While that was the intent of upvote/downvote in some places early on, virtually nobody has actually done that to a sufficient degree for it to not be agree/disagree.
Comment on User "threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works" is banning users for downvoting his posts.
rglullis@communick.news 22 hours ago
The message is “If you disagree with me, you will be banned”
It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not whether how “agreeable” a comment or post is. This cultural change is one the most toxic behaviors that made Reddit such a crappy place for discussion.
This was already bad on Reddit, but at least there one could avoid this problems because people were used to browse only the subreddits where they were subscribed, so a niche subreddits could still have some semblance of good “community” participation. On Lemmy, most people browse by /all and lots of them still treat the downvote button as a some mechanism to train an algorithm. These users are the worst. In the beginning, I was actually sending DMs to people asking them to please not downvote something if they were not part of the community and their reaction was basically “I don’t want to see this, so I will downvote to bury it” (completely ignoring the fact that they could simply hide the post or stop browsing by /all).
So, while “banning everyone who downvotes the post” might seem an overreaction, I could definitely see a moderator could flag a vote as coming from a non-community member and use that flag to ignore their votes in the ranking systems, and I would love to have a bot that auto-messages every clueless downvoter explaining the proper netiquette around votes for non-community members.
eronth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I guess I’m one of those old dinosaur users that still tries and mostly adheres to that old unwritten rule but the lines of inflammatory BS, rampant strawman, whatboutism with disagreements has made it so much harder.
Iceman@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how “agreeable” a comment or post is.
Never was. It was a wish by some but not it was always an impossible one.
rglullis@communick.news 20 hours ago
My Reddit account is from 2006. I joined it when Aaron Swartz was still working there.
In the very early days, it was like that. Even it was an unwritten rule, people expected to see disagreement in a conversation, not in a vote count. Only spammers would get mass-downvotes.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
It used to be that the best posts would have hundreds of upvotes and hundreds of down votes. They showed +100/-98 and you did mediately knew this was an interesting comment.
Then they stopped showing both up and down, and only showed the summation. 100 upvotes and 98 down votes is now +2, and this comment is now lurking among all the other +2 comments.
Showing the total instead of the ratio was the end of reddiquette, and the earliest Reddit enshittification that I can point to.
Iceman@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
It was gone by '09 when i made my account at least, the good old days when their where still site wide mod drama like this one :D
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 22 hours ago
I personally prefer to downvote what I don’t agree with. Why would I want to promote a point of view I don’t agree with?
Skavau@piefed.social 22 hours ago
Yeah, I mean it depends - doesn't it? If someone is expressing a text-based opinion post you dislike, I can see that. If you think the articles source is corrosive - I can see that. If you think its off-topic, I can see that.
But supposing someone found a metal music community, and downvoted everything there because they don't like metal - would that be reasonable?
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 17 hours ago
That probably wouldn’t and would obviously be vote manipulation. This situation is pretty rare and is ignored, like on YouTube, because people get bored and most people wont go out of their way to do this
Problem is: Lemmy’s algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
People just can’t stand being disliked. Should we ban people disliking crypto posts? Because damn most of my posts are disliked based on people hating and spreading lies about crypto just because they dislike it
Blaze@lazysoci.al 16 hours ago
Problem is: Lemmy’s algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
Piefed has keyword filters that can help with that issue.
Skavau@piefed.social 17 hours ago
That probably wouldn’t and would obviously be vote manipulation. This situation is pretty rare and is ignored, like on YouTube, because people get bored and most people wont go out of their way to do this
Absolutely, it is rare. But people do it. As I've said before, I banned 5 people on the original !television@lemm.ee instance for just downvoting posts repeatedly. No pattern. None of the accounts were active on the community n terms of posting. Some of the accounts had never even posted on the fediverse - they were simply downvote accounts that purely existed to vote negatively on content.
Problem is: Lemmy's algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
Piefed has much more control here. People can easily just block communities though.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 21 hours ago
Why would I want to promote a point of view I don’t agree with?
Because you also wouldn’t like those that disagree with you to essentially censor you. I.e. the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do to you. If you don’t want to be censored because of your personal opinion, maybe don’t do the same to others either.
Now a downvote is not really “censorship”, but still, I would say you should still have respect for an opinion that is different from your own (provided it’s not a completely unreasonable opinion). That respect should be enough to prevent you from downvoting such an opinion, I feel.
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Downvotes are not censorship in any sense.
LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
They certainly are censorship in the sense that it reduces other people’s ability to see that content.
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 17 hours ago
I am free to disrespect them or their opinion, but I respect their freedom of speech
Everyone is free to downvote me. This is not Reddit, having a lot of downvotes doesn’t ban you, unless you’re in a shitty instance
FridaySteve@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
But why does a platform have logins, persistent identity, and voting if the users aren’t intended to use that to moderate the conversation and push comments that they feel don’t belong in the discussion to the bottom of the thread and ultimately hide them? Why not present threads in bump order with users identified with a single thread ID inside threads?
Juice@midwest.social 20 hours ago
This is so revealing, I always thought “why not engage with an opinion I disagree with?” Now I see that engaging with it might bring attention to it, even if it were to help us learn and teach.
Instead people want to push the punish button, to be a nameless and unidentifiable avatar of hegemony. Our role in history is to suppress the ideas of others and boost those ideas which we’ve adopted. Hide what we are uncomfortable looking at, even if it is only an opinion, and let the people who control our own opinions continue to push their own agenda without obstacles.
People actually want to remain ignorant, and not develop discourse; people want a closed discourse away from disagreement. When we create our logins, our online identities, we want to remain anonymous and detached from reality. We don’t want those who disagree with us to be considered human with differing opinions, because we don’t see our own opinions as human.
Every interaction is a conflict, and conflict is hard, so I’ll punish this other person. I’ll play my part as a silent executioner, murdering ideas by consensus without a thought as to why I disagree, or why the other person disagrees with me. I’m powerless but at least I can take away someone else’s power.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 20 hours ago
You are intended to moderate via votes. But I hope you don’t feel that something you disagree with needs to be “moderated”. Other people are allowed to disagree with you, it doesn’t require moderation.
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 17 hours ago
I personally don’t see votes as a way to moderate, they mean much more to me
OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml 18 hours ago
If your posts turn up in /c/all they’re going to get treated accordingly.
And this is fine. /c/all should let users downvote posts they don’t like so popular stuff can rise to the top. That’s what makes /c/all sometimes worth looking at.
Otherwise, it’ll just fill up with all sorts of crap from communities with no downvoting rules, including edgy borderline racist stuff that’s not quite bad enough to get banned, or just shitty positivity memes copied from somewhere else.
Your problem is that you can’t delist your community from /c/all. That sucks, but right now your posts are turning up in two different communities with different expectations and you just need to deal with that.
Blaze@lazysoci.al 16 hours ago
Your admin can, that’s a more effective way to deal with that than downvoting
rglullis@communick.news 17 hours ago
I may be wrong, but admins will be able to configure what communities should be visible in the public view. So your instance would not show on their frontpage things that are not representative of the instance
For users themselves who are browsing by /all and feel justified in downvoting because they don’t like what they see, it’s a different story. If a community is (in their view) problematic, they can simply block it. Downvoting has no place in their curation.
Skavau@piefed.social 17 hours ago
Yeah, but community moderators also have the ability to look at those downvotes and react accordingly.
Sure. I don't want to delist /my/ community from /all/ but if someone did downvote every post on the community made in the last day, I might consider that mass-downvoting from someone who doesn't like the topic and react accordingly.