Should Lemmy hide downvotes on your own posts by default? : lemmy

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I think disabling downvotes totally for the user's content by default would be a bad idea, because it is important for a user to know if what they are saying is unpopular.

Here's an approach I have taken for my app (for all posts and comments).

If downvotes are <= 5, downvotes show as 0.
If downvotes <= 5%, downvotes show as 0.

Remember, the reasoning for this is a mere hypothesis and not results obtained from an experiment.

The 5 percent rule aims to prevent fringe opinions from downvoting. This solves issues like, "why do I have 3 downvotes on a picture of my cute puppy?".

The 5 downvotes rule prevents downvoting bias. I have observed this happening on Reddit a lot. If a comment has 3 upvotes and 2 downvotes, people tend to downvote more (just because of the downvote counts and not the content itself). 2 downvotes in a 5 total votes sample size is too small to make any decision about the quality of content.

In my opinion, cases like these are where the downvotes serve more as a mental health destroyer rather than decentralised content moderation.

So to answer your question, I think having the current as default would be better, I.e., option "Show". However, if you're open to refine this even further, I would suggest the 5-5% idea.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago

I really like your solution!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 weeks ago

I think it’s a neat option to have, but personally I would make it opt-in rather than opt-out

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Yes. As a hexbear user where down votes are disabled I find the experience is much more enjoyable. Ideally down votes off would be the default for servers.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

This setting is only about how downvotes are displayed. They still exist and will be visible to other users, but not to the post creator. Disabling downvotes entirely as default is a separate discussion.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 weeks ago

Oh, for sure, I understand the distinction. Not seeing downvotes on your own posts is a good measure for reasons stated. I'm just saying also support a more aggressive stance, which is making downvotes off for new server instances, that's all.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

would be interesting to compare results

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Giving feedback from the other side of the comradeship wall, you hardly have downvotes on your comments anyhow. Even libs downvote you less than lemmy.ml and lemmygrad users

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, generally downvotes are pretty minimal across the board for sure.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

To elaborate on why I'd like to add this, from the original issue:

This is to enable a user being able to still show downvotes for other people's posts/comments, but hide downvotes to their own content.

Adding this exception for your user alone, is to promote a positive experience, and for users to not have their mental well-being negatively affected by downvotes to their own content.

To mitigate the mental health negatives of downvotes, many instances already have downvotes entirely removed (meaning not only are downvotes not shown, but its impossible to downvote anything).

Disabling downvotes globally (not just for your user), has a lot of negatives, such as:

Highly negative / low score comments seem to still be upvoted, and so encourage twitter-style rage-bait engagement (instead of just downvoting and moving on).
These combative threads then keep getting bumped to the top of the active sort, making hostile comments seem the norm.
You don't know which comments are actually unpopular or not, so like twitter, you have to "check the ratio", of replies to upvotes, to see if something is actually unpopular.

By making ShowForOthers default, we mitigate the downsides above, while also promoting positive mental health.

Just to clarify:

This is not removing the ability to downvote.
This is only about adding a setting to hide downvotes to your own content.
Users can always re-enable showing downvotes to their own content at any time in their settings.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago

I get why you want to add the option, but why are you proposing to change everyone’s settings by changing the default on something almost nobody changes?

If you insist this is a better default, at least have the courtesy to only change the default for new users, and ensure any DB migrations don’t change existing users’ settings.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I was not aware of the issue that downvotes negatively affect mental health.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago

56 comments in 5 years huh? maybe that's why lol

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I agree a little with the post tbh. So I generally hold pro AI views (where I admire the tech, believe it can make the future a lot better, while being against it being owned by oligarchs and for profit corpos).

When I started using Lemmy in 2023, everybody here was ABSOLUTELY AGAINST AI. Any post/comment mentioning AI in a slightly positive tone was downvoted to oblivion.

It was really depressing to see stuff like this, because the concept of downvoting on Lemmy and irl works very differently I suppose. No one irl just randomly shows up, shows you a thumbs down and leaves, right? Most conversations like these offline tend to be a lot more developed than a "thumbs down". In my experience, people offline are also a lot less meaner compared to online, as they are talking to a real human being rather than a profile picture.

I suppose this platform makes you a little thick skinned too. Sometimes you have to say, "I am right, even if this large group of people thinks I am wrong" and accept that sometimes the majority does not share your opinion, no matter how correct you think it is.

