This is a general proposal that concerns Lemmy specifically, but also other forum-alike software that uses ActivityPub, such as Piefed.
For me, the original sin of social media is downvoting (rant incoming). Specifically, its rampant misuse as a “Me no like!!” button. Apart from conveying totally uninteresting information (i.e. a subjective binary opinion), downvoting encourages schoolyard social dynamics and discourages heterodox views (and therefore debate). The nearest in-person equivalent (saying “shut up”) is universally considered rude. At scale, the effect of downvoting is to brutalize a community that might otherwise be pleasant and welcoming. I believe this practice is almost always toxic and poisonous. Those who defend it (in good faith, I do not doubt) need to consider the possibility that it has helped to homogenize their communities into people like them (to caricature: insensitive males). Most ordinary people do not participate actively in social media. There’s a reason for that.
No, this is not a popular position here (cf. selection bias) and so it will of course be… downvoted. But it’s how I see it. I like to think that I’ve added some value to the fediverse with my contributions, but if there’s one thing that regularly causes me to consider leaving, it’s this. Going to Beehiv or Blahaj-whatsit is not a solution, because the communities I’m interested in are not there. Hiding downvote scores does not work because… it does not hide the downvoters.
Which gave me an idea. Given that the identity of downvoters is technically public, I propose a new setting: “Auto-block downvoters”. That’s it. Automatically hide comments (or posts, or anything) by users who have downvoted your contributions. Logical, no? They don’t care for what I have to say, and I don’t care for their inane negativity. It’s win-win! Lots of possible variants:
- Hide [ subsequent | all ] comments by users who have downvoted [ a post | a comment | anything ] by you [ in this thread | on this post | in this community | everywhere]
- Hide [etc] by users with an upvote-downvote ratio lower than [ X ]% etc
Such a setting (especially #1) would immeasurably improve my experience of Lemmy. No exaggeration. I like to think it might also serve as a subtle incentive for users to be more generous and tolerant in their behavior towards others, but that is secondary.
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The only time I think it would be appropriate to take action against any user for their downvotes is if it is a bot account that 100% or primarily just downvotes.
And these do exist. I have seen a number of user accounts on Lemvotes that have 0 upvotes on anything, 0 posts, 0 comments and thousands of downvotes. Often on multiple posts with the same exact timestamp for their vore.
Fair enough (indeed, I agree) but that is not what I am asking for here.
If this was just for personal blocks, I don’t see why you couldn’t write a script/bot for yourself to do so. Unless you don’t know how.
Yeah, I’d be in favour of this.
Why don’t you just be like Lemmy.world admins and stop federating specific users to avoid having their ban be in the modlog.
I use a mobile client to browse, and it uses swipes for both voting and for navigation, which means sometimes I accidentally downvote stuff before going back and correcting it. That means that both myself and other people who use this client would accidentally get banned just for downvoting by mistake.
At best something like that just lets people spout off all kinds of abusive noise and then ignore the feedback.
In theory, such a person could easily be blocked or banned. In practice, I don’t see such a person actively choosing not to see the results of their abuse.
Downvotes are a deliberately built in feature of this platform, so it would be really stupid to have a feature that punished people for using another feature.
If you’re this petty about downvotes maybe move to another platform.
How does it punish anyone if it’s an opt-in read-only feature? Are you against any feature that you might not want to use yourself?
I’m against features that undermine other features. Also I think votes shouldn’t be public in the first place.
Also I think votes shouldn’t be public in the first place.
This at least makes your objection coherent to me.
Ok, I’ll try, what do you need? eli12, eli8, eli5?
Which lemmy alternative is alive and has no downvotes?
No idea, if there isn’t OP just has to write one I guess.
You talk like a kid
This guy text-to-speeches.
Same bullshit as if tou don’t like the usa just leave. This is 5 years old or lower mentality
if tou don’t like
This guys shakespeares!
You keep confirming that you act like a 5 years old. Acting like typos and language police
Orrr, move to an instance that has the downvotes disabled. They don’t exist if I can’t see them ☺️
The comments still do. As I said in the post.
Okay I just reread your post, as I missed the bit you mentioned about instances like blahaj hiding the downvotes.
So a couple of questions for you.
