I agree 100%. It just sucks when I go out of my way to post a thoughtfully-worded comment so I can positively contribute to Lemmy, only to have someone nitpick my comment and reply with an "Um, aktshually" and a downvote. The downvote brigading on Lemmy seems even more punitive than it was on Reddit; of course this varies largely depending on the post's subject matter and instance.
If I remember the ancient days correctly, you were supposed to downvote incorrect info so it wouldn't appear at the top? You weren't supposed to downvote if you disagreed but if it was wrong info? Am I hallucinating that?
If a platform puts arrow buttons on everything people say, and tell you that up means you get "points", it's a social metric. At this point if you're trying to create a consensus metric, you'll have to think of something else. It's too ingrained in us.
This kind of information is all suppressed now, but early on when Facebook only had likes, there was a lot of discussion on how downvotes weren't really needed. It was believed that people engaged more with content they enjoyed, and ignored unfavorable content.
This is wildly wrong. People obsessively engage with content they hate, to the extent that it probably makes more sense to only have a down vote button. Everyone knows that now, and the big sites uses psychological studies funded by casinos to gamify engagement, entirely in the pursuit of click-pennies.
What do votes mean? On lemmy it seems nothing. On other sites they mean revenue for the owners.
I have never cared for human nature. It's tedious at best and often ghastly. We should all concern ourselves much more with human nurture.
To put it plainly, we should not be letting corporations do research on how to manipulate our most base instincts on social media. That would have been a moderate solution a century ago. Now we would need a more radical approach, such as outlawing most forms of advertising content and social media manipulation. And even raising the topic probably makes me sound insane.
Yes, there were, and for the most part YT promoted those dislikes the same as likes. I think they still do. The dislikes they actually removed were the visible ones, the ones people could use to steer clear of ads and scams.
Lemmy has no total score anymore, so the up and down votes only matter in the topic layer. I think that's the best solution rn. There's no big incentive any longer to point farm.
On Lemmy there is disincentive to troll right? If you're being too much of a troll you might get thrown out of your instance for making it look bad. Unless you selfhost of course. I'm not sure why botspam from selfhosted lemmy's is not a bigger problem to be honest. You can deferate them but it's easy to make new ones.
You were supposed to upvote the best version of each argument/position or additional info and downvote the rest. Instead the site is the most popular opinion presented 6 different ways.
I have not seen one conservative take on Lemmy that wasn't down voted into oblivion. Lemmy has got some libs and some actual leftists, but I imagine most of the conservative servers have defederated by now.
I stay away from what all I call bummer topics because mentally, I just can't take it anymore. I'm 38, and im already done with this life and the constant bullshit that the people in power do. So I just look at cute animals, video games, macro photography stuff, and stuff like that.
This is clearly fake. If it had really happened at least one person would have called them a slur and downvoted their entire post history, then they would have been permabanned from 7 different subreddits.
Now-now it's Reddit - he might have posted on one of the subs that people monitor with bots and silently autoban you from other subs for having ever participated in the offending sub. So he might very well have been Perma banned from 7 other subs for the comment, whether it was up voted, downvoted or totally ignored.