Now about disabling downvotes for your own post- I'm not sure if that's a good idea. Doing so prevents getting feedback from others. There are times where I have been a dick (mostly unintentionally). The amount of downvotes told me that what I said was wrong, and I needed to do better. If downvotes were disabled, then I wouldn't have access to this feedback.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

Agreed 100%.

As someone with some unpopular opinions that I think are backed by good data, I get down votes on a number of my comments. I find that changing the way I present ideas goes a long way toward changing perception. My natural way of presenting things is to give the TLDR at the start and justify it after, but a lot of people don't read past the TLDR. So when presenting something controversial, I'll change my tactic to reference something popular and demonstrate some tweaks I'd make to arrive at my idea.

For example, I'm a fan of a Negative Income Tax. Most people don't know what that is, and I used to start by saying it could replace welfare, which is unpopular (I have good reasons to want that end goal). Instead, I pitch it as UBI, but not going to wealthy people, and that's a lot more popular, amd then down the thread I can show how it could make welfare more accessible (i.e. replace it) by eliminating the complex application process.

If I didn't see downvotes, I wouldn't be able to make that correction.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 weeks ago

Fudging data to protect feelings of bad posters is how you get more bad posters.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago

Absolutely not. Sometimes you say something stupid, and people make you feel bad about it. That's healthy, that's good.

Sometimes you say something unpopular but correct... You need to recognize that it's unpopular, and learn to package the idea in a more palatable way or approach the topic less directly.

You should feel bad for rage baiting... Even if you're unambigiously right, you need to read the room and meet people where they are if you want to change minds. You don't need to change your views, but you need to adapt your framing or you're just rilling people up

Negative social responses are a good thing, it's required for a community. Social rejection hurts so bad because we so rarely feel it, and that's sickness. Most people can have few or no negative interactions, because when money is involved, people will smile and take your money

It's such a little thing, but it's a very gentle form of rejection... Avoiding it is not good, and so from a public health perspective we should default to showing it

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago

I have to say I really appreciate not seeing downvotes when I am on hexbear I think they got a good thing going on over there.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I could see it being a "softer" way of a community enforcing good behavior, especially for things that don't rise to the level of mod action.

I'm not on an instance with (visible?) downvotes though, and I do think that makes me more comfortable voicing opinions.

The hexbear mods/admins will probably have gotten community feedback and done a poll, so might be worth checking with them?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago

Hexbear does not have downvotes at all. The option isn’t hidden we just can’t downvote. The reason was transphobic harassment/downvote campaigns against our comrades by cowardly piss babies

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

As others have said, I think it should be opt in instead of opt out, but it is probably good to have as an option.

However, if the intent is to improve mental health - I would recommend making it an option to hide all votes in their entirety. One can hide their down votes, but that may just change some peoples perspective from "high number of down votes" to "low number of up votes" which to them may be functionally the same as far as mental health is concerned. Therefore I think that it would be good to have the option for each/both.

For me this would have another benefit as well - it would allow me to think about and respond to all content in a more objective and honest manner.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago

Transparency everywhere should be the ultimate goal. Save the social engineering for the capitalists.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago

No

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

I really like that

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

Sure. An off by default option would not hurt.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

You might as well. If it goes poorly then surely you can just get rid of it later, right?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

You want to be more welcoming to the people who freak out about downvotes? The people for whom the slightest criticism is a huge problem?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

This is a misunderstanding of why downvotes can bother people. I will try to put it in perspective with an analogy: Imagine if in RL, you were trying to talk casually with an acquaintance in public. Suddenly, you hear a "boo, [your name]." The boo explicitly uses your full name, not a shortened name, so for the sake of analogy, you know it was directed at you. However, you have no idea who said it or why. All you know is there was a "boo" targeted at you.

It is just negative noise, divorced from any grounding. Not unlike the psychology of a scary sound in a horror movie, it leaves your imagination to fill in the blanks as to why the noise happened. There can be many explanations for the noise, some of which will have nothing to do with you, personally. But the nature of it is still presented as if it is about you, targeted at you.

In my understanding, a criticism is usually considered to be something specific that you can engage with. For example, if you yelled at the acquaintance and they said "don't yell at me over nothing, we were just talking." That is a criticism and something you could take action based on. You could reflect on whether you were needlessly yelling and if you think you were, you could apologize and try to be more calm in the future. The noise, on the other hand, doesn't tell you anything clear. So, do you really need to know? What purpose is it serving?