You mentioned the communities aren’t on the instances that hide downvotes… Are these communities that live on instances that are not federated with for example blahaj.zone?
And also, you mentioned that instances that are hiding downvotes is also not a solution due to the downvoter and others still being able to see the downvotes. So I ask, why is that an issue for you? Why be worried about fake internet points that aren’t even really tracked here (unlike Reddit for example), that you can’t even see? Actual engagement in discussion between people is far more important no?
To reiterate: I don’t care about the scores, which I can already hide. I want to hide the content. Effectively: put a temporary block on people who express their dislike for my content, so that I don’t have to deal with theirs. Not a permanent block - everyone can change their ways!
You indicated you are against homogeny and pro discussion. I wonder how your proposed solution doesn’t contribute to these.
That’s a fair point. But I assume then that you are against the blanket block feature (which is much worse than what I am proposing) and want it removed?
Downvote limit posts visibility, mass downvote literally is a form of censorship. It is not mere useless points
Finally. I’ve made exactly this point before. It’s somewhat less true given the plethora of sorting options, but it still seems directionally correct: all else being equal, downvoted comments are always going to be less visible, which means downvoting is a form of censoriousness.
My issue is more of downvoting posts then downvoting comments. I don’t think there is a filter allowing to see the most downvoted posts and most people would probably not use it which would effectively means it hide aka censor content.
My view is upvoting posts you like, do nothing against subjective content that you are not interested in and report for objectively wrong stuffs like racism, settler colonialism, genocide etc
An instance removing downvotes can still get it’s post downvoting by other instance.
So
Let me see if I understand you
You only want to see
-
opinions you like, or
-
no opinions at all
Let me see if I can do my small part to help you
Bye…
-
Have one for the road.
This sounds kind or ridiculous, maybe just don’t take people on the Internet so seriously?
First, perhaps read what I wrote rather than just the title, because I am guessing with 102% certainty that you didn’t.
Second, “seriously”: personally I prefer the idea of a world where people take each other seriously. Where they treat each other with respect, understanding, tolerance. No, that is not the world we have here, and in any case it seems you’ve given up on it already.
Oh man the people at .ml will love this reaffirmation of them being nice and nestled inside their echo chamber.
So if you think about this. Out of the people that downvote some will and will put an explanation for why they down vote. You want to not see these so that you will have less of an idea on why your post got downvoted. Do I understand the idea behind this?
But why should I care what someone who downvotes me thinks? They could just as easily have disagreed respectfully with my post, without downvoting it and so tagging it as BAD for everyone. As I am doing right now with you.
Well often downvotes will get a comment or edit from an OP along the lines of. Why the downvotes. So some want to know. Further someone who downvotes and comments may have something salient to say. A contstructive negative criticism. Those who down vote and move on just don’t care enough. Granted its always going to be a crap shoot like anything else. I mean why do we care about what anyone on the internet thinks? Its just two kinds of ways people are expressing themselves. Granted I find public voting to be useless myself. I would rather a system that allowed people to vote just for their own uses like modifying how their feed shows up without letting people know they voted it down or up or sideways.
I would rather a system that allowed people to vote just for their own uses like modifying how their feed shows up without letting people know they voted it down or up or sideways.
Excellent idea. Never thought of that.
so it basically is from trust cafe which is the social media by the wikipedia guy. Unfortunately he did not make it federated or worked with the concept to be brought into federated social media and I prefer the federated thing over it. With it the user can rate everything. users, communities, comments, posts, literally anything. You rate it 0-100 where 0 is essentially block and 100 subscribe and everything defaults to a ranking of 50. Then your feed takes into account your rankings for the order of it. Someone is a bit of a dick but don’t want to block him. rank him 25 and his stuff will be half as often as default. I mean I don’t know the exact thing it will do around ranking but love the concept.
Dont you think its inherendly dangerous to just automatically block anyone who disagrees with you?
If you see only comments that agree with you or interract only with people who have the same opinions, your views will never be challenged. Many of the societys problems has its roots in people living in their own bubble.
Totally agree, in principle. That’s why I don’t use that very feature, which already exists - i.e. blocking (permanently). Are you against it?
Im against auto-blocking.
The block feature we have now is fine for what it is, because user needs to review case by case if they want to block somebody or not and they will always keep seeing other peoples opinions even if they try to make a bubble for them self.
