Ill upvote how I want!
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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simpsonsshitposting
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This is one of those things that's doomed to fail. The vast majority of people will always upvote/downvote based on agreement or general feelings.
The number of people who upvote something they don't like will always be insignificant.
You're probably right. But I feel like that's learned behavior because over on Reddit and Twitter, likes and upvotes/downvotes held so much sway over the algorithm because that's what advertisers wanted, here there are no advertisers, so why not fix the shitty training they forced on us?
Why is it shitty though? I personally want a site that disencourages people that I don't like (like right wing trolls) from posting. We're all here for our own reasons. We should all collectively be able to decide what it is that this site encourages from it's posters. A really well thought out post from a Nazi is something I don't even want to think about.
But Nazi posts are an edge case. My instance is federated with everyone. I've seen some far right stuff in All and when it's egregious of course I downvote because that stuff doesn't help. In the same vein when the lady tried to make this an unsafe space for people of colour by attempting to fetishise her race and religion in one of the adult instances, I almost downvoted and told her to be better. But my post was deleted and I got called a bigot for that 🥹
Point being, there's always a time and space for a downvote. But as a "I disagree" or "this doesn't fit my idea of what All should look like," it's seldom that.
It's not training. It's quite intuitive. Voting for/against something is common in many scenarios, not just from Reddit. And most people will associate up with good and down with bad.
If you like something, you want to reward it, and if you dislike something, you want to do the opposite.
With the vote buttons right there, it was inevitable this is how it would end up.
Even more logically, people know that higher-voted items get more visibility and lower-voted items get less, so if you like something you're more likely to want others to see it. Therefore, upvote it to send it higher up the tree. And send it down to hide it.
When you normalise toxic behaviour everything else seems abnormal.
Like and dislike.
You have my gratitude