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
Comment on User "threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works" is banning users for downvoting his posts.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 21 hours agoWhy 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.
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 17 hours ago
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.
FridaySteve@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I prefer platforms without voting buttons for this reason. People are treating the up and down arrows like “punish buttons” because of the result of pushing the button. Older forum and imageboard style platforms did not have voting. You couldn’t just push a button to register your disagreement, you had to actually make a comment if you didn’t like something, and other users could judge the quality of your response.
In addition, your identity was often only relevant to a single thread, which was on a single topic, so your opinions weren’t portable or traceable. There were no profiles, so other users weren’t able to use your comments on different threads to try to accuse you of intellectual inconsistency. This led to more complex discussions because people are complex.
Furthermore, on a platform like the one we’re on, if enough people click the “punish button” then the platform makes the comment less visible, requiring an extra step to be able to see it. The purpose of voting buttons is to shape discourse into what’s most agreeable, and homogenize it into what’s agreeable to the most people. Complaining about users “misusing” the voting buttons is something that happened a lot on reddit in the early years. People didn’t realize that they were working as designed.
Juice@midwest.social 18 hours ago
I see where you are coming from now, I misunderstood your intent. I took what you meant as “its good to use these buttons because that’s why the platform has them,” which I disagree with every which way!
But you were actually saying the design of the platform causes the behavior, the platforms hurt discourse more than individual users who’s understanding (or misunderstanding) of how a vote button is supposed to be used is an ambiguity that is inherent to the platform. Which, yes I agree with that also, and it is a better point to make than which user is vicious or virtuous in using the platform.
I make similar criticisms often about structural basis for social movements, but admittedly I have a blind spot for tech platforms. Not because I’m bad with tech, but because I’m pretty good with it. I do tend to think of these platforms as neutral, but that’s more of a bias than a product of analysis. I’d like to unlearn the bias.
You seem pretty advanced in your understanding, is this something that you’ve just thought about, or are you in community, or educating yourself by other means? I could use a little of that in my own work, as I am aware of this bias but still wasting time and energy because of it
Anyway, holy shit its a conversation if either of us had the attitude of “downvote and go” then I’d have missed your actual intention. Another tendency of online discourse is for people to take the dimmest possible interpretation of others opinions. I guess I also fall in this trap, at least around certain topics
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.
FridaySteve@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Right that’s what I’m saying, I don’t understand why voting buttons are there except for users to use them to moderate each other. I don’t feel like they’re necessary at all. I participated in online discussions for 25 years before reddit showed up. We didn’t need voting buttons at all and the presence of those buttons removes nuance and complexity from the conversation.
Skavau@piefed.social 17 hours ago
They're there so the frontpage isn't a disordered mess where nonsense posts aren't given equal weight to meaningful news stories.
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 17 hours ago
I personally don’t see votes as a way to moderate, they mean much more to me
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.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
That is not at all a reasonable definition of censorship.
LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Censorship is “the suppression or prohibition of [media] that is considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security” according to Oxford dictionary.
How is downvoting content with the intent to make it less visible to other users not a form of suppression?
Electricd@lemmybefree.net 17 hours ago
Can you blame censorship when you’ve voluntarily decided to participate in a network that has a voting for visibility system?
LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I’m not blaming anyone I’m just saying it meets the definition of censorship.