The auto-block would be context-specific and temporary, as I described. Essentially it’s a fine-tuning of the existing block feature, which I totally agree is excessively heavy-handed (and I don’t use it for that reason).
I disagree. Its not fine tuning. Its fundamentally changing it.
I firmly belive that if we are ready to write anything on to a public channel, in this case even with anonymity, we need to be ready to accept critique and the fact that people will sometimes disagree with you. Also there will always be irrelevant, or snarky comments, but as a adult we should be able to ignore those. If you are not ready to accept it, you should reflect with yourself, if you should even be writing anything.
Artificially making it seem like everybody agrees with you is just lying to yourself and skewing your own perception of the mattet.
Also as a another point. This whole discussion we have right now comes from disagreement. I have read your comments, it has made me ponder things i would not have tought without you and weighted things you have written. I hope you have done the same. Even when we clearly have different opinions i think we have argued in good spirit.
The system you are suggesting would remove these interactions completelly.
The difference between you and me is that I read your opinions and let them stand, while you vote mine down. Why should I be interested in what you think when you are declaring openly that my opinions are illegitimate and not worth considering? I’m not doing that to you. Because why should I? You’re being perfectly respectful, even interesting. Why would I downvote you? And why would you downvote me?
I am more than happy to deal with reasoned criticism. A downvote is “Shut up”.
Moreover (and this is really all that counts) this feature would not affect you. You would be free to go on downvoting and being downvoted. Those who don’t appreciate having their contributions shouted down could talk (and disagree) quietly and respectfully among themselves as adults. It’s my idea of social-media utopia and this small feature would make it possible.
Well i havent downvoted you during this conversation…
And you must be somewhat intrested in what im saying because you take your time and respond to my arguments.
And id like to think that given good enough argument i could change my mind.
I think we perceive the downvote differently. I dont think it means shut up. Its a binary choise. (Or ternary because no voting is choice too). There is hardly enough substance to interpret any intention behind it. Its just something people press, when somebody dont have anything to add to the discussion, or they dont have time to write their own comment.
It’s my idea of social-media utopia and this small feature would make it possible.
This is the fundamental part we seem to disagree with. I dont think its “utopia”, i think its facade, that only creates personal echochambers for people guarding them from seeing any opposing opinions.
Again, I promise you I have no problem with being contradicted. I have in-person friends who I disagree with on politics and it is not an issue. I have a problem with being told “I am publicly tagging your contribution as bad”. That is what downvoting is.
Anyway, I understand your take, I’ve heard it a hundred times. You don’t think it’s a big deal. You’re in the majority. I get it. I would just like the option not to have to see the content of people who are publicly declaring - even though nothing obliges them to - that what I have to say is worthless.
There’s a difference between manually blocking specific users and having a system set up so you will automatically block anyone who ever downvotes any of your posts or comments.
ever
I specifically did not ask for this (it was one of the options and the one I personally would never use).
You seem to have good intentions. But I think that you’re disregarding how most people would use such a feature if it was an option and what that would do to an ecosystem
How so? In functional terms this exact feature already exists: blocking. Essentially I’m just asking for more controls over it, because it’s too brutal (and fastidious) as things stand. Details could be discussed.
Even if you wouldn’t use that option, having an automated blocking system to that scale is absurd to me
Might indeed be hard to implement (congratulations for making approximately the 2nd piece of constructive feedback in this whole discussion BTW). The level of granularity would have to be limited. As described, it sounds like a front-end (i.e. Javascript-based) feature. But time-limited auto-blocks are definitely possible in theory. Not exactly what I asked for but I would definitely use it.
A time-limited manual block is doable and desirable.
I am afraid I simply don’t support your automatic block system time limited or not.
Hello, i downvoted this because i strongly disagree, but that doesn’t mean i’m not open to discuss this (are discussions not why platforms like this exist in the first place?). A downvote doesn’t mean i don’t care, like you suggest.
People should be allowed to agree AND disagree, and still be allowed to explain why they downvote.I disagree with OP too, but I also think downvotes are not great for disagreement. I like them much more for marking something as wrong or off topic. Otherwise we just limit lemmy to a tool that finds the majority opinion, instead of being an actual discussion platform.
