Ok, I get it: the majority of users on Lemmy are browsing by “all”, which puts a lot of content on their feeds that they are not interested in. I’ve already got in many arguments to try to explain this is kind of absurd and everyone would be better off if they went to curate the communities they are interested in. But I also understand that this feels a bit like saying “you are holding it wrong”.
But can we at least agree to a guideline to not downvote things in communities you are not an active participant, or at least a subscriber? Using downvotes to express “I don’t like this”, “I don’t care about this”, or “I disagree with this” is harmful to the overall system. It’s not just because you don’t like a particular topic that you should vote it down, because it makes it harder for the people that do care about it to find the post.
Downvotes should be used as a way for us to collective filter out “bad” content, but what constitutes “bad” content is dependent on the context and values of the community. If you are not part of the community in question, then you are just using up/down votes as a way to amplify/silence the voice of majority/minority. By downvoting in communities you don’t participate, you end up harming the potential of smaller communities to grow, and everyone’s feed gets dominated only by the popular/lowest-common-denominator type of content.
Instead of downvoting, a better set of guidelines would be:
- If you don’t care about the post, leave it alone.
- If you don’t want to see content from a specific community, just block it.
- If the content is actual spam and/or not according to the rules of the community, report it.
Another thing: don’t forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I’m tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we should make some improvements in the software side to have a more flexible rule system for scoring downvotes, but until such a thing does not exist, I’m seriously considering creating a “Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame” community to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.
If I can see it and I view it as bad content it’s getting downvoted. Especially since such content usually is inflammatory political post from niche politic subs that have no problem espousing their politics in a “either you agree with us 100% or you’re wrong/the enemy”. The rest of the time it’s weird fetish porn.
I browse by all because it’s a good way to see communities/content I wouldn’t otherwise see if I stuck to a curated community list. Not being part of the community doesn’t matter because I’m still seeing the content and still behaving consistent with using the downvote button to collectively filter it out.
I think a better option is these communities opting for the post not to get sent to all. Which won’t happen because a lot of previously mentioned post; the target isn’t the community who already likely agree with them, it’s everyone else. Better yet these communities could implement rules against post that are clearly inflammatory/flaming but then where would they grandstand?
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Yeah that does suck but unfortunately people using downvote as a disagree button was a problem on reddit despite the guidelines against doing so. So the same people would likely ignore OPs suggested guideline too. Again, I wouldn’t consider that bad content and not in the criteria for my prior post. Though it does make me wonder if lemmy has implemented vote fuzzing if it’s getting downvotes that quickly? Most likely people are just dicks though. My previous partner was a vegan so I am unfortunately familiar with people getting offended by them just existing.
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Where are your mods? Mods can see obviously the comments but also downvotes and investigate repeat downvoters
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I put some examples on another comment: I’m talking about the most inane, sports-related posts.
Also, if you think that your policing is going to help the other communities you think are “bad”, then why not just block the posters or the whole community and solve the problem once and for all?
I don’t view inane content as bad. So that rules me out for that case.
Me using functionality of a website in its intended fashion isn’t “policing”. I usually do that afterwards if it’s bad enough but usually a sub has to have a pattern of doing it before I filter it. I know sport subs that were just match/race titled would cop downvotes on reddit, which again sounds like an issues better addressed by the community it’s being posted too.
Look, I’m upvoting you here because you are at least trying to have an open conversation about the post. I don’t even necessarily agree with you, but I don’t think your post is something that should be silenced or pushed away from view of other people.
On the other hand, you:
- downvoted this post
- started your argument based on an incorrect assumption.
- accepted that some people end up misusing the voting system
- did not retract your downvote
Do you see the problem here?
I appreciate the first part of your comment and the overall candour. However:
- Which post? Because I only downvoted the OP because you essentially imply all people downvoting content In communities they aren’t in are doing so because they just don’t like it. I’m asserting people sometimes do with reason, like the flaming I mention. Also the OP isn’t really asking a question(imo), it’s stating your views with the question in the title as a means to do so. The rest, even you disagreeing with me I have not.
- What assumption? My initial reply is explaining why people may downvote content when they aren’t in the community in cases outside the ones you’ve provided.
- I don’t see how this is worth mentioning that I accept the reality that people don’t use vote mechanisms as they’re intended? Edit: if this is in regards my sports post on reddit remark that was me essentially saying “yeah sometime people don’t use it correctly which sucks” not “deal with it”. Though again said communities could avoid it by not allowing post that are just match titles etc.
