By default, Lemmy allows downvotes globally. However, when a server disables downvoting, it is similar to using a feature that is usually reserved for enterprises and very small, non-federated communities.
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.
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?
Don’t like Mastodon, huh?
Never really used it, I think I have it, but it’s basically Twitter rather than a forum, right?
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.
Voting is supposed to indicate if a comment contributes to the conversation or not, but it has been an “I don’t like this” button for a long time now.
It always will be. I think their should be a ranking where the closer to 50/50 the votes are multiplied by the magnitude of votes is thw score. If people like as much as dislike it surly is adding the most to the conversion.
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:
- people use downvotes to signal “I don’t want to see this”
- most people want to see naked women, not naked men
- the instance is supposed to be inclusive towards people who want to see either
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.
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Sellers being also part of the problem is a fair point. But it isn’t just about Lemmy being Lemmy; it’s that unless a community disallows sellers, amateurs eventually leave.
This would probably need a different approach, like different comms for sellers vs. amateurs. Or, if the tag system were to be implemented, forcing people to tag their content accordingly.
About sexuality: the reason why I think that tags would’ve worked is that, once legitimate-but-shortsighted users stop downvoting things based on their sexuality, the trolls stick out like a sore thumb. And then you can simply kick the trolls out.
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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.
Lemmy is the ultimate embodiment of a free market. U dont think thats even a valid argument if that content is downvoted communities dedicated to it will be equally downvoted. Welcoming should not mean making the experience for the majority significantly worse simply to avoid a minority having to search a little harder.
Blocking communities doesnt work entirely since u end up with fat chicks and dicks in communities that arent specificly dedicated to either.
Lemmy is the ultimate embodiment of a free market.
Certain tools inspire certain behaviors. In other words, all you have is a hammer… Ironically, that’s also a reason commercial platforms resist implementing negative votes.
Changing the tool to better suite it’s purpose is an option, but decentralized networks are inherently resistant to such changes. With the backlog of bugs and missing features this ecosystem has, the developers would not be amused if somebody came up with a new tagging or filtering system.
Lemmy is the ultimate embodiment of a free market. […]
Yet another dumb claim piled up over another. At this point I’m not wasting my time with this, I’ll facepalm at this crap and move on to the main point.
Blocking communities doesnt work entirely since u end up with fat chicks and dicks in communities that arent specificly dedicated to either.
Nirvana fallacy. People who expect perfect and all-encompassing solutions for problems should take a reality check.
The fediverse is a perfect metaphor for a free market please explain how it isnt.
I dont expect perfect solutions thats why downvotes to solve the problems that blocking cant exists. Thx for proving my point
Easy: Votes are an unlimited resource because a user can vote on as many posts as they want and a person can create basically unlimited user accounts, thus the fediverse would be like a market where everyone can create money out of thin air, defeating the purpose of having a market at all.
The fediverse would be more like a market if users had to “earn” votes by posting stuff other people vote on then “spend” those votes on other people’s posts. Then votes would be a limited resource that would make sense to apply market principles to.
Bitcoins are an unlimited resource you can mine infinitely many of them. Both votes and bitcoins are raw resources that can be “mined” (earned) infinitely at a given rate by utilising the base resources time, compute, and internet.
U spend ur time compute internet and attention to earn votes that u spend on posts to affect the marketplace of ideas.
Porn should definitely be separated into categories, because there is a lot of content that a lot of people don’t want to see.
It’s simpler just to say “androphiles”
Problem with downvotes is people assume they feed the algorithm. They use them to say " I personally don’t want to see this". When they’re really meant as " this is inappropriate for this community".
I think Lemmy needs to create an algorithm that would help with downloads acting as expected. And then allow people to flag separately if something is not appropriate for a community.
This is a load of horse shit. If something gets downvoted cos its xyz and all xyz content gets downvoted but the xyz content is in a community of xyz. Then the net effect is zero.
Also i swear to god the admins are fucking with me by unblocking the people and communities ive blocked previously.
If u cant handle a couple downvotes then u probably shouldnt be making porn.
This is a load of horse shit. If something gets downvoted cos its xyz and all xyz content gets downvoted but the xyz content is in a community of xyz. Then the net effect is zero.
