Chat

7500 readers

19 users here now

Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

AskBeehaw

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

I'm really enjoying no down votes on Beehaw (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

108 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When I first found out it was an interesting concept that I was pretty neutral on but the more I engage/lurk with the community the more I enjoy it.

I generally don't post/comment much on Reddit because I tend to be extremely sincere and that's not always well received. Usually I don't get much hate, but what I do get is a lot of non-interaction mixed with downvotes. And it's just really discouraging when I'm just trying to share my thoughts.

But having no downvotes here is so nice because I'm not afraid that I'm going to get silenced into oblivion. Either people will actually engage with me (and maybe disagree, but in a meaningful way), or they'll move on and not randomly share their disdain via downvoting.

It's such a small change but makes a big difference. I bet a lot of people feel the same as me - it's more comfortable to engage here.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.

It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn't do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.

I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That’s actually genious