I ‘upvote’ more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone’s entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example).
Think about one person in your life who you first thought was a complete asshole and once you got to know them they were pretty cool, maybe you became best friends with them. The point is, judging a person based on a minute snippet in time is a fool’s errand, and your own state of mind contributes a lot to your own judgement of people. Your next thought might be, well they have a history of x, y AND z, so they deserve every bit of judgement coming their way! I would ask you, why? Are you not simply fueling further hatred, vitriol and division? So instead of stopping for a moment and thinking about the world from someone else’s perspective, you’d rather just spit out some more hatred and move on like that person doesn’t exist?
I would love to see some solution to the shitty state of the Internet. I only say Internet because for the most part this doesn’t happen in real life in my experience. I think it has to do with consequences and social sigma and so on. I reckon it would be pretty awesome if there was something like the following:
- all upvotes are free range, people can give out upvotes like they were candy
- downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.
In an ideal world, and setup, this would help raise positivity in the world and have people at the very least have a second thought before being negative.
Yes I understand there would be flaws, I’ve worked with and used computers for a long time, I know. I chose not to delve deep into those as I feel that would defeat the purpose of the message I’m trying to convey. And, you know, lead by example.
What do ya’ll think? Any suggestions to boost positivity in the world, I’m all ears, smash them and any other thoughts in the comments.
downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.
I think it’s the complete opposite. Platforms with downvotes tend to be less toxic because you don’t have to reply to insane people to tell them they’re wrong, whereas platforms like Twitter get really toxic because you only see the likes, so people tend to get into fights and “ratio” them which actually increases the attention they get and spreads their message to other people.
In general, platforms without upvotes/downvotes tend to be the most toxic imo. Platforms like old-school forums and 4chan are a complete mess because low-effort troll content is as loud as high effort thoughtful ones. It takes one person to de-rail a conversation and get people to fight about something else, but with downvotes included you just lower their visibility. It’s basically crowdsourced moderation, and it works relatively well.
As for ways to reduce toxicity, shrug. Moderation is the only thing that really stops it but if you moderate too much then you’ll be called out for censoring people too much, and telling them not to get mad is just not going to happen.
My idea for less toxicity is having better filtering options for things people want to see. Upon joining a platform it would give easy options to filter out communities that are political or controversial. That’s what I’m doing on Lemmy, I’m here for entertainment, not arguing.
Yep exactly, you’ll get hiveminds and echo chambers without downvotes
Instagram is another example. Part of it is the algorithm promoting controversial and toxic comments, and part of it is the lack of downvotes and threaded comments.
Every single time someone makes a post with this opinion, they’re either a Nazi or a Nazi apologist. They don’t want discourse, they just don’t like it when people tell them to shut up. It makes it hard to take their arguments seriously because I know they’re just excuses.
Lo and behold, you have a downvoted comment in your recent history where you argue Nazis should be allowed a safe space to talk in. The pattern continues.
Criticism is a part of public discourse as much as approval is. People who allow positive responses freely but put walls in the way of criticism tend to be the ones trying to silence all forms of criticism. They want a positive feedback loop so they can pretend people agree with them. Some people need to be told to shut up quickly and decisively.
Sounds more like an enlightened centrist to me, but same difference really.
If a maniac wanted to shoot someone ten times, and the victim wated not to be shot, the enlightened centrist would smugly proclaim that the maniac shooting the victim five times would be a just middle ground that’d be fair to both parties, and that the victim would be unreasonable, intolerant, and antidemocratic for not agreeing to it.
Same result, orders of magnitude more hypocrisy and idiocy, and of course you can’t criticise them, since by enabling the maniacs they’re just debating and trying to find a compromise, and disagreeing with them is being hostile and going against the very principles of democracy itself.
Malignant asshats, the whole lot of them, wouldn’t recognize the paradox of tolerance if you violently hit them in the head with it.