People don’t browse only by “subscribed”, nor they know magically all communities with their desired content. As such no, the net effect is not zero because the downvotes still affect the visibility of the whole community, reducing its discoverability and of the content within it.
Also i swear to god the admins are fucking with me by unblocking the people and communities ive blocked previously.
That’s likely a bug, and irrelevant in this discussion.
If u cant handle a couple downvotes then u probably shouldnt be making porn.
True but irrelevant. Specially because what I’m saying does not apply just to porn, it applies to every bloody type of original content, SFW or not. And we definitively do not need reasons to discourage OC production here.
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.
I would argue the actual solution is to curate your feed by subscribing to communities you enjoy and “unsubscribing” from the ones. You can even create your home (or whatever the subscribed feed is called) feed for your “finer” taste and then block communities you don’t want to see in the “All” feed.
That’s how I’ve set up my Lemmy. I have my home feed for niche communities that generally don’t end up in the all feed, and for general news I have the All feed where I’ve selectively blocked out communities I really don’t care about. Ideally I would like to set up multiple feed because there are some communities that are so small they don’t end up in my home feed either. I would need a separate feed for the extra niche communities so I could participate in them and help them grow larger.
While a tag system could achieve something similar I feel like tags would probably be more annoying to use because you’ll be at the mercy of whomever sets the tag. If you look at how people use tags on Steam the tags can easily overreach. I had blocked sexual content tag on Steam to get rid of sex games, and it blocked Baldur’s Gate 3. Technically Baldur’s gate 3 contains sexual content but there’s a world of difference between an RPG with sexual content and an actual porn game. I think Valve added some other way to filter out adult games so now I use that and I don’t even bother with tags.
Frankly I also browse by “Subscribed”. However that is not an actual solution for the problem, unless you have a sensible way to encourage/force other people to do it.
Multiple feeds (a la multireddits) is a great idea that pops up often. I hope that the devs are at least considering it.
While a tag system could achieve something similar I feel like tags would probably be more annoying to use because you’ll be at the mercy of whomever sets the tag.
The solution doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful. So even if posts within a grey area get tagged in a way that reaches a wider audience than they’re supposed to, it’s fine.
Frankly I also browse by “Subscribed”. However that is not an actual solution for the problem, unless you have a sensible way to encourage/force other people to do it.
What do you mean? People already post things in the correct community and moderators make sure wrong posts get removed. My suggestion is that people should make use of that by curating what communities are they see or don’t want to see. There’s no need to encourage/force other people to do anything, they’re already doing it.
The solution doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful. So even if posts within a grey area get tagged in a way that reaches a wider audience than they’re supposed to, it’s fine.
First of all, wouldn’t the tag system need other people to be encouraged/forced to do it? Secondly, if the tagged grey area posts reach a wider audience then it doesn’t solve the problem because the problem is that people don’t want to see specific posts in their feed. Posts in the grey area can contain posts people don’t want to see. If the unwanted posts still end up in their feeds then the problem isn’t solved. The tags should be used to exclude posts not be used to include posts.
I mean that what you call “the solution” (to curate one’s feed) already exists and did not solve the problem for the platform as a whole, as attested by the OP. Because regardless of what you or me think that people “should” do, they’re still browsing by “All” (that’s fine) and then downvoting content geared towards other audiences (that is not fine).
And it is not just porn; you see the exact same issue with content in other languages. Same deal: the resource exists (you can set up the language of your content, as well as the ones that you want to see) and people still don’t use it.
You’re suggesting that people should make use of that resource, but our suggestions mean nothing if people won’t follow them. We do need a way to at least encourage the usage of those resources, and discourage this idiotic “this content is not made for ME! ME! ME!, how do they dare? Downvoting time!” tendency.
Secondly, if the tagged grey area posts reach a wider audience then it doesn’t solve the problem because the problem is that people don’t want to see specific posts in their feed.
It might not solve the problem but it does alleviate it. There’s a big difference between seeing 10% or 50% of irrelevant content.
But tags have the exact same issue as the current solution, which is that someone has to set up what tags the user wants to see and the only one who can set them up is the user itself. The current solution already does a better job at solving the problem than tags would and people don’t use it. If the people don’t use the current solution why would they use tags? Why not just improve the current solution so people would use it?
