I’ve been seeing more often (and others have posted the same) that some of the elements of “Reddit etiquette” seem to be taking over here. Luckily I can still find discussion comments but it seems the jokes and general “downvote because I disagree” are slowly taking over.
So the question becomes is it the size or the functionality of the site? The people or popularity? What’s your thoughts?
The universal problem is that there’s no shared definition of what a downvote represents. Is it “this is spam and should be removed”? “I don’t like this”? “This doesn’t belong here”? “I want to see less of this”? “I disagree”?
That’s not even a Reddit problem - it’s innate to any social media voting apparatus. Extend it to Facebook, even. Does the laugh reaction mean I’m laughing with you or at you?
Most comments and posts I’ve downvoted have been because I accidentally swiped too far right and my upvote changed to the downvote action and I didn’t even notice. So those downvotes don’t even mean anything!
I think the right answer is to stop worrying about votes. Even if they all mean the same thing they’re still meaningless. It’s better to change your post and comment sorting setting than to try to social engineer a way out of it.
Someone replied to you with the expected use is the downvote button, but contrary to your comment, I believe there is a de facto use of the button and it more or less corresponds to your “I don’t like this” interpretation.
Now, they could have done something to address this issue, even completely eliminate the downvote button. I don’t think they will do it any time soon because it would affect their profit.
Reddiquette says
Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
If people followed that there would be no problem.
Unfortunately, the downvote button is mostly used as an “I disagree” / “I don’t like your opinion” button.
Vice versa, I think Reddit upvoted a lot of the same old boring memes/jokes with the idea that maybe they would benefit if they get there first then next time.
Any post related to WWII, Top comment: “I did nazi that coming” 10,000 upvotes.
It’s not that bad on Lemmy but I have noticed an up tick in non helpful very unoriginal jokes in threads with serious topics.
It makes me wonder—would the dynamic change if there was only an upvote? So you could choose not to upvote, but the default action would be a neutral one, and if you liked/wanted to support/etc you could signal that.
I see tons of posts on here now that are downvoted to oblivion, because they are a legitimate article that says something a group doesn’t like. There won’t even be comments on the post. So like a Reuter article that discusses Palestinian casualties and no comments and like -20. This doesn’t seem like a super useful mechanism. Or at least, it’s just functioning today as a content preference “I don’t want to see this typed content” as opposed to “this is bad info, out of line with the community, etc.”
And despite ranking my list by either hot, or top day/six hours, I still see the downvoted posts regularly so the mechanic doesn’t even really do anything in terms of visibility. Or possibly there’s just too little content on a given community for it to get filtered out.
Not sure if you realize, but a lemmy instance can turn off downvotes for the entire instance. So we’ll see if instances with downvotes disabled will do better.
No I didn’t know that, would be interesting to see more of them try it, just for curiositys sake.
Blajah doesn’t have downvotes, so I can’t downvote anyone and also can’t see if anyone downvotes me. It has helped me break free of the Reddit hivemind and truly be myself.
+1 and -1 is not representative of the full of ways you can feel about a content. This is what happens when convenience for the system outweights human expression.
+i
Thinking scores are “added” is part of the problem. 5000 people voting 1/10 is not equal to 500 upvotes.
-1/12
Giving someone 1+2+3+4+5+… votes seems excessive
Normal humans would understand that by amplitude, I probably meant a x/10 score. And then the algorithm would put that in context of every other score your account has given out to properly weight relative to your baseline. Then perform sentiment analysis on that specific post relative to all the other posts you’ve passed judgement on as context and isolate your relative score with respect to that specific sentiment.
Dude, it was just a maths joke and I wasn’t even replying to you
-1/12 is the result of putting the sum of all the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) through the Riemann zeta function.
Get off your snarky high horse and treat people with kindness.
“Normal humans” good gracious.
OK sorry but it sounds like your saying “votes with values other than +1 and -1 ? Ridiculous ! What next ? downvotes of amplitude -1/12 ? Cats and dogs living together ?”
Which I assume the reason the designers of these platform only give us binary +1 and -1 expression and that’s IF they don’t take away the negative option entirely.
In my defence I plead reddit brain
One thing I always liked about slashdot is the ability to tag votes with things like “funny” or “informative”.
Ultimately moderators do not wish to cede any discussion shaping power to the unwashed masses.
We need proper platforms for discussion. Reddit isn’t such a platform.
The reddit mechanic of using upvotes and using a sorting function optimized for engagement leads to unfavorable second order mechanics.
Quite frankly Lemmy does it too. This hive mind is against LLMs for example and spouts claims without backing them up. People act like it’s obvious.
I’m not gonna share my thoughts on how to fix this. There are certainly experts out there who know more than me about game theory and rhetoric.
I think one advantage lemmy might have is the possibility of expanding the number of sorting metrics allowing users to sort things the way they choose rather than a few monolithic sort options.
Moderation and mods being accountable.
Public modlogs help a lot
I was thinking the same thing. Reddit is a cesspool because communities shut out anyone who dissents with a group’s opinions, allowing the group to continue thinking “everyone” believes the same thing they do. Sure it’s a good thing for mods to be able to quickly block obvious troublemakers, but there needs to be an unbiased review process in place when someone is kicked out simply for disagreeing or asking legitimate questions. Echo chambers are bad.
