Did anyone else here noticed?
No matter the subject or your opinion, there’s always people down voting you.
I don’t care about up/down votes but we can’t deny that’s a way to know the acceptance of your thoughts by the community.
I tried to make some posts absolute neutral, just asking simple things to see if people discuss and interact which each other and me, I just got down voted out of nowhere.
Right now I’m seeing the karma count fighting going up and down, some people just down vote out of nowhere without any possible logic explanation.
Did anyone figure out what’s up with those people?
Discussing on Reddit feels like a fight to know who has the best opinion of all, you just aren’t allowed to think different or they’ll down vote you to hell.
Downvotes are inherently broken. They are a bad idea and they cannot be easily fixed.
Why are they broken? Because users with good intentions don’t use them as much as people with bad intentions, yet the system actually rewards users for downvoting.
How are people rewarded for downvoting? Well, their votes count more. If I upvote a comment I agree with, it becomes more visible. But if I downvote all of the other comments, the one I agree with becomes even more visible. It’s like giving downvoters double votes. And since votes are private on Reddit, it’s impossible to know for sure what is happening. People may even have extra accounts just to get more ability to downvote.
If you reward people for acting in bad faith, then they will keep acting worse and worse.
From a moderating perspective, downvotes can act as a way to isolate for potential spam/rule-breaking content that isn’t reported to instance owners or admins. It’s imperfect and better solutions would be preferred, but they do have a janitorial purpose.
That part you quoted is the least important part of the comment. I put it in because I think it’s important that everyone knows votes are public, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with my point. But I’ll just remove that paragraph so that it doesn’t confuse people who only read the bare minimum.
I was just noting they do have some utility. I’ve also been on lesser-moderated platforms unlike blahaj that do not have downvotes, and trolls can trend and get much engagement because there’s no in-system tool to degrade their post visibility. I imagine if downvotes were removed fediverse-wide, similar problems would take root on the fediverse.
I actually made the same point in the part that you quoted. I said that I only use downvotes for things that I think mods should remove. You stated it more clearly, though.
And I think your other point about removing downvotes leading to increased trolling would need to be investigated with better controls. You even said that the forums you’re talking about are “lesser-moderated”, so my mind immediately latches onto that as the reason for more trolls, while you see the differences in voting as the problem. I think moderation is the vehicle to decrease visibility, while votes are the vehicle to increase visibility.
It could also be related to something like the number of users and traffic. Likely trolling is encouraged by many of these factors combined.
Well, yes - that’s part of it. Blahaj and Beehaw (two examples to my mind) are notably stricter environments than most other instances networked up. Currently, most fediverse instances don’t operate to their level - and I’m not sure that it’d be welcome for them to do so. The downvotes currently, because of them being public - function pretty much as Reddit originally intended - used as a tool to hide malicious/trolling/bad-faith content or even simply off-topic posts (that don’t justify instance intervention) rather than just haterating.
Well I can assure you as a local instance staff that there’s a lot of annoying trolling, spam and AI splatter right now that is mostly bought to my attention by downvotes.
I would like a better reaction-system than just up and downvotes though, but it would require Lemmy not being the major instance software.