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Downvoters!?! I always thought the arrow ⬇️ was the button to scroll down the page!!! My God …all those dislikes! 😨
A lot of those are joke downvotes, well mine was.
Mine wasn’t.
Communities trying to have alternate meanings for upvotes/downvotes must keep in mind that people scrolling posts across communities won’t generally notice the community and if they do they won’t read the rules and will vote however they want. Trying to force them to follow some silly community specific process is tilting at windmills and bitching about it is embarrassing.
Apparently it’s the button you press to get banned from a community.
ASK ME HOW I KNOW
How I know?
I’ll stop using the downvotes as a disagree button when everyone else stops using upvotes as an agree button.
I actually think up- and downvotes are inherently asymmetrical in this respect.
Upvoting things you agree with is fine and a main use of the function. Why then is downvoting things you disagree with wrong? Because the purpose of voting is visibility, you upvote things you want people to see, like arguments you agree with, and downvote those you don’t think people should see.
Now if you believe in having an open discussion you don’t want to suppress posts just because you disagree with them. Disagreeing is fine, so downvoting is reserved for posts that detract from the conversation.
you upvote a comment saying they love cats
you ignore a comment saying they don’t like cats
you downvote a comment saying they hate cats because cats are evil
and you report a comment saying they eat cats
Downvotes are definitely a disagree button and anyone denying it is just coping or lying about their own usage of it. Reddiquette was the worst thing that ever happened to internet culture
Reddiquette was the worst thing that ever happened to internet culture
I can agree that they end up being a disagree button in practice, but you’re saying they should be a disagree button?
what else should it be?
Almost anything else or nonexistent. Maybe a way of filtering lazy, unhelpful, or uncivil comments. Downvotes being a disagree button just seems blatantly toxic. Expressing disagreements calls for using actual words.
Not sure about that last bit. Do you know how many people are wrong on the Internet? Lemmy isn’t my job, yo: I can’t engage in a dialogue with with them all.
then dont engage with them. let someone else do it: do you know how many people are on the internet?
Not sure. Let me start counting. 1… 2… 3… 4… oh, wait, that’s a bot. 3… 4… 5…
Earnest question- what is it supposed to be used for? I don’t downvote people very often, but I think I’ve only ever seen it used express approval or disapproval so that the score reflects community sentiment
How is it supposed to be used?
In addition to what others said, in comments the down vote is meant to be used on comments that don’t further discussion in good faith.
I used to subscribe to that idea, but I’ve since changed my mind. If the far majority use upvotes to mean agreement, then me upvoting a controversial, but well structured, opinion will likely be viewed as agreement as well.
It’s a nice idea to think the voting system is meant to promote discussion, instead of homogenise opinions in a community.
We disabled downvotes on hexbear and it honestly made for much healthier discussion
That’s actually surprising to me, because I’d think that down voting whack stuff would make things better overall. What was happening? It’s not like people know who it was, or were down votes done out of spite?
I also couldn’t help but notice some super conservative instances I’ve seen have down votes disabled.
My perspective is that without them bad takes get called out, and if the poster is redeemable they can engage with constructive criticism and learn something from the replies
Rather than people downvoting and moving on which can lead to resentment on a posters behalf if they don’t understand why a position of theirs may be getting downvoted
Downvotes were disabled because posts that touched on trans issues were routinely downvoted, often by the same users. Those users were purged and downvotes disabled to good effect.
Uninformed posters are given information if they are sincere.
Malicious posters get dunked on before getting banned.
It has worked very well in my opinion.