Telling someone they’re disgusting for being POC or LGBT+ is a good example of an action that deserves an immediate ban. Asking someone what policies a political figure implemented that benefited you should NOT be a reason for a ban, especially if you’re only banning them because you can’t answer the question.
I’m not quite sure how the process works on Lemmy, but I feel like moderation should include incremental periods. Like the first time you get blocked for a day, then a week, then a month, and finally a permanent ban. And a person should be able to request a review of their ban, which would be judged by a panel of mods from random groups and instances to limit people of like minds all piling on for the same butt-hurt feelings. There should be ways to make things more fair than just reddit’s policy of an invisible admin making decisions based on their mood that day.
On Lemmy the safeguard to mod abuse is instance admins. On Reddit this can take place, but rarely does. The only time admins on Reddit really step in is when mods are allowing illegal behaviour on their sub, or when mods are protesting against their own shitty behaviour. But on Lemmy it’s much easier to reach out to an instance’s admins if something is going wrong. Mod actions are all public, so you can create a post explaining what happened and it’s not just a “he said/she said” situation.
If they aren’t being responsive to feedback, the appropriate response is to start up a new community, preferably on a different instance. Or, in the extreme case, to block that instance entirely. You can even build a consensus to doing this with a “panel” consisting of…every user on the platform. That’s essentially how [email protected] became the de facto Star Trek meme community, rather than [email protected], after the mods of the latter community were shown to be abusing their powers and the instance admins refused to take remedial action.
It may be impossible to prevent such community-wide erosion especially on an individual basis, but I think the best one can do to at least not contribute to that erosion is maintaining a sense of vigilance about the foundational idea at the heart of Reddit’s site-wide rot: “I am smarter than the out-group, and anything I do within the in-group to increase my score affirms that I am endlessly clever and funny.”
It’s friendliness of the community and willingness to treat randos with respect. Responses here seem to fit a general pattern of “I agree and…”, or “you’re wrong and stupid”.
I generally have a better experience on Reddit. I’m less likely to get responses, but I get fewer downvotes there and the responses are usually nicer.
There’s a number of instances that don’t have downvotes. Notably, it forces each person who takes issue with something you’ve said to respond to you if nobody else has said it. Whether that’s better is up to you.
In my experience the lack of downvotes does make for a better instance.
I’ve no strong feelings on the matter, but I can understand how some would feel 10 people telling you exactly how you’re wrong can feel worse than 10 downvotes.
I avoid this by simply being correct all the time.
I really need to work on that.
Gamifying the voting incentivises people to make low quality posts and comments. That’s why Reddit is now basically just rage bait fake stories with comment chains that all look exactly the same. And now it’s all just ai generated anyway.
I sometimes visit and read the AITAH type stories and I’m dumbfounded that people can believe or enjoy reading them. All the subtleties and nuances of the early days are gone and it’s a race to who can karma farm the hardest.
The other thing that made Reddit great in early days were the small communities being visible on the front page. It made the content varied and there were different types of posting hitting front page. I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.
Indeed. When’s the last time we saw a well-thought-out, controversial opinion on Reddit?The system breeds behaviors that are in conflict with a high-quality, diverse discussion.
It is for the same reason that I’m very particular about my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with. I’d like if we could all learn to be less judgmental and more constructive so that we may all learn something meaningful. I think this is incompatible with the way that Reddit operates.
my downvotes. They are reserved for low-quality content, not that which I personally disagree with.
There was more of that in the early days of Reddit. At some point everyone abandoned that principle, and from them on every thread became more of a battle than a conversation.
I wonder if separating relevant/irrelevant & like/dislike into two votes would have any success. Quite likely it would not, but might be worth trying.
Would probably rename [ like / dislike ] to [ agree / disagree ] to avoid overlapping with [ relevant / irrelevant ]. To make it more robust, make voting for relevancy compulsory if voting for [ agree / disagree ].
But the reported stats is all moot if there’s bot manipulation anyway. Also, people would most likely say it’s relevant even if it’s actually not, just because they agree with it
As someone who recently switch to Lemmy, I did notice that there is a general difference in the tone of conversation. This is the first time I’ve seen it put to words
Using scaled sorting really helps with getting smaller communities on the front page. I still see the political and news communities but I also see communities for cities and niche hobbies.
I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.
I regularly suggest people to block those communities, or consider an alt to follow those
I really agree with the excessive news e politics comunitties. I have a hard time setting a good feed 'cause of that
I remember when Reddit’s best “reading” threads just suddenly shifted. AITA, JustNoMIL, TalesFromTechSupport, TalesFromRetail, all of a sudden they went from realistic stories of real people venting to… just obvious rage bait. It was so disappointing. It was one of the best things to read on the bus, here’s someone going through something, can offer support, laugh about it, whatever.
It went from stories like “I had someone demand a manager when I wouldn’t offer them 40% off” to “someone pulled a gun on me at work, and my manager told me I should have punched them”. Just such horrible bullshit. That’s when I knew the site was going downhill.