For example, OP starts a discussion and your comment that I disagree with is a legitimate opinion, so I won’t downvote either. But if someone tried to derail the discussion by commenting ramen recipes, I might downvote that.
So we agree in substance. Why then would you be against a feature that would allow you (entirely optionally) not to see the contributions of people who have marked your content as illegitimate? This is what I don’t get.
I don’t tend to believe in technical fixes, but this particular feature would really improve my experience here. Maybe yours, too.
I don’t know about you, but I believe that the people who gave me a negative review can still create content that interests me. After all, if a person doesn’t agree with my opinion, it doesn’t make their comments and posts any worse for me. Otherwise, i can say something stupid that i would be ashamed to reread in 5 years and then block half of the platform.
Lemmi already has one of the softest voting systems. on Habr, for example, if your rating is negative, you can’t write comments at all.
That’s a fair position and honestly I wish I could see it that way. Perhaps it relates to personality. For me it has always felt pretty clear: the downvote button is a hate button. It’s otherwise redundant: “up” or “not up” is already a binary system which functions as an entirely adequate quality-control mechanism (with “report” being for abuse). If you scroll down this discussion you’ll see that literally everything I’ve said, even positive things like “I agree” or “Thanks” has been downvoted by multiple people. The button is being used a tool of mindless gratuitous hate, I don’t know how else to put it.
Obviously with this particular post I was asking for it. But it’s been the same story every time I’ve tried to launch any kind of discussion or debate. It’s such a disappointment.
Anyway. Hadn’t heard of Habr, clearly I won’t be going anyway near! Not sure how much longer I’ll be here either, to be honest.
Just relax, buddy. How many downvotes there? Dozens? Hundreds? There are 7 billion people on the planet. It’s impossible to please everyone. and that’s okay. in the end, they at least bothered to press the button. in this sense, indifference is much worse.
Sure, I understand this “just relax” position, it’s perfectly legitimate and it’s widely shared - HERE. In the post I mentioned my theory about selection bias - what if everyone here thought like you (plural) simply because all the others have left or just wouldn’t stomach being in such a aggressive environment in the first place? I’m a guy but how many females do you think are here, and why is that? What if I’m the only one complaining because I’m the single normie who somehow stuck it out this far and then had the balls to speak out? I’d argue that downvoting is the distillation of what a TON of people dislike about social media - the bad faith, the meanness of spirit, the herd dynamics. You’ll reply “Oh come on! Just relax” and you’ll be sincere, but try to imagine how these things might feel to people more sensitive than you. There are tons of them and I think it would have been nice if federated social media had provided a better experience.
AGAIN: this is not a criticism of you personally! You seem like a nice person and you’re polite and sincere (and admirably phlegmatic). But I really think in terms of psychology I’m closely to the average in the population. 90% of people do not participate actively on social media. To me it’s pretty clear that this problem of ambient hostility (perfectly represented by downvoting) is a big part of the reason.
Well, if you’re that sensitive, then fine. In fact, it’s just a classic fear of public speaking. If you’re uncomfortable expressing your opinion in front of a wide audience, why are you doing it? Not everyone likes you in the audience, yes, that’s right. There is no tragedy in this. And this is not a reason to ban everyone. Just don’t speak out publicly, gather an interest group and discuss some topics there. There are worse things in the world than voting against.
P.S. and you don’t have to stress so much that this is not a criticism of me. because it doesn’t matter. gather your will and just say what you want and let people do what they want with it. That’s how it works. There is a moderators for everything else.
UPD: I’m Russian in general, and I can catch downvotes just for breathing. not very often, but still. Well, that’s life.
it’s probably impossible to get downvotes to be anything other than agree/disagree buttons at this point, but I like to dream of a world where it’s for contributes-to-productive-conversation/mindless-nonsense-or-hate-speech.
Downvotes should only be for posts like
lol this ^I’ve never been able to imagine a system that could convince random users to use it like that, though.
Why should I not be free to hide comments by people who have openly declared that they prefer not to see mine?
If they preferred not to see your comment, they’d block you. That’s how you not see someone’s comments.
Downvotes are an indication for other people telling them “hey, this comment/post might be wrong/off-topic/stupid/offensive/etc”.
