Comment on You earned some more dislikes
Hawke@lemmy.world 10 hours agoAs another downvoter I will also take the time to explain:
I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.
If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.
The downvote button is a quick shortcut to let people know their comment is “bad”, with a lot less risk of raising attention to the level where someone might dig through post/comment history or worse doxx/swat someone.
Does that mean that downvoting is perfect? Of course not. I would say that probably downvotes should be weighted much lower than 1:1 with upvotes, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it makes sense to ignore them completely or maybe just a tiebreaker. Might also be important to distinguish comment-downvotes from post-downvotes, but I’ll gladly leave it to the software designers to worry about all that.
irate944@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Considering the point of the comment - and the post being about downvotes - my edit was meant to illustrate the point, not to whine.
Regardless, about another thing that I feel is more relevant:
To me this is not… A healthy way to interact with forums. You don’t have to engage with every post or comment you come across, be it with commenting or voting. You’re “allowed” to be neutral, to not know, to not have an opinion, or to simply not want to engage.
And if you feel that someone is pulling you into a pointless argument, you can just walk away. Having the last word != being right, as a lot of people misunderstand.
And if people posting ragebaits becomes an issue, downvoting or replying to them won’t solve anything. The problem would need to be fixed on a more fundamental level, but that’s another can of worms that mods need to figure out on their own communities. As for me, I simply walked away, as I did with Reddit and others
Hawke@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I just find it very odd, the seeming beginning of a Lemmy culture of “you would downvote me? EXPLAIN YOURSELF SIR”
No, I should not need to explain myself, a downvote shouldn’t carry that much weight, it’s not that big of a deal. Less than a middle-finger or even a thumbs down. At most a disagreeing shake of the head in conversation.
Further, the reasons can be their own, maybe someone wants to downvote everyone with a username starting with “h” just for a fun gimmick.
irate944@piefed.social 9 hours ago
It has nothing to do with explaining oneself, but more about fostering discussion. You can check my earlier reply where I explain it better.
Hawke@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Sure but not every opinion needs to be a discussion. There’s nothing wrong with downvoting or upvoting and moving on.