this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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So what, what's wrong about expressing "I don't like this"? How's that different from expressing "I like this"?
The only "toxicity" is that it seems there are downvote trolls, so almost every post automatically gets a downvote immediately. But you can just ignore if you only have that one or two downvotes. If you can't handle that, you can't be surprised if you get called a snowflake.
More applicable to comments than posts... Used as "I don't like this" stifles conversation. For example, the comment that we're replying to has been downvoted two to one. It's a legitimate comment that is worthy of conversation but that won't happen because downvoting is being used as a "I don't like this" button. It inevitably creates an echo chamber.
I don't get that argument. Sometimes I just don't have the time or can't be bothered to write a comment, and a downvote serves as a perfect, fast replacement to indicate my disagreement.
Echo chambers are created exactly when you can't express youe disagreement easily. If all you need is an upvote to agree, but need to comment to disagree.
I hear there's this thing called ratio on Twitter, a comparison betwen something and something else, idk I don't use it. But you know what would be just as useful? Upvotes and downvotes.
I'm tired now, today I'll only be downvoting what I don't like :p
These are the same people who say "let people like things" but they don't want you to be able to dislike things and totally ignore that there are legitimate reasons to dislike some things. Then they call anything they dislike "toxic" and don't see any disconnect.
Being defederated from beehaw doesn't seem so bad as from what I've seen they represent the overly sensitive, are offended by everything crowd, who, while I largely agree with many of their views, are just exhausting to deal with.
I'm not sure if Lemmy collapses heavily downvoted posts like Reddit does, but if it does it is also playing a part in creating an echo chamber.
I personally don't have a very strong opinion about up-/downvotes but in general I try to stick to only downvoting comments that are not contributing or down right hostile. I refuse to downvote a comment that is attempting to discuss something in a proper manner, even if I completely disagree.
I get your point about it being harder to agree than disagreeing with this type of mindset though, so it's not perfect.
“Ratioed” on Twitter is when a post has more comments than likes/favorites/whatever. Twitter doesn’t have downvotes. So, more comments than heart things suggests the post is disliked or controversial, as it’s presumed that otherwise people commenting would have also “liked” it or whatever it’s called on Twitter.
Exactly, so at the end it's just comparing two numbers anyway.
Yeah, it’s just that Twitter has one less action. I guess there’s also retweets.
A more perfect(*) solution would be separating sorting by relevance (formerly up-/downvote) from emotional reactions. There's the possibility of having a range of emoji reactions: agree, disagree, inaccurate, like it, bookmarked it, dislike it, find it funny, makes me happy, makes me sad, loveyou for this, what the fuck, find it's bullshit, (etc. but this is not necessarily a good selection). Some of the reactions (disagree, inaccurate ...) could also require a comment of at least (n) words to be left.
(*) oxymoron intentional
Edit: See here what people interested in development are opining about this idea: Add emoji reactions to posts, comments. #29
The echo chamber effect comes from mass downvoting of dissenting comments by a dedicated faction or the hive mind and mass upvoting by the same. The ticket to virtual popularity is popular soundbites.
Downvotes hide discussion, and upvotes make them more visible. That's not what you want if your goal is to eliminate the echo chamber. Perhaps we should change the default sort to sort by controversial (i.e. lots of votes on both ends).
For example, let's say there are two comments:
The first comment is likely to be near the top, and the second will likely be buried near the bottom, and perhaps hidden (e.g. Reddit auto-hides if a comment goes too negative). That's not what you want if your goal is to have productive conversations.
From my experience, people are less likely to click the upvote when they agree with something or think it's relevant than they are to click the downvote button when they disagree. For some reason, disagreement is more likely to provoke a response than agreement. So if you eliminate the downvote as an option, you'll likely get people only voting on things that are relevant or really important to them. It doesn't solve the whole problem, but it at least seems to help a bit.
People can and will build botnets to artificially upvote their posts, and downvote opponents. It's too easily abused.
Ok so why keep upvotes? It's the exact same problem. I've seen so much crap with shittons of upvotes, but one downvote and it's suddenly an issue.
They shouldn't keep upvotes either honestly.
I can respect that consistency.
Problem with that, is then you have to wade through every piece of trash that gets posted. The system isn't perfect, but I can't think of a genuine solution, so until there is one, this is what we have.
Eh, you could sort them higher if they have a ton of discussion under them. I think that could work pretty well. Maybe prioritize number of direct child comments over number of descendant comments (i.e. one long comment chain between two people shouldn't push it to the top).
If you think a topic is interesting, you'd comment under it. That says nothing about whether you like or dislike the comment, it just means that comment provoked some kind of response. That's also not perfect because there are plenty of times where I don't think I have anything valuable to add, but maybe it's an interesting metric to try.
Oh ffs, I wasn't even talking about you specifically, the "you" was just generally addressing anyone, but yea I see it applies you completely.
Don't worry, I won't bother you with my "attacks" any longer, in fact I'll rather block you outright, because I can't stand people like you who scream "attack" or other bullshit accusations whenever someone is just in their vicinity. So I'll never reply to you ever again, win-win!
I don't see anything in the comment that I see as a personal attack. The person you replied to used "you," but I think that was meant as a general "you" (i.e. other people reading this) rather than you specifically.
I generally agree with you, but only for popular subs. In more niche communities, downvotes seem to do a better job of showing which posts are useful and which aren't, but once you get enough people involved, it seems to devolve into a popularity contest.
I would like to try something a bit different, more akin to what Twitter does. Basically, if a comment gets a ton of comments under it, it should be sorted more highly than one that doesn't. Maybe that way we can eliminate votes entirely, or keep upvotes and downvotes as a form of agree/disagree but reduce their impact on sorting.
While in very formal English "one" is the generic pronoun and "you" is addressed to you personally, in casual English "you" is the generic pronoun with the same meaning as formal written French "on".
So the post above wasn't a personal attack. It used "you" to mean "one".
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
I was trying to be charitable by assuming you badly misunderstood the comment because English was your second language. The alternatives are that you, in your own words, lack "the basic literacy of at least a second grader" or that you misread it on purpose to give yourself an excuse to pick a fight.
Enjoy the fight that you sacrificed your own dignity to start.