IMO: tribal thinking.
It comes down to “they do not think like I want them to or they won’t agree with me, so I will downvote posts.”
Controversial topics are even more downvoting just to downvote.
The self-built echo chambers are already constructed; self-censorship and anything outside of their views and sources are dismissed, labeled, and smeared so as to not think about the information being shared.
It happens everywhere; the status quo is welcomed, while anything outside of it will seem controversial or extreme.
We’ve absolutely got hive minds here - it requires extremely good and dedicated moderators to keep in check but one thing that might help is adopting my favorite hackernews rule… you are prohibited from downvoting any comments that are direct replies to your comment. That single block works pretty effectively to untrain the habit of “downvote what I disagree with”.
probably an unpopular view but tbh i think voting has ruined modern forums
firstly its much much easier to game, and for big platforms to fake
but more to the point, voting makes excellent sense when the topic is something with a clearly provable right/wrong answer. eg. technical questions are ideal for voting, where the wrong information does belong at the bottom because its simply wrong and in most cases most people can easily verify if it works or doesn’t work.
instead we get voting for everything now, so it merely becomes a poll of opinions not facts, but unfortunately our monkey brains sees the numbers and somewhat equates emotions with facts.
oldschool forums ALREADY HAD a poll feature, so when we wanted a poll we could get one. now everything is a poll, and when everything is a poll nothing is especially meaningful.
I feel so stupid lol. I’m on a bunch of random forums still that I’ve been visiting since the early 2000’s and trying to figure out why things go so bad socially (grouping/instance hating/etc) on platforms like this so quick. There’s no voting on any of them, it’s such a baked-in thing here and on reddit and so foreign on forums that I just didn’t consider it for some reason. There’s definitely dissent or butting heads but it usually just fizzles out and doesn’t carry onto other posts (unless two users really hate each other, always happens unfortunately).
aye exactly. i’d rather see it gone tbh, but since voting is apparently here, and if we try to work within it, such as mentioned above where hackernews prevents downvoting replies to you.
some other ideas
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permit upvoting but downvotes require a textbox reply (imo downvoting without a valid reason is just noise, and we want signal over noise right?)
-
self posts not being upvoted (all posts start at 0)
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no voting until you ‘earn your stripes’. not perfect, but somewhat helps at keeping voting within domain expertise.
eg. i ‘fucking love science’, but just because an answer feels nice to me on nuclear rocket surgery doesn’t mean my vote should count.
-
We also have a problem on lemmy that there is a subset of users who think that votes are how you curate your feed. They downvote anything that they don’t want to see instead of blocking communities that they aren’t interested in.
Consequence of lack of onboarding. Would be easily fixed by popping up instructions for voting and feed shaping the first time a new user votes.
Quora may be exacerbating the behaviour by automatically blocking topics when you downvote questions. They also downvote a question for you when you only want to report it for something. The downvote remains after the reported issue has been corrected.
I suspect a lack of critical thinking. Respond first, ask questions later or not at all.
The hivemind comes from people caring too much about their votes or karma. Nobody likes seeing their post or comment downvoted to oblivion so they’ll play things safe and just post something they know everyone will agree with. I’m not sure you can have a voting system without having some kind of a hivemind.
That shit goes back way before reddit. It was a problem on digg, on 4chan, somethingawful and other vbulletin forums, Usenet, etc. it will be a problem here and every place that comes after
It’s easier to just agree with the group than do critical thinking. It’s easier to just repost the same stupid tired joke someone else just made than to be clever. etc
Yeah I’m going to show my age here. But I’ve migrated from fidonet (bbs days) to Usenet. To slashdot. To digg. To Reddit. To Lemmy. And I’m 100% positive one day I’ll migrate again.
Forums evolve and change. And once it changes go find your tribe again. Your peeps will still be out there especially this kinda tech leaning crowd.
I’ve stopped worrying about it. Humans are going to human.
Unfortunately I think people downvoting things they disagree with is kind of inevitable. People are notoriously combative online, and if they’re given an option to drown someone out, they’re going to abuse it. And that makes it even easier for any sort of hivemind to kick in.
I personally don’t know a better system, but it’s not perfect.
Remove downvotes. Unironically, its a good idea. Requires people to actually engage with something if they disagree rather than just downvote and move on. Gets people talking & raises user engagement. Will be an uptick in shitflinging for a short while till all the assholes out themselves, get banned, and site culture improves from that alone.
Fully agree, down votes are toxic and the fact that reddit has them should be a tell.
i’ve seen this in a few instances and i think it’s made them better
One of my several Reddit accounts followed that principle: only upvotes allowed, no downvotes. Then, when I said that in a comment someone discussed with me how stupid they thought that practice was. They believe it was completely undesirable for Reddit, citing what happened in YouTube after they removed the downvote option. I didn’t care to understand, but that experience allowed me to develop a perennial restraint for hitting the downvote button. I use it scarcely against what I’m convinced are trolls.
How it took over: liberalism
How to defeat it: agressive communist mods
No need to thank me 😌
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”
— Agent K, Men In Black
