Comment on [deleted]
Zak@lemmy.world 7 months agoSlashdot had a good idea for this wherein votes were combined with a small set of reasons for a positive or negative vote. I think the use of those reasons was optional there, but modern systems might do well to adopt mandatory reasons for votes. If the reasons for negative votes are limited to things like “off-topic”, “hostility”, and the like, it could cut down on inappropriate downvotes.
Of course some people might still select inappropriate reasons, but a small nudge like that can have a big impact on aggregate behavior.
density@kbin.social 7 months ago
Should still include "i dont like it" as a reason
density@kbin.social 7 months ago
It is a very (the most?) common reason for downvoting and if you force people to chose a reason but don't include it, they will just lie and the whole exercise will be rendered pointless.
And you know even though it's not your personal preference, I think there are situations where it's really just helpful to know "a lot of people agree" or "a lot of people disagree". Not everything is about having a long debate with many sides. Sometimes the most popular thing is the best thing and the least popular is that way for a reason. Or it can provide useful context to understand the comments. Like if I am posting to ask advice about how to fix something and several options are presented but one of them has 5x the upvotes, I am thinking that might be the best one.
And it can tell you about the community. Like if I go into a community and I see someone says something nasty/dangerous/stupid and it has a similar votecount to other comments, I would think "I guess that sort of thing is acceptable here". Whereas if I see it has lots of downvotes I might think "this comment is not representative of the general community here". Voting based on like/dislike allows the community to express approval/disapproval when things don't meet the threshold of moderator action; especially in very permissive communities where mods do not wish to take a heavy hand.
Further more, agree/disagree votes cut down on identical "me too" type comments. They give people a way to show approval without needing to make a comment and sometimes that is appropriate.
Zak@lemmy.world 7 months ago
How do you think that would improve the quality of discussions?
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 7 months ago
It would let users choose the option that best describes the reason for their voting. You then do a bit of trickery where you don’t tell the user those votes don’t count and ignore all votes with that reason. That would allow removing useless downvotes.
But this being FOSS it would have to be a public secret so the irresponsible downvoters wouldn’t know about it.
Zak@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Voting reasons could be made configurable on a per-server or per-community basis without showing it to end-users, but to have federated voting work correctly it couldn’t be completely secret.
Most of the people thoughtlessly downvoting things aren’t going to put in the effort. Coordinated inauthentic voting is a separate issue my proposal does not attempt to solve.