And comments like yours are exactly why I want open discourse. You’ve risen in the comment ranks with misleading information. And even if what you said were true verbatim, how does your argument solve anything? Do you think that suppressing someone’s right to think or express themselves will make them “see the light” like in some movie? Think about it from another person’s angle. If someone you disagree with tries to silence you, I’m sure you would not be okay with that, right? If they said you’re not allowed to have a safe space because your ideas are somehow dangerous from their point of view. They could use the same argument your using, demean your viewpoints by name-calling. In their mind, their opinion is the correct one, much the same as you’re feeling. Where does it end? These are all fairly common arguments to silence people and where has it gotten us? Think of the children, this group of people are dangerous they’re not allowed a voice. So you’re free to speak, just please don’t cross the line into defamation or anything illegal. I find it troubling that the first thing you did was go searching in my comment history, instead of simply addressing my post on its merit, which is something we all should try and do. I don’t care what you believe politically or whatever, I’m here for discussion and advocate free speech, and to do that there are times when you will defend peoples’ right to speak you don’t necessarily agree with, but there’s more to it than this petty arguing, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. To sum up, you’re essentially telling me to shut up through the side of your mouth, as is your right to do so in a free world, but I implore you to critically evaluate your comment. Honestly I’m not 100% sure what your point was, you’re stating criticism is part of public discourse, I agree, I don’t advocate otherwise. This implies that people should be free to speak, but also to be criticised, yes, again, I agree. Then you speak about walls to criticism, not sure where you got that from. A downvote is not criticism, it’s a mechanism by which to control visibility of someone’s post or comment. My argument is that people should be held to account for those downvotes, which would mean they would be criticised, so again we circle back to the criticism, which I’ve already agreed with you on. I hope you allow yourself to let go of whatever hatred you have in your heart, and I wish you a good day or night wherever you are.
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To be fair, i too would argue that even horrible people with sick midset should have a safe accessible digital space to talk in and i align with antifa anarchist radical far left progressives.
The wrong and sick opinions in their thought remain opinions and therefor are a protected human right.
By providing at least a safe space were biggots can be biggots we keep them away from other communities.
It allows us to create a window so we can look ourselves and try to understand why they think the way they think. So we can eventually learn how to help them with their mental illnesses. Only when an individual rights are broken or planned to be broken (doxxing, sharing someones pics without consent) are we right to intervene. For generic hate speech? If no visitor consider it offensive is it still offensive? (yes if it leaks, otherwise its no different from a racist family over dinner)
In the end Fascism isnt a problem we can solve by just not allowing it, its not even the problem We need to solve but a symptom of a toxic psychology, these people will always find a way. Its the same for drug use and other criminal acts. There will always be back channels or alt communities to provide for them, the more oppressive we try to ban them the more secretive and the more fuel wel give to there extremes.
I like the feature where a post’s score is hidden for the first 30 minutes or so. People are very critical of posts with a score of 0 or -1, but if a post is new it really isn’t hard to dip into the negatives. Hiding the score for the first few minutes prevents a post from being reflexively downvoted just because the first two people who seen it disagreed.
Hacker news has a great system - downvoting is locked behind a karma threshold and flag (default on). It means that new accounts can’t downvote swarm to shut down opinions and mature accounts have more care when downvoting. The ability to flag restrict does require a centralized trusted authority though… and HN is basically as good as it is because dang is fucking awesome at their job.
Upvotes/downvotes mean nothing. At least here. On reddit, if someone says something people don’t like, their post will be downvoted below the threshold and automatically hidden. Lemmy doesn’t do the automatic hiding, so the downvotes just mean nothing.
The only thing it really does is let people express their frustration or agreement without having to start a conversation. Like yelling boo or cheering at a performance. I’m not against that.
Don’t the comments sort in order of popularity?
You can pick
But that means I have to read them all. One of the things that drew me to the other platforms was the fact that the smartest or whittiest answers came to the top.
Oh, that’s not what you get on any of these platforms. The most upvoted thing is just gonna be the thing that made people press the upvote. Which is usually either because it’s funny or “I agree.”
The top thing is often flat out incorrect in whatever it’s saying, but people don’t know and it sounds about right so up it goes. Make a habit of reading everything, it’ll do you good. And at least for now lemmy is good at scaring away the racists and the nazis so you don’t have to read any of that.
This is why hexbear disabled downvotes, because it requires the would-be downvoter to engage
I think a bigger issue is the acceptance of logical falicies leading to arguments that are nothing more than insult wars.
I can think of several instances but one that comes to the top was a long well reasoned argument for FM on phones. The writer put a great deal of effort into it then ended it with “do you know how stupid you sound [for taking the other position].” I made the mistake of pointing this out and was met with downvotes and told it was a very reddit thing to say.
I would love to see a platform where fallacious arguments were excluded until resubmitted or at least flagged. They do not encourage reasoned discourse.
Nobody likes to be made to feel stupid. A person without knowledge isn’t stupid on the face of it, they’re just a person without knowledge. I think the moment you start insulting someone the argument or whatever is already over at that point. At that point it’s not a discussion it’s the beginning of a mud slinging match.
