Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
Forced positivity is toxic positivity.
Removing an interaction choice from users can only result in lower quality user interaction.
Removing the capacity for downvotes harms the community.
Before there was no voting, just conversations. Scoring interactions is toxic.
So your logic is that since we already have some toxic we should just go ahead and make it more toxic?
Make it less by removing downvotes, at the least.
Scoring interactions is toxic.
Hmm, maybe... but if this is what you think, then why use Lemmy at all? This is basically a core function of the platform. If you just want conversation, there are other platforms that are built for that.
I haven't seen many of them, if any that I can think of. Which do you know?
I disagree with you, but the fact that all your comments are in the negative while constructively contributing to the conversation is very telling. I don't think you're right per se, but holy hell you're not wrong.
The downvotes on this person's comments are a perfect example of toxic downvotes.
The problem with downvotes in LemmyNSFW was very specific to that instance and its sexual nature. It boils down to the typical user doing the following:
As a result, content geared towards gay+bi men, hetero+bi women, and plenty non-binary people was consistently downvoted - and it was discouraging genuine OC for those demographics.
It was totally a band-aid measure, mind you. But it kind of worked?
An actual solution for that issue would be to require people to tag their content, and allow posters to pick what they want to see based on those tags. But for that you'd need further improvement of the software.
Sounds like they should have more LGBT ~~subreddits~~ (communities? Is that the term?)
They do, but once you hop into the "local" view you see all of those posts. And the users, instead of blocking those communities as "content that is not relevant for me, but might be for someone else", simply downvote the posts as a knee-jerk reaction.
(Yup, communities. I typically shorten it to comms.)
Supply demand is king either ignore the downvotes or find a new target market. I dont recon its worked at all its just means people will block the accounts meaning they are memory holed perminantly.
Supply demand is king
No, it is not. Smithsonian economics don't even work here, due to the network effect causing a vicious cycle: less visibility due to downvotes → lower perceived supply → users look for that content outside Lemmy → less demand for that content → lower actual supply.
And in this case it's really bad, because Lemmy is supposed to be welcoming to gay people too, not just heterosexual men like me.
I dont recon its worked at all its just means people will block the accounts meaning they are memory holed perminantly.
They block the communities instead, as it's easier than blocking individual posters. And, frankly, it's a better approach than downvoting the content as it discourages it from being shared.
I do not care enough, because here on lemmy.world it isn't a thing. But I see you're from lemmynsfw. I vaguely remember a thread where the disabling of downvotes was discussed and to this day I do not understand why people are afraid of downvotes on their wanking material.
They disabled downvotes because they want to encourage people to post porn of themselves not just to repost stuff. Getting downvoted for posting your own work isn't encouraging and essentially kills communities before they even start.
This actually makes sense. Thanks.
Downvotes discourage reposts more than anything.
Reposting is not a problem, it's an NSFW server, nobody will downvote repeated content. What was getting down voted were dudes and chubby women showing off.
I cannot affirm with certainty there is correlation, but the main page is far more diverse in people and content since the removal of the downvote, and constant reposting is not a thing I see (at least for now).
Downvotes on lemmynsfw were being used to bully people who posted pictures of themselves. They weren't always disabled. But they became a problem and the instance felt that downvotes didn't belong in a porn instance.
There was no reason to downvotes a porn post. Ever.
If it breaks the rules, report it. If you don't like it, keep scrolling.
It would make sense if the end result was to prevent downvotes on NSFW posts by any user, but that's not how it works in practice. My lemmynsfw account can't downvote anything, but my other accounts can downvote anything (federated).
I’d downvote this post if I could.
I would downvote this comment also if I could, but sadly my instance disable downvotes. (◕‿◕)
I like being able to downvote using my main account, but on lemmynsfw it really needed to be removed. People were downvoting literally everything that didn't fit into their fetishes, so anything that wasn't straight and and vanilla would go into the negatives. Like, I'm not into mascs, but I still think they should be able to post to gonewild. Even posts in gay-specific subs were getting downvoted en masse.
It makes the upvotes meaningless. Just like on youtube.
This might be a real unpopular opinion but I think the down vote is a broken feature. We do need some kind of vote to help the best stuff rise to the top, thus the up vote. Down vote basically says "I disagree with your opinion but I don't have a strong enough rebuttal to engage in the discussion to explain why". A basic agreement doesn't usually add a lot to the conversation unless the comment itself comes with additional context, a disagreement requires some level of dialog as to explain why. It encourages this bubble hivemind instead of open discussion. Really makes me miss how popular forums were in the mid 2000s.
It doesn't really stop spam, we have stronger mechanics for that like reporting, moderation and spambot tools. Plus posts without any engagement usually just fall off pretty quickly without reaching a wider audience.
Then you have your trolls who collect down votes. Having a vote score of 1 is way less compelling for a troll than -15.
Edit
4 down votes without discussion, we've just proved the point.