The spirit of it I suspect comes in some part from the real life forum inspiration of internet forums, where the idea is you are discussing things publicly and openly in front of an audience, and so you might get cheers or jeers. But in practice, this is not really how the internet works. You don't know who is looking attentively at you and who is not even present. You don't know who is "cheering" or "jeering" at what point in what you said and because you don't have any chance of knowing who it is, you can only guess why. The amount of information a downvote gives is virtually nothing, despite what anyone wants to tell themself about adapting their posts because of it; and you can see this reflected in how people react sometimes when they get heavily downvoted. They can get defensive, but in a sort of flailing way, like they're trying to work out what the hell is going on. Because they haven't actually been told what the problem is supposed to be. All they have is noise, their imagination, and whatever coping mechanisms they have for dealing with the noise. In this sense, downvotes can be more like a cowardly (in that it is usually anonymous) taunt than actual information. This is not to claim the intent is always or even often a taunt - remember, the point here is you know basically nothing from it - but that the nature of its low information is easily experienced as more akin to a taunt, since there is nothing substantive you can do with it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago

Also, for further RL comparison, even the best standup comics sometimes lose patience with, and go off on, hecklers. So it's not like this is something exclusive to the virtual world. People don't really like being booed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

You're conflating downvotes with criticism. Also if there's no downvotes you're more inclined to comment (and criticize) because you can't lazily downvote

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I think downvotes are criticism/judgment - even if it's more of a silent type (in lieu of actually replying, as you pointed out).

Even from the standpoint of "You should only use downvotes to indicate that a comment/post is off topic for the community" that Reddit originally tried to (naively IMO, you can't enforce it not being a "I disagree" button, but I digress) have is still what I'd consider to be criticism. Mainly because regardless of the vote being cast as that vs a general "I disagree", it's still an indication of disapproval of the commenter.

Criticism of course comes in a lot of forms, and can vary on the "level" of it - I wouldn't say that downvotes are a high level of criticism, but one nonetheless.

That's just my view of it, at least, I can't see how they wouldn't be a form of criticism - you shouldn't use them as a "This breaks the rules" indicator because that should be a report instead of a vote IMO, otherwise it's far less likely to be acted upon/handled.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I've seen countless good comments downvoted on reddit and .world with no engagement whatsoever just because it didn't fit passing lurkers worldview, but is otherwise factually correct. Forcing you to comment instead of downvote, let's lurkers vote based on the content of the comment (obv this lays a burden on moderation, but is worth the tradeoff as it can foster really good discussions and higher understandong of the topic at hand)

Mainly because regardless of the vote being cast as that vs a general “I disagree”, it’s still an indication of disapproval of the commenter.

Here's the disagreement: one is a disagreement that allows you to vent without challenging yourself, the other is a disagreement where you know what the disagreement is about

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

I pretty much agree, personally I rarely ever downvote a comment/post - to the point where I cannot even recall when my last downvote was, unless I accidentally have done so via a mobile gesture (I try to be cautious about this). If I were at my PC, I'd check my instance's database, but alas.

[The rest here on is more of a "6 o'clock in the morning stream of thoughts from my perspective" thing. My friends know me as being very verbose - last paragraph is where I try to steer back on track]

If I do upvote something, generally it'll be something that I feel is driving forward a discussion in good faith (even if I don't necessarily agree with the content itself) and is respectful of all parties involved.

Though a lack of an upvote from me doesn't indicate disagreement either.

An actual flat-out disagreement from me tends to be more on the rare side of things. Because so many comments are an opinion / viewpoint rather than solid fact. It's one thing to say "No, 2+2 does not equal 5" since that is rooted in fact.

Whereas I have to feel pretty strongly about something to directly challenge an opinion, especially since it super easy to misjudge tone on the Internet/across text and I'm not here to unintentionally start a war over something that doesn't have a right or wrong answer (within reason - but even that itself is something that isn't binary). I try to be cautious about asserting something is wrong unless I'm very sure of it (even if I do often fail at that, given the previous issue of tone being hard to judge across text), and of course in most cases you can't really say another person's opinion is unequivocally wrong.

I don't mind giving a different viewpoint, but again I try to be cautious about it because I don't want to come across as "My viewpoint is ultimately right and yours is wrong" and that is unfortunately how a lot of discussions end up being seen (or I just simply make the human error of just having a far too strong opinion of my own).