- Why would I when my issues with the OP still stand? Edit 2:
- Definitely not advocating for downvoting content you just don’t like. For me content I don’t like doesn’t means it’s inherently “bad”. Bad for me means inflammatory, trolling, rule breaking, low effort etc.
- The one vote against OP is offset by my upvotes of your other comments and engagement with the post; and is likely weighing it up more than down at this point.
So you are downvoting because you disagree with something, or because you don’t like how I phrased it.
You really don’t see that is exactly (part of) the problem I am describing?
My point is: the votes on a post are not a poll. Downvoting the post does not work as a way to signal you object to the content. By downvoting my post, you are just trying to silence this conversation down and make it harder to reach other people that might be interested in it.
I mean if you want me to be specific then unfortunately I can do so. It’s more than I just disagree with you. It’s that I think your reasoning in the OP is very flawed and misrepresents the situation you are attempting to portray. Which felt dishonest initially but given your attempts to engage people who disagree I now assume misguided, sorry to say. Also I think people stating their views under the pretence of a question should be discouraged due to proximity behaviours like concern trolling (not implying that’s what you’ve been doing, just an example). Lastly, I super strongly oppose being shown content on a site like this that I can’t interact with. For your case it may make sense but I can super easily see it being abused by the cases in my example; where people can grandstand shitty politics(again as an example) but then the onus is on me for some reason to not engage with said content.
I’m a proposing a guideline, not a law. I don’t want to forbid you from doing anything. I’m just saying “hey, Lemmy doesn’t have any type of recommendation engine based on your voting history, so maybe consider the context of the community where the post is coming from before voting on whatever it is?”
If you think that you are gaining anything by voting “shitty politics”, ok. You do you. But when there are people saying “our non-english community has a bunch of downvotes from english-speaking people”, and you understand that this might be an issue, perhaps it would be a nice gesture if you voted this up to help this message reach others?
Perhaps it’s because they think there are too many of them in the all feed?
This is a guess, I don’t use the all feeds so I haven’t seen any of them.
Perhaps it’s because they think there are too many of them in the all feed?
That’s not the fault of the all feed. That’s the fault of the user for either not subscribinng to communities they are interested in or not blocking communities they are disinterested in.
Either people browse by all because there is not enough content in the communities to follow, or there is already “too many” of the things that they don’t want to follow on all, and they should start curating their feed by browsing their subscribed communities.
Which is it? You can not have it both ways.
You are trying to enforce rationality on inherently irrational humans. It’s not going to work.
It’s even worse, because I’m not enforcing anything. I can not enforce it. I am saying “The current way of doing things seems bad. How about trying something different?” and instead of trying to take a look, people are responding by doing exactly the bad things that they deny to exist.
I downvote and upvote whatever I wanna 🤷. Deal with it
bruh you literally are advocating for echo chambers
I usually see a lot of people downvoting posts in a language they don’t speak, presumably because they don’t care.
I would suggest those people to select their languages in their settings so that they don’t see this kind of content.
Now that is just lazy, doesn’t even fix the problem when you could just filter it and never see that sub again.
Definitely
The language settings do not work. Some hugely high percentage of comments and posts have an “undetermined” language because Lemmy doesn’t force you to choose a language when submitting something. And then there is federated content from programs that don’t even have a language setting.
If you block “undetermined”, you block almost all content, and then there’s no point in even being here.
What we might need is code to identify the language of a comment and assigning it automatically while allowing it to be changed if it makes a mistake. I imagine it would annoy multilingual people having to switch their configured language every time they make a comment, so just make it automatic by using a language model. That’s the kind of thing a language model would be really good at.
Until we have something like that, the language settings are useless.
You can configure languages per community, every post in that community will automatically be tagged in that language.
Example: https://feddit.de/post/9930318?scrollToComments=true. All of the comments are tagged, and this hasn’t been done manually by users.
The Undetermined point you are bringing is valid for some communities which are not configured, but most of them are.
Ah, I did not know that. Must be a lot of mods that don’t know that either because I see foreign language communities all the time.
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And I downvote anyone who reads any post and assumes malicious intent and tries to grandstand before looking for common ground.
This is not about telling people what they should vote on, it’s about trying to make the system work better for everyone.