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).
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If ur posting shit u don’t want to build a community on that. I recon they did it simply to push an agenda of unpopular crap that most people (on lemmy) dont wanna see ie dudes and fat chicks, they got downvoted for a reason. Now i guess everyone needs to get used to a liberal application of the block button.
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Well lemmy has a target market if ur not marketing to that market and feel discouraged thats just supply demand sending u a message. By disabling downvoted u are literally forcing shit people dont wanna see down their throats. I guess the solution is now just the liberal application of the block button.
As I understand it, the reasoning is that someone posts a picture of their gaping arsehole and it gets downvoted because of the horrid hairy mole on the left cheek, it might dissuade them from posting pictures of their naked breasts — which might be more in line with the community’s aesthetic sensibilities — in the future.
Which, frankly, seems kind of reasonable.
Lemmy does need more user engagement. Even if you discount the 99% of posts by repost bots, reddit’s maggoty corpse still has one or two orders of magnitude more user engagement, which means more tits and gaping arseholes, even if some of them have moles. Anything that makes people more comfortable posting original smut (and other kinds of content, I suppose) here is welcome.
That said, I think this only should apply to posts, not comments, and only in specific communities. Downvoting gaping orange arseholes in political news communities, for instance, should not only be allowed but even encouraged.
(Personally I still downvote everything anyway; it might not affect the vote count, but it makes me feel better.)
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).
You choose what instance you use. If you don’t like the choice you made, choose again.
How about this: you can choose whether you want to disable downvotes in your Lemmy client, and everyone can live happily ever after.
That already exists.
Exactly.
I’m confused, what are you complaining about again?
I’d downvote this post if I could.
I would downvote this comment also if I could, but sadly my instance disable downvotes. (◕‿◕)
I did it! Maybe i should start a special downvoting service for the poor downtrodden commenters whos got no DV of their own
I gotchoo
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.
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.
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.
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They are removed to protect the sensibilities of the users, so instead of seeing ambiguous 100 downvotes, now you’ll have 70 downvotes with messages that might go from no or ew to horrible insults I’m not going to type here, if it was hurtful or discouraging before, it would get worse.
I am not proposing that you’d need to write down why you’re downvoting the content, but that you’d pick an option. As such, the ability to say “ew” or hurl an insult would be zero.
And the goal here is not just “to protect sensibilities”, but to force the downvoter to provide at least some feedback. Because a lot of what makes the current system feel awful is that downvotes are interpreted as “this is bad”, but nobody can be arsed to tell you “why” it’s bad, in a way that you could fix.
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People who mass downvote, with or without scripts, are better dealt separately - it’s vote manipulation, those people shouldn’t be voting up or down on first place.
Disagree, the downvoters would just pick a default reason
You’re still doing two clicks to downvote someone, instead of just one. And in the meantime there’s always some room to think “why am I downvoting this again?”
And perhaps I’m judging other users too much based on my own usage of the downvote button, but often I’d rather have a way to say why I’m downvoting it - because someone were rude, or because they’re babbling bullshit, etc. I tend to believe that other people are like this too, but perhaps I’m wrong, dunno.
For reference, Slashdot uses a similar-ish system; except that it does it towards people voting up. I see “types of upvotes” problematic because often good content checks multiple boxes, but the rough idea works.
Honestly… after reading another guy’s comment, I am more inclined to just say fuck it and say we return to the forums, no upvotes or downvotes, things neatly categorized into their place (specially so sensible things can be hidden but still available) and if someone wants to interact they’d have to comment.
The problem with this approach is that chronological sorting leads to a lot of trash, as people know that their shitpost will be still highly visible for the others. Kind of like 4chan.
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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.
Well i think caring about upvotes and downvotes at all is the sign of someone going through an exceptionally fucking lame part of their lives. Just stop giving a shit about something so… so… extravagantly useless and bam! Life improved.
Upvotes and downvotes are simply engagement markers that prove you made an impact on that many people. If you need to tell someone you don’t like them, ya can’t downvote them, tell em! Tell em how wrong they are! Get that bag baby! Now get up, get out there and get ta arguin with your words
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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.