Also people might downvote some of your comments, but upvote others. You know, because people have different opinions on things.
What you demand is: “I want to auto-block everyone that has ever disagreed with me on anything”, which is not a very healthy position.
What you demand is: “I want to auto-block everyone that has ever disagreed with me on anything”, which is not a very healthy position.
If you read my post, you’ll see that’s actually not why I’m demanding.
It literally is what you’re demanding, though:
Hide [ subsequent | all ] comments by users who have downvoted [ a post | a comment | anything ] by you [ in this thread | on this post | in this community | everywhere]
If I am asking to be able to block subsequent comments by a downvoter on this thread, then no, that is not a universal block. A feature that already exists - do you want it rolled back?
So if I was to downvote you within this thread, you would want this system to block me - but only comments by me within this thread?
The setting could have various permutations, but yes, that would be the one I personally would use. After all, downvoting my contribution you would kind of be declaring you don’t care what I have to say.
If I am asking to be able to block subsequent comments by a downvoter on this thread, then no, that is not a universal block.
That is correct. If you ask to be able to block all comments by a downvoter everywhere then it is!
A feature that already exists - do you want it rolled back?
I’m not aware that this feature exists, but it if it does, then yes.
The feature I am talking about is just "blocking*. Personally, I do not use it precisely because it’s permanent. So no, personally I’m not interested in permanently auto-blocking anyone who downvotes my contributions. But I can see why someone would be. Again: to downvote somebody who expresses their views in good faith - that is a hostile act. A micro-aggression, you might even call it. People here don’t want to admit that, but it’s true.
Downvoters can disagree on something, hence the downvote. I don’t mind seeing your post, because it opens a new discussion for a possible new feature. Now we can talk about whenever it is a good thing or not. And i simply disagree.
Do you disagree on principle with any feature that might create a better experience for other users while changing nothing for you?
In this case, yes. Because next time i downvote something, i’m not allowed to explain why. How respectful i may be, you take away my freedom to share my opinion. On a open platform, of all… This is a place of discussions, criticism often is a part of that. Can’t handle that? This place might not be for you.
I think you’re free to share your opinion, and he’s free to ignore it if he wishes.
Yes, that’s true. But what’s the point of asking something to a community if you’re not willing to handle criticism?
I love criticism. Downvotes are not criticism. Downvotes are “Muh! Shut up!” with the added effect of making your contribution less visible to third parties.
The feature would not block permanently, I agree that’s unhealthy. BTW: I hardly block people at all, and I never downvote (literally never).
What seems incoherent to me in all this (completely predictable) pushback is that this feature would not affect anyone else’s experience at all. People are already free to block you manually. Nobody is taking your freedom away. So why the opposition?
I think you’ve missed how blocks work on the fedi. They don’t silence the blockee, just hide them from the blockeur.
I disagree that this is a better experience for the user. I think it’s perverse and unhealthy and will only serve to isolate the user and reinforce them into error in situations where they are incorrect or antisocial.
OK. But then you must disagree even more with the existing block feature, which is much worse in that regard than what I am proposing.
I don’t use the block feature, but I think the friction of manually having to apply it each time helps to reserve it for special cases, like harassment.
Going to Beehiv or Blahaj-whatsit is not a solution, because the communities I’m interested in are not there
As long as the instances are not defederated, you can interact with the communities from other instances. And AFAIK on instances that have downvotes disabled, the vote numbers will also be only from upvotes - I mean, those not only hide the downvote button, but also don’t federate in the downvote actions
As pointed out in my post (which nobody seems to have read, naturally), hiding downvote scores does not hide downvoter content. I already hide the downvote scores, of course. It’s cosmetic. You still have to deal with all the negativity and spite in comments, and this correlates almost perfectly with downvoting.
It would solve the problem of seeing your posts downvoted. As for comments, are you sure the ones you want to hide are from those that downvoted you?
What it would not solve, BTW, is the problem of having the visibility of my content pushed down for everyone on the basis of subjective disagreement. I believe THAT is a real problem of downvoting that obviously nobody here wants to talk about. My proposed feature would not affect anybody but those who choose to use it. And yet still people are finding reasons to object. Sigh.
As for comments, are you sure the ones you want to hide are from those that downvoted you?
