I used to downvote fairly often on Reddit as a sign to disagree or to push down really disgusting bigoted comments. And to be honest, it became a habit to just downvote without replying. However, now that I’m on lemmy and not Reddit I’ve been actively trying to not instantly downvote things and instead move on or take the time to reply. Has anyone else been trying to do this?

  • GONADS125
    link
    fedilink
    English
    372 years ago

    I’ve never changed my voting habits. I downvote trolls, hate, spam, and irrelevant content. I never downvote out of disagreement, nor do I use the upvote as an agreement button. I will upvote people I disagree with/am debating with if I believe they are promoting relevant discussion. That is how voting is intended to be used.

    • Pyr
      link
      fedilink
      English
      142 years ago

      I don’t downvote if I disagree but I can’t help but upvotes in agreement. Positive reinforcement is my thing.

    • @MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      32 years ago

      Same. For me, upvote = adding something to the conversation. That’s why I upvote most comments I come across, and rarely downvote people.

    • @MurrayL@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      22 years ago

      They should make it so that replying to a comment automatically disables your ability to downvote it.

      Would simultaneously prevent people trading downvotes while they argue back and forth, and encourage people to simply ignore trolls and move on without replying.

      • @DoomAxe@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        102 years ago

        If a post contains incorrect information that could be dangerous, you should be able to reply to it and also downvote it so that the incorrect information becomes less visible. For example, if someone said you should pinch your nose and lean your head back when you get a nosebleed. You should be able to correct them and still downvote to make the incorrect information less visible.

        • fuck reddit
          link
          fedilink
          English
          02 years ago

          Wouldn’t the correction be sufficient? Other users could read it and decide to downvote

      • fuck reddit
        link
        fedilink
        English
        12 years ago

        I like this idea. Make the karma irrelevant so we don’t get those awful bots or the tit-for-tat arguments

    • Draconic NEO
      link
      fedilink
      English
      72 years ago

      Yeah it wasn’t made for disagreement, it was meant for a crowd control form of moderation. That’s why they had the karma index and allow for subreddits to impose karma restrictions. (I guess there could be an argument about it being a form of social credit system if it were, which let’s be honest it became that anyway, whether or not it was intended to be that way from the beginning)

  • Ben
    link
    fedilink
    English
    252 years ago

    up/down voting is simply a way to help comments you think are good, or agree with, become more/less dominant in the thread.

    In some cases, comments are useful to explain why - but often that’s just not the case.

  • @daniskarma@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    92 years ago

    I don’t think I have downvoted anyone in Lemmy yet.

    But post and comment quality is much higher than Reddit.

    • fuck reddit
      link
      fedilink
      English
      22 years ago

      I downvoted that post that was an advertisement for crypto

  • @MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    82 years ago

    HackerNews has an interesting approach: You can’t downvote comments unless you reach a certain amount of “Karma”, and you can’t downvote posts at all, you can “flag” them, meaning you think they don’t belong here. Flagging doesn’t affect the vote count, but massive flagging does make the post appear lower in the feed, and alerts mods.

    This, alongside the tight moderation and zero-tolerance towards flame wars in the comments makes HackerNews one of the best places on the internet imho.

    • @infotainment@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      2
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Completely agree on all points.

      An additional one I’d argue is a huge part of HN’s success is their employment of a full-time moderator, dang, who does a great job.

  • AFF
    link
    fedilink
    English
    72 years ago

    I think downvotes should be removed completely. They are useless, if a content is harmful or off topic you can just report it. With massive numbers of bots coming to Lemmy I think downvote brigades will be even more frequent. Why do we need to give a score to everything? Let’s just enjoy good content and try to answer to bad one

  • @PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    52 years ago

    I’ve often wondered what removing upvotes and only allowing downvotes on posts, not comments would do. The default behavior would be to not vote at all, but downvoting, especially for chronic reposts might actually be a nice thing. Plus no more karma farming.

  • Nioxic
    link
    fedilink
    English
    52 years ago

    i think ive only downvoted 1 offtopic lame comment so far, on lemmy

    its not something i do often

    in general the process of downvoting should be reserved to offtopic content, poor quality content etc

    on reddit the “norm” was to downvote things you disagree with, which is dumb. then you end up with the echochamber problem and such. I once asked a critical question on /r/conservative and i got banned. Asking questions where the answer make them seem … dumb, was apparently not acceptable. i got downvoted to hell, and eventually banned. for ONE comment :P

    • @LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      12 years ago

      I don’t think downvotes, as they are now, are for any particular purpose other than showing the poster you don’t like the post. What I mean to say is that limiting downvotes for off topic stuff isn’t enforceable and poor quality content is pretty subjective. Not sure if you are aware of the bean posts recently, but I didn’t like them and would consider them poor quality memes. Almost everyone else loved them though, which is totally fine, but I still downvoted those.

      Anyone armed with critical thinking skills will eventually reason themselves out of echo chambers, just like your story proves! Although I feel like the ban was more due to the admins of the sub than the downvotes. There are communities where downvoted content isn’t removed if it doesn’t break any rules, those are the ones people should look for.

  • DingDongBell
    link
    fedilink
    English
    42 years ago

    i don’t downvote if i disagree but if someone is insulting or something else

  • @zombie_kong@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    42 years ago

    No downvotes. I use BAMO.

    Block and move on.

    I’m here for memes and boobs, ain’t nobody got time for dickheads.

  • Speckle
    link
    fedilink
    English
    42 years ago

    I think lemmy is too small at the moment to downvote in the same way people did on reddit. It’s still growing and we need people to post content to build the site and everyone’s engagement, downvotes for just disagreeing are going to discourage a whole new group of people who didn’t post on reddit because of getting drowned out in the noise. Look in all the question posts about how people are enjoying lemmy and you’ll see a bunch of them.

    I’ve just been moving on and ignoring things I disagree with, no upvote is enough punishment in my eyes. Saying that I’ve been giving out upvotes to most things to encourage people to post and comment more. If something is clearly gross and offensive it’ll get a downvote and possibly a report, but that’s so rare in the communities I’m going to. If it’s a really off topic comment or whatever then yes it’s downvoted because it doesn’t belong.

    If there’s something I really, really disagree with but don’t want to get into a conversation about it I’ll just block the user. That way I don’t have to see or deal with their opinions I disagree with anymore and can just move on with my life.

    I guess that’s a really, really long winded way of agreeing with you lol. I’ve been a lot more liberal with the upvotes and have really changed my downvote behaviour too.

    • @TeryVeneno@lemmy.mlOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      This is not a really good reply to to your nuanced comment lol, but I love your pfp 🥰