Comment on You earned some more dislikes
lurch@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
don’t forget that downvotes mostly help with sorting. they don’t mean “this is wrong”. they mean the reader didn’t like it and it should be sorted further down or even start collapsed. it can just be a highly unpopular or disgusting truth ppl want to swipe under the rug. it can also be totally irrelevant or link/quote sites ppl don’t like and want to reduce traffic to or be forgotten (reddit, xitter, fb come to mind)
it’s just a quick feedback that can help the community.
BillyClark@piefed.social 11 hours ago
Do you know what else helps with sorting? Upvotes.
Do you know what else helps with hiding spam? Reports.
If you have upvotes and you have reports, then you already have all of the information you need as a platform. Downvotes are unnecessary.
Plus, speaking of sorting, accounts that use downvotes get double the votes for sorting than accounts do that only use upvotes. Yet, the types of people who downvote a lot are…. well, they’re the assholes. So, you give assholes more control over the platform than good people by having downvotes.
So, downvotes are unnecessary and they give extra power to assholes, making the entire user experience worse.
lurch@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
“only upvotes” don’t help as much, because you get a gap where ppl don’t like it. you can only use ppl who like it to sort, which may be much less than ppl who dislike it.
also, once downvoted from many ppl, fewer ppl see the content and it gets less downvotes.
actually downvotes give less “power to aasholes”, because otherwise ppl can post their evil shit like on xitter and they and the algorithm assume silence=agreement, even though agreeing takes only one tap while disagreeing requires writing a comment. this emboldens the “assholes”. they get littke to no feedback ppl don’t like it. on top of it, there are ways/algos to sort by number of comments. so if ppl actually dislike it so much to write a comment, it pushes the bad post up on these rankings, shoving the horribke stuff in even more ppls faces.
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
I disliked not being able to downvote when I moved to blahaj, but I kinda love it now. If I like the content I upvote, if I dislike it not I either respond (not for them really but for other readers), tag them or block/report. I upvote much more than before now.
If the comment isn’t deserving a block/report, is there any merit to downvote them really? If they are assholes just block/report, and if you just disagree, you can either respond in good faith or ignore them.
You either downvote because you disagree, which is a soft censorship since you are lowering the visibility of the comment you disagree, or you downvote because they are assholes, when you should have blocked/reported them to actually eliminate that comment if it’s actually bad.
Downvotes offer nothing of value.
BillyClark@piefed.social 8 hours ago
I do think downvotes are universally a terrible idea, but for the part about reposting from xitter, which is the only point you made with any small merit, that is only relevant to post downvotes.
If they got rid of comment downvotes and left the post downvotes, you’d still have enough data to sort. People could still vote for comments strategically.
Comment downvotes are a clear case. If you’re making a valid argument, and talking about the topic, then the only people who would downvote you are raging assholes. Here’s the list of people who voted for my previous comment. As you can see, it’s got the full public list of downvoters. Strange. One of those usernames looks familiar. One might look at that and come to the conclusion that certain people here are not coming to this discussion in an honest manner.
lurch@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
that depends on what you think is honest. maybe the ppl think repeating this discussion again is boring and they dislike it. don’t take it personally. you are not your content.
btw mastodon and bluesky don’t have downvotes. i think ppl who are here instead on those, decided this way is better. i for one left mastodon in favor of lemmy.