Yes. I have no problem with constructive criticism expressed politely by people, assuming (as is usually safe to assume) that they are not simultaneously telling me with the downvote button that my contribution is worthless.
What it would not solve, BTW, is the problem of having the visibility of my content pushed down for everyone on the basis of subjective disagreement. I believe THAT is a real problem of downvoting that obviously nobody here wants to talk about.
That is not the problem, that is THE feature! You get to comment and everybody else get’s to vote on whether that comment was good or bad. If you don’t want your comments to be downvoted, write better comments.
Sounds exactly like a school playground to me, with in-groups and out-groups, and bullies and bullies and self-censorship. Sounds like what social media is. Hence my proposal.
having the visibility of my content pushed down
I might be wrong, but I think most use “New” sort, and I just checked, the default algo on .world is “Active”. So downvotes won’t push posts down
telling me with the downvote button that my contribution is worthless
The definition of downvote is not set in stone, a lot of people define and use it differently. For some it’s “I don’t agree”, for some “it’s wrong but I’m not going to report” and for some… I have suspicion that for some it’s “I’ve seen the title, I’m not interested”. The fact that people don’t agree with you does not mean they see your point as worthless. They just don’t agree. And I suspect, most often people would just downvote and move on, the cross between those who downvote and comment will be much smaller. And actually the fact that they commented means that they decided it’s worthwhile to spend time on disagreeing with you
I just checked, the default algo on .world is “Active”. So downvotes won’t push posts down
That’s reassuring as far as it goes. Hard to believe it won’t have some effect even with “Active” (i.e. when all other metrics are equal). Point being that “downvoted” is always going to resolve, to some extent, to “bad content”.
OK about the motivations of downvoting. I’ve had this debate a thousand times, I’ve heard the arguments, most feel like post-hoc reasoning to me. IMO the truth is mostly pretty simple: it means “Muh! Me no like!”. Which is completely uninteresting as well as (I argue) toxic. The best argument IMO is the “offramp” one: downvoting provides a safety valve for sterile negativity, i.e. people downvote instead of shouting back. OK fine. Except, for whatever reason, I personally don’t feel this overwhelming need to stamp aggressively on other people’s “wrong” opinions. Would be nice if social media were not so full of spoiled children. But I’m ranting again.
I regularly argue with people here, but I do it respectfully. Like I hope I’m doing with you. I would never downvote you for saying what you believe. It’s not so hard.
people downvote instead of shouting back. OK fine. Except, for whatever reason, I personally don’t feel this overwhelming need to stamp aggressively on other people’s “wrong” opinions
So for you downvoting is aggressive but shouting back is not?
IMO the truth is mostly pretty simple: it means “Muh! Me no like!”. Which is completely uninteresting as well as (I argue) toxic
Apart from votes meaning not being set in stone, I think they do serve a very important role. You can’t realistically be having 5/10/50 simultaneous threads, especially if the points are the same. Someone upvoting can be a signal “I agree with that take”, without essentially spamming the discussion with such comments. Someone downvoting can mean “I don’t agree”. Someone downvoting one comment and upvoting a response is essentialy taking part in discussion - “I don’t agree with you, that other person is right”. Without muddying the exchange. It’s a mechanic to have a social discussion without it looking like a chat during hype-train.
When we gather IRL and there is, let’s say, 50 of us, we will be using claps, murmurs, whistling, maybe short shouts. But for sure it would be impossible to discuss a thing if everyone in the room would form as little as one sentence. That’s what votes sometimes are - room temperature of the audienceSo for you downvoting is aggressive but shouting back is not?
The off-ramp argument is that downvoting is a substitute for shouting back, i.e. a marginal improvement. That’s the best argument I have seen for it.
Which you mention in your comment. About the in-person analogs, surely a downvote does not exist beyond jeering and booing. That is exactly my point. It’s fine to clap someone’s good point, it’s not fine to boo and to jeer. Just don’t clap. That’s what happens in person. It’s polite and honest without being hostile.
wouldn’t an option to ‘mute’ rather than ‘block’ people achieve the same outcome? that’s how it works on twitter iirc
Sure, that would work fine. Essentially the same thing as far as I can tell. The point is that it would be fine-tunable and automatic, neither of which the current block is.
