Comment on The crusade against Lemmy devs, lemmy.ml, and so-called "tankies"
logicbomb@lemmy.world 11 hours agoKolanaki downvoted your comment asking what they meant, but didn’t even respond. That was what my link showed. I don’t think their initial comment explained itself, and so downvoting a simple question without responding to it is simply arguing in bad faith.
Basically a comment downvote is an attempt to silence the person who wrote the comment.
My personal opinion is that every comment downvote, outside of comments that deserve to be removed by mods, is done in bad faith. A comment downvote is for things you are sure are spam or trolling. That sort of thing. Using it as a “disagree” button is a bad faith use.
I think most people are unaware that comment votes are public information, and so if you look at how they vote, often, all of their hypocrisy will be laid bare.
Cricket@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
I agree with you, even though I sometimes succumb to the desire to downvote comments that I think are stupid or that I don’t agree with. I’ve downvoted a few here, but generally not for disagreeing with me but for comments that seem in bad faith or that don’t seem to contribute anything to the conversation. What you’re describing is essentially what I recognize as the (old?) Slashdot moderation guidelines, but very likely older than that. I wish that votes information were more public so it would be easy to see it at a glance.
logicbomb@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I often feel a strong desire to downvote in retaliation to other people’s downvotes, so I certainly don’t expect others to be perfect when I’ve probably not perfectly lived up to my own ideals in the past. The real answer, I think is to remove downvotes, even from the underlying message formats, and somehow rework the “report” button so that it’s not a burden for mods to deal with. Maybe something like Slashdot’s community moderation could ease the burden.
Cricket@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
I completely agree with you. I have wished that Lemmy would remove downvoting for a long time now. Some instances have done that individually. I also often wonder why no one else ever adopted at least some of the ideas of Slashdot’s community moderation model. Perhaps it was just too complicated and different from other systems.