this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (18 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I think a better option is these communities opting for the post not to get sent to all.

Is this even an option? If it is, it must be fairly hidden. I've certainly never been prompted to not send a post to /all when creating a post.

I also don't think this is a good solution, as it would further stifle the growth of small communities.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Now that is just lazy, doesn’t even fix the problem when you could just filter it and never see that sub again.

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I confirm it, we have lot issue with it.

On the software side, I think the language setting shouldn't hidden in setting. I would move it in the filter bar along side "local, all, moderator view..."

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Yeah, maybe a big ignore community button could do.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

I'm gunna down vote this

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Very good point.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Isn't that what the scaled sorting in v0.19 is supposed to fix?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

It is supposed to, but it isn't working. Niche communities are still outnumbered by posts from more active ones and people in the larger instances see content from smaller communities and use the voting system like they are training some algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

A little before I started using Reddit, my mate who told me about it said upvoting was used as a means of promoting posts or replies that people may be interested in, not because you like or dislike a post or reply.

I think Facebook has changed that and I will admit I will thumbs up a post/reply because I like it, but I will also upvote posts I think other users may be interested in.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

A little before I started using Reddit, my mate who told me about it said upvoting was used as a means of promoting posts or replies that people may be interested in, not because you like or dislike a post or reply.

Yeah in theory it was about promoting content that you felt was a "good link to share" and was "good content". Not about your personal feelings on it. Never quite worked that way of course, but eh.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

I downvote and upvote whatever I wanna 🤷. Deal with it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (7 children)

I feel its a feature not a bug. It theoretically should filter the overall content to a more "average" viewpoint be the one that bubbles to the top this should mean that the more extreme views will be downvoted more and help solve the massive political divide that the existing echochambers have helped create.

Downvotes will always be used as a "i dont like this" and "i disagree with this" thats just what people gonna do when they have an emotional responce to somethibg they see. I recon its fine tho cos all people are going to dislike bad content but only specific groups will dislike other content. Might lead to some groups getting targetted but only the extremists like the nazis, communists, and vegans will be targeted and thats fine they are extremists.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

With your great suggestion, i got an idea for lemmy software : why not activate vote only to subscribed community ? You haven't subscribed, you can't vote. But you can hide /filter the community.

The frontpage also need a rework because when you cross-post it flood thus people tend to downvote those posts. And lot other things.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

What if upvoting and downvoting IS an active method of participating in those communities?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

People will never use downvotes the intended way. They haven't done so on Reddit either.

I see no productive use for downvotes, so I've disabled them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Hi there, you seem to be getting a lot of pushpack on this, so I thought I'd just chime in that I agree with what you've written, and have noticed the same problems in the smaller niche communities that I frequent. I worry that this behaviour could be a limiting factor in the growth of niche communities, which Lemmy desperately needs more of.

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.

Do you think moderators could or should consider banning users whose only interaction with the community is downvoting posts? It would seem that the user isn't interested in these posts anyway, and the result would be very similar to if the user had simply blocked the community to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

Note that the votes are currently only public to admins, there was an issue to extend that to mods that are modding the specific community the upvote is in but not sure the status on that

edit: seems to have been merged in a day after 0.19.3 released so it would probably be in the next version

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

it's pretty clear reading this thread that different folk have different ideas about what or how downvotes should be used. what is intented behavior for one is wrong for another. i doubt that even clearly defined rules would change that as they woud be essentually the same thing - someone's opinion on how it should work. plus different instances have different rules.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

From the title alone i agree completely with you i just don't have the patience to read the body.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

bruh you literally are advocating for echo chambers

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