Still learning the rules of this room by the way so bear with me
People don’t like rejection. Evolutionarily rejection from peers/society means danger. Even if it’s not dangerous now, the brain (especially the amygdala) reacts the same. People get anxious, defensive, etc. It takes time and reflection to accept that maybe what you said was wrong or socially unacceptable. Internet is too fast to reflect, it’s much easier to respond in anger and then forget it all.
Totally this. It just sucks to put work into a comment or a post and be downvoted to hell.
I mostly don’t worry about it, many times text just loses some of the nuance that speech has and misunderstandings are more common. My most down voted comments on reddit were mostly in subreddits like nvidiashield and had the temerity to say something negative about their choice of streaming box, I’ve never understood the need to defend things like that.
Why specifically the amygdala? I would’ve assumed it’d originate in older parts of the brain
It’s mainly a feeling of rejection, as others have said. But also, when I post a non-joke comment that gets downvoted but not replied to, I really want to know what the point of disagreement was. It’s frustrating to not know what nerve I’ve hit. The negative number next to my comment tells me nothing useful.
In the early days of link aggregators there was a strong implicit rule in most communities that the downvote button should NEVER be used for disagreement - only to mark responses that a user felt did not contribute to the overall conversation.
Nowadays people hit downvote on anything they don’t agree with. People don’t like seeing a large count of people who clicked the “You’re wrong” button on what they said.
I don’t know why reddit thought that people would use it any other way, they were basically asking people not to use it how the vast majority would presume it should be used.
The reddiquette was strongly enforced by the community for the first several years. Eventually reddit got Eternal Septembered and it was just too many newbies for the experienced ones to police.
I think it’s simple. When you post something or reply to a post, you’re sharing a part of yourself with your community. Down votes mean people don’t like what you shared.
That’s why I upvote liberally and downvote sparingly. I’d rather my input be encouraging than discouraging.
On reddit, reaching a certain negative score threshold would often hide your comment, meaning that your contribution to the thread would be hidden. As the site got older, karma began to be used as an initial leaping off point for participation in some communities, making down votes socially expensive for casual participants, since that slowed their ability to interact with the more restrictive communities in the site.
