this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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It is baffling to me how many people want to copy Reddit voting system, including hiding voting history, despite having left Reddit. The entire voting system over there is a huge part of the toxicity problem.
Downvotes should be removed, all votes public. Accountability changes peoples’ behavior and I can tell you that before kbin.social went down you could definitely see the difference.
This is clearly an unpopular opinion and I will be downvoted like crazy for it, but it is so exhausting watching forum after forum make the exact same mistakes.
I’m of the opinion that downvotes are useful for self moderation of troll/off-topic comments or posts.
People also use it as a disagree button. That use doesn’t bother me personally but I see a lot of users get upset about having a negative score on a comment.
I think the best method is to keep the votes and either hide the score total or to not visibly show any score that’s less than 1
Let me ask you this: do you think even a slight majority of people use upvotes and downvotes to delineate between high quality/poor comments and posts? Because I think we all know that the majority of people just use them as agree/disagree buttons to try to build momentum during arguments.
That is (often) the noble intention by those who programmed into forums, but we all know that is not how it shakes out. Removing downvotes still allows us to push the best to the top considerably more easily than allowing up upvotes and downvotes does.
Self-moderation doesn’t work at scale unless you have a team of mods at the top aggressively policing the content, which I am actually in favor of but people also get mad about that and call it “power tripping.“
From what I can see, people will downvote shitposts even if they agree with it. But the downvote is used as the disagree button the majority of the time.
I will upvote any comment that seems to be made in good faith but I don’t have any illusions of that being how the majority of the network uses their votes. I think a higher percentage of people use their vote that way compared to Reddit but not much to make a difference.
That’s why I suggested hiding votes entirely. I think that would be unpopular because people like the dopamine hit of seeing your comment score go up, and so my compromise was to only hide 0 or negative scores.