Eh, up votes are just as likely to be an "I agree/like" rather than a topicality, importance, or quality indicator. And it's just as likely to be done without any engagement worth seeing.
This is also a way to form bubbles/echo chambers since sorting by anything but new will surface just the stuff most agreed with.
If down votes are broken, then all votes are broken. The only way for voting to be not broken is to have them not change what all users see. You'd have to use some other metric for sorting that isn't time based, and specifically exclude any vote based sorting at all.
Which is entirely possible, and I think that's the way it should be. Keep votes because they work to filter out useless comments to some degree, but don't let them matter.
Downvote do have a role... It sort of reading the room.
Sometimes the hot take is too hot, sometimes person literally spouting wrong information with confidence of ChatGPT. You don't always have to engage.
All of this is true in "natural" social media tho once it becomes big enough too many bad faith actors get involved and no consensus can be built
I agree that it's a broken feature, but I disagree with the idea of simply removing it and calling it a day. It is useful; the content that surfaces up might not be always the best, but the content near the rock bottom is typically shitty.
In my opinion the best approach would be to force some feedback from the user while they're downvoting the content. It doesn't need to be fancy, nor to go against the pseudo-anonymous of downvotes; just something like a pop-up asking "why are you downvoting this?", followed by 5~6 options (for example: "disagreeable", "rude", "factually incorrect", "unfunny", "off-topic" etc.). In that situation, even if people downvote you based on opinion, it's damn easy to detect and say "nah, they just disagree with it".
Love this idea. Down vote is severely lacking a why and ultimately doesn't change anything but good reasoning can go a long way.
they're disabled on hexbear.net, take a wild guess why
spoiler
it's to protect their circlejerk
Originated and enabled well before there were other active Lemmy instances or possibly even federation of any sort. It was put in place to stop anti-trans harassment.
Plus AFAIK it’s only truly applicable within Hexbear itself. The main effect it has is that a Hexbear user can’t downvote anything on any instance with their account.
It's to encourage posting and comment by having a positive environment, especially on hobby community/instance. Lemmy is still small and post isn't as many, and its full of people who is downvote happy and will downvote topic they don't understand or care. Try build a community around that, i'm sure it won't survive.
If a user prefer to not see downvotes, they can disable it by his favourite client settings, but the rest of the community should not miss this functionality for the pleasure of few users.
Let me flip it around:
If a user prefer to see downvotes, they can go to another instance that support that, the admin paying for the hosting shouldn't need to listen to a few user.
It's a setting, it's a tool, let people building the community/instance adjust it how they want instead of dictating how they choose, isn't that your point?
You can't force people to be positive, they might still leave negative comments.
Lemmy is still small, so users don't have the option to choose servers as they please. For instance, I'm looking for an instance where you don't need an email to register (for privacy reasons) and where you can quickly create an account (I don't have the patience to wait for days to get my account). Also, it should have a good number of federated servers working with it.
With these specific requirements, there are only a few servers available.
Why do you think not allowing dislikes is toxic positivity?
I mean, it's more like "don't be critic" rather than "you're forced to like". You can choose not like if you don't want to.
Don't mix things up. Don't be allowed to dislike is not the same as being forced to like.
Toxic positivity is just like woke, it can be anything you want it to be!
For real though, not allowing down votes is not toxic positivity. You don't go to an orgy and start yucking everyone's yums. You're not being told you can't dislike things, you just aren't allowed to vocalize it at no cost. And if you do decide to vocalize it in a comment, you may* be kicked out of the orgy because it's a fucking orgy and that's the rules. There's literally no point to it except to shit on others, which you wouldn't do at an IRL orgy**.
*There might be a room for sexual degradation **There might be a room for scat
Toxic positivity is telling someone their negative feelings (not opinions) are invalid. The existence of this term still doesn't make people at an orgy assholes if they tell someone who's bringing down the mood to go away. It's literally a fucking party, don't go there trying to make everyone worse. I could play devil's advocate and say that the act of throwing a feel good only party is toxic positivity as it's just as likely to enable escapism (from bad feelings) as it is to be totally neutral, but fuck that. Sometimes the cure to a bad mood is acknowledging it, and then escaping it.
It's pretty ironic that your posts are being downvoted here.
Downvotes are integral to keeping communities safe and clean. Bad faith posts and people just being assholes are downvoted to the bottom significantly faster than mods can remove them.
I agree. I also think that combining votes into a single score is disingenuous. A post with 20 downvotes is perceived very different than a post with 60 upvotes and 80 downvotes. When you only show the combined score it gives the appearance of a singular opinion
What is needed is better controls over who can downvote. Communities should get better controls for moderation - up to and including control over whose votes get counted. Simple controls like "only subscribers" or "accounts older than 1 week" or "accounts that have commented on the post/replied to this comment" all the way through to "only users on this list".
But pushing the control into the individual user's hands will simply create echo chambers worse than the existing ones. Let's not turn Lemmy into Facebook.