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The only fool that I am suffering is you. Lucky for me, I can solve that right away…
Until there is a proper hide feature voting is the only way to hide a post across apps and the web-ui.
Remember fake internet points don’t matter.
Yeah, hiding the post would be good.
But like I said in the post… It’s not about “internet points”, it’s about visibility of “minority” and niche content getting completely eclipsed by the majority.
As the Fediverse grows and more people come with their own niche interests, there will be more and more smaller groups. If the people on the majority side thinks it’s fine to downvote because “they don’t care about that”, then it stands to reason that every minority will be outnumbered and then the whole system becomes a popularity contest, only “common denominator” topics will get enough traction. This makes the whole system super bland and boring for everyone.
Isn’t that what the scaled sorting in v0.19 is supposed to fix?
What if upvoting and downvoting IS an active method of participating in those communities?
I’m gunna down vote this
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I’m sorry, but I will continue to downvote exactly one post in every stupid anime community right before I block it. We don’t need a separate community for every single anime ever made clogging everyone’s feed with boring pictures of characters.
My single downvote in each community is helping to shape Lemmy as a whole, and I’m certain it’s very effective at doing so. It’s definitely not just a childish tantrum. No, sir!
I was sorta with you until the “Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame” bit at the end.
You can ask people to try and think about their voting behavior, but that’s just a bit weird and obsessive.
For me, downvoting posts means either “this post is not appropriate for this community” or “this post is not appropriate for the ‘all’ view.”
If the community is not relevant to my interests, I just block the community.
Edit: actually, after reading your post, I amend my earlier list. I also downvote posts if the author is an arrogant cock nugget.
You don’t know whether someone has a good reason for downvoting or not, and every time you think you do know, you’re making yourself a little dumber.
I sincerely doubt it. The main reason might be that people actually think that they are “helping” by downvoting?
In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes? (most especially in the “those leopards surely won’t eat my face off” sense)
And tbh, isn’t that what a downvote button is meant for? So however sparingly we may choose to use it, can we really complain all that bitterly if others choose to use it more often?
As someone who already follows these guidelines, I believe that most other people will never follow these guidelines. Far worse, even if >95% of the people across the Fediverse were to, that’s still an awful lot of downvotes, compared to the number of people that have heard of a brand-new sub that is trying to get up off the ground.
Lemmy is at best beta-version software - the apps I hear are amazing but Lemmy itself is still relatively undeveloped (most of the time lately whenever I try to up-vote something, I have to do it 2-3 times for it to “stick”, and getting comments to go through is also problematic, sometimes I have to cancel and try again, across multiple platforms and OSes including Android and Mac, Firefox and Chrome). We are desperate for a place that is not Reddit or X, but if we want something, we have to build it.
My suggestion: make downvotes public, not just to admins and mods but to everyone. Tbh I doubt very much that that would do the trick, but it is a thought to try to help people break out of that system of “I am anonymous so I can be as insensitive to the needs of others as I wish” mindset. i.e., if they thought that there might be consequences, then they might behave ever-so-slightly better? But ofc that would only reach the subset of people who actually cared.
In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes?
That’s the thing. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but going from “votes are used to signal what matters to the community” to “votes are used to signal what matters to me” was a monumental cultural shift that can probably correlate with the deterioration of social media.
This assumes that people who are interested in a community are subscribers, which isn’t always the case. Users like me who subscribe to RSS feeds for communities, for example. This also doesnt account for people who might create a new or alt account. Wouldn’t they have to resubscribe to every community just to get their votes counted?
Users like me who subscribe to RSS feeds for communities, for example.
If you are using RSS, you are just lurking, then you wouldn’t get to vote.
Wouldn’t they have to resubscribe to every community just to get their votes counted?
Migrating accounts should not be difficult and there are already tools that can “port” your subscriptions.
If you are using RSS, you are just lurking, then you wouldn’t get to vote.
Sorry but the assumption that people using Lemmy RSS feeds are just lurking and not actively participating comes off as a little naive.
In fact, the whole post makes a lot of assumptions that I dont think are accurate, which makes it difficult to wrap my head around whether a solution is necessary or if this is really a problem to begin with.
Users do users because humans do humans. The only way to change how humans use the software is by changing the software. Trying to instead change the humans is sure to fail.
There is such a thing as “culture” as well. Agree that the software can make it easier or harder to tips the scales one way or another, but it’s not like people are unable of learning something just because it’s not the default setting.