I do my best to keep my tone as neutral as I can, though as they say "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." My original comment is a good example of this, because I do agree that downvotes are far too often used in the manner that you stated. I also agree that they're typically a poor way of criticizing someone if they don't include a corresponding reply (if I say something that is factually wrong - or even just poor taste, I usually want to know about it so I don't keep doing so!), my only divergence from the matter was that they are a criticism - just a really bad way of doing so.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

"Criticism" has multiple meanings, and I believe the user you're replying to is using one of the definitions which means more than just simple disagreement - obviously a downvote is expressing a negative judgement.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I see two issues here:

more "dunking"
awful takes getting more attention

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

The other side is:

it challenges you to formulate your disagreement
if the community holds awful takes they never get exposed to a differing opinion (although moderation can do that too)
there's people out there that believe: more upvotes = more true and Formulate their opinions based on that
"dunking" and "ratio" only work if the content of the comment/criticism is valid. Otherwise its just showing your ass

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago

I personally prefer way the things they are now (show downvotes). I'm not quite sure what the reasoning would be to hide downvotes on a user's own posts?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not sure there's a purpose to it the way things are clustered here. Particular for anything of a political/news nature the very same post on one instance and com may get a completely different reaction on another. There are a fair number of people that I think of as 'fire and forget posters' in that they simply fire off posts but rarely interact with them after. Making this the default would likely encourage more of the same behavior, possibly leading to more spam.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

How would it encourage the behavior? If they fire and forget, they aren't looking at downvotes anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

More a speculative thought, but if those who do pay attention to negative feedback no longer see any, they may not take that into consideration when they put things up.

Say someone put up a post, saw no backlash on the front end, but then comes to look at the responses and sees a cesspit of hate. That's hardly going to soften any mental harms it might otherwise impose.

Another thought here is messing about with such things, particularly in making them a default behavior, could disrupt comms where there is a strong voting aspect to it. The 'am I the asshole' type place that, despite the usual attempt to have them adjudicated by some nuanced comment system, inevitably end up using votes as a agree/disagree dynamic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Regarding mental health . avoidance is generally not considered a good thing. one of the criticism of why technology is bad for cognition is that it creates a very pleasant experience but solving problems and achieving meaningful outcomes in the real world requires delaying gratification and accepting negative experiences

Emotional regulation and resilience are skills. if you don't get negative experiences you don't get to practice those skills. this is why helicopter parenting where well meaning parents do too much for their kids end up creating psychological problems like lowered self esteem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Based on the feedback here, I've changed the PR to have Show be the default, and its been merged.

ShowForOthers is still an option, just not the default.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

I'd prefer even more parameters. Big corpo wants to dumb it down to only likes or other manipulative/hidden metric displays

made a post about this too

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

IMO framing this as a way to protect the feelings of the poster sets us up to debate how people should react to downvotes. That was my initial reaction, anyway. It's not a productive discussion, too much judgement.

But there are heaps of other good reasons why you might want to just show a single number (upvotes minus downvotes), for everyone, not just when viewing one's own content.

cleaner, less cluttered UI
simpler code?
people don't need to know how many downvotes a comment got (their own comments OR other people's), all that really matters is the aggregate score

Reddit and PieFed both just show one number - the score - and it works fine. On PieFed you can hover your mouse over the score to get a tooltip that breaks it down into up and down but afaik no one cares.

If other people can see that I got downvoted a lot but I can't then every little snarky comment about how many downvotes I'm getting is going to trigger extreme FOMO and the urge to turn the downvote hiding feature off. An unknown amount of downvotes is worse than knowing how many downvotes there are.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

Reddit hiding vote totals was the first sign it’s heading to shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

I'd rather it be transparent, or non-existent. Hexbear is nice, it has no downvotes, but some users like the ability to downvote for other instances. I think it could be on an instance to decide to implement it, but not for the "flagship" instance. Though, I'd prefer it be put to a vote. I think it has use cases for sure.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Why? Most posts that I've seen that have been downvoteed are because the comment in question is bad in some way. People who don't realise that need a lesson in been appropriate.

What I would be in favor of, is downvotes been hidden to everyone to stop bandwagoning.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

Hexbear disables downvotes, and some other instances do that too. Check some of them out!