I’d rather get a meaningless downvote so that someone gets their frustration out than having to read a rant ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think that human nature is not meant to be universally shared in all its communities and that indeed there will always be the desire to have divisions, this to bind more with single individuals who become then family or friends. Being friends of all, but also only friendly, is a counter-evolutionary fantasy. The Internet is inadequate for long-range relationships, this is evident to all those who frequent large virtual communities. I sugget (even to myself) to press x more often.
absolutely yes
God, no. Voting as a filter is soft moderation, and moderation is crucial.
Voting on a comment isn’t sending someone to the cornfield. You can downvote a dumb post and upvote a good post from the same rando within the same minute. You might not even notice unless you pay attention to usernames.
Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. Reddit, for all its many, many flaws, is probably the closest humanity has come to “the free marketplace of ideas” actually working as-advertised. Frauds and fascists had to retreat to their own miserable boltholes… until they started crying to the moderators that every detailed disproof of their entire worldview came with G-rated insults. Was their insular and irrational behavior besides that? Yeah, of course, it’s a mass of humans. We suck in predictable ways. But on average we can make things work. All that’s usually necessary is that decent people are allowed to help.
Also, reddit’s revised blocking is the worst antifeature on social media. It stops you from seeing the person who blocked you. That is the polar opposite of what blocking is for. Reddit also stops you from replying anywhere in that subthread… even if you’re the root comment, and other people keep piling on and asking why you won’t respond to them. So as anyone who’s bickered online would guess, people use it to get in the last word and then forcibly mute the other party. And now reddit straight-up lies to you, saying “something went wrong, try again later.” Knowing full well it’s working as designed and waiting will never work.
Lemmy works similarly. If a particular comment has been deleted by mod, all of the comments below become publicly unviewable, which is horrific. The only way is to skirt around and randomly try looking on a user account for related comments, and guesstimating where the comment would fit in the invisible thread.
Limiting downvotes forces other people to think about bad ideas more, at the cost of letting people with bad ideas think about their bad ideas less. Ideally the bad idea has some tangible rebuttal that the original poster can consider, but ultimately the onus is on you to understand why your ideas aren’t landing. This is all presupposing an idea that is worthy of consideration. People aren’t obligated to convince themselves you’re right, you have the job of convincing others they are wrong, or realizing that you yourself are wrong.
Wouldn’t nerving downvotes/dislikes make it harder to voice your option freely? It’s the easiest way to signal if you dislike something (And ofc the other way around with upvotes). But if you make it harder to do that, you’ll suddenly have a lot of people that just don’t bother. That will create a false sense of acceptance of whatever has been said and will make it easier to create echo chambers.
But isn’t it ambiguous what a downvote means? Did they not think it was relevant, did they not like the opinion, the tone, the style of phrasing, etc. etc.? Or are they saying you’re factually wrong (which is also another way it gets used)? Also a downvote may not be interpreted in the same way that the downvoter intended. I think it’s better that people just say what they think.
Also, if they can’t be bothered to properly express their opinion, is it really that important? I think the default sense is indifference not acceptance. Anecdotally speaking I’ve observed that echo chambers have only got worse since voting has become a thing.
Couldn’t that be said about upvotes as well?
Also: Nobody owes anyone anything and that also goes for explainations on up- or downvotes.
I think the same could be said for upvotes as well - I remember the days before upvotes or “likes” were a thing and I don’t think their invention ever really improved anything. I’m mostly talking about downvotes because that’s what the topic is about, and maybe they are more likely to contribute to a negative atmosphere.
Yes, nobody owes any kind of response, but if you’re using it as a form of communication why wouldn’t you want to make sure you’re understood in the way you intended?
But there’s there’s already a way to clarify what your downvote means by just writing an additional comment.
But maybe someone doesn’t want to clarify because they feel like it’s not worth their time. Or maybe they disagree with everything and don’t know where to start. Or maybe the just want to say “I don’t like that” and that’s it.
Conversations are a two-way process requiring effort from both sides to work well. If they feel like it’s not worth their time I would rather they just didn’t engage in the first place. Like you said they’re not owed a response, that also means you don’t have to give one.
But what If I don’t want to have a conversation? Sometimes I just want to signal to someone that I don’t like what they posted.
That’s quite a negative interaction though isn’t it? Can you think of a real life equivalent expression of a drive-by downvote that wouldn’t be considered rude?
Also, why do you think they would care what you think if you’re not going to engage more? If I have a comment that gets lots of downvotes and no other engagement, it’s hardly going to change my view, all I’ll think is “people around here aren’t very friendly”. I think it just contributes to a hostile atmosphere online (and don’t get me wrong, I’ve been guilty of doing it too).
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