I think upvoting and downvoting should be removed in its current form. There should be a way to report content that doesn’t contribute to conversations or is hateful and if you want to know how popular a post is go off of alternate engagement metrics like views/comment count.
I genuinely see no benefit to upvoting or downvoting if the above mechanisms are in place. Upvotes are something many folks get obsessed with and downvotes are too easy to spam, especially on a social network that consists of mostly anonymous users. This post is a good example - it’s adding to the conversation and trying to spur engagement with the community but at the time of me commenting it has -1 upvotes (via Voyager since it aggregates downvotes/upvotes). What is the point of these mechanisms - they should be left to Reddit and the fediverse should innovate in this area and make something better than what we already had.
Corgana@startrek.website 1 year ago
I’m cool with basically Lemmy but more polished UI, hidden/obfuscated vote counts and better mod tools. User votes is an OK way to sort by quality but without heavy moderation will always favor low-effort over longform content because it can be consumed at a much higher pace.
Don’t much care for image or video posts, user profiles, karma etc. Would certainly never want any kind of visible ratings. Basically I’m pro anything that enables thoughtful, varied discussion and anti anything that encourages quick, easy content consumption.