort to correct you worthwhile, or if you were just someone that likes to argue endlessly because that’s how you get your entertainment. It just because easier to punish and move on that to try and correct.
That kind of thing can push people away from new hobbies just because they aren’t familiar with reddit though.
And if downvotes are disabled, then either they just get ignored and drowned out by other posts/comments, or someone points them to the wiki and they still get the answer they wanted.
I think it’s natural to have a stronger reaction to bad things more than good things. There’s something called Negativity Bias and it’s kinda why rage-baiting and (bad news) articles is so prevalent is because we inherently feel a stronger reaction to those than the positive counterparts
It’s really hard to hold onto those good feelings from an accomplishment they fade quickly. But the negative ones, even minor, can stick around a long time!
This is why therapists often highly recommend gratitude journaling. I’ve never been a fan of the 'gratitudec name of it, but the basic idea is you make a habit of writing down (and thus deliberately paying attention to) the positive and nice things in your life, and that counteracts negativity bias and makes you notice the good things more. Even when your current situation is awful, you can still find stuff, like a nice sunny day, or a friend giving you a compliment, or a cool fact you learned, or a tasty scone and suchlike. After a while it becomes a habit to pay more attention to positives even when you’re not writing it down.
Dopamine is one hella drug.
I would also add there’s some inherent inertial component to upvotes. A submission that gets a few upvotes quickly will easily get more upvotes over time because it’s more likely to float into visibility by other people, ultimately regardless of veracity.
As the saying goes, everything on the news is supposedly 100% true until it is about a subject matter one is an expert one.
I wasn’t a fan of Reddit’s downvote system. It was a pointless, vague way to show displeasure without actually providing any useful information. I never knew if a downvote was because I made a comment that was factually wrong, the reader had a differing opinion, or simply because I made a grammatical error. Plus, there’s brigading. By itself, a downvote doesn’t really tell you anything.
I’m sure that in at least some cases, a genuine discussion (rather than a simple downvote) would have been more thought-provoking for everyone.
If they were used as they were originally intended which was ‘only downvote spam, flamebait, and other content that objectively doesn’t belong there’ ie not as a ‘disagree’ button it would have been fine but in practice nobody ever used it like that even in the olden days of Reddit. I reckon BeeHaw made the right call by disabling them.
Completely agree. At first, I though that the Reddit’s voting system is great, as it aims to be somewhat similar to the approach Stack Overflow has taken, with actually helpful answers ending up at the top… which does not apply to what Reddit is, which is a forum, which is a bunch of people sharing opinions most of the time, and voting on that has never been a great idea.
Hitting an upvote or a downvote is a very basic type of engagement, a way of expressing something without having to say anything. And it’s not doing much good to a forum-like platform. I’ve been trying to find places that don’t have any vote systems, akin to the old-school forums, but I wasn’t able to find anything that fit my taste or activity preferences (feel free to point to some if you know any).
Metafilter.com has “favorites” still but is pretty good imo. It can a bit snooty sometimes, but I find interesting links and discussions on there.
