Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
A government would only need to get its hands on one instance to havest downvote based dissent data.
Tbh I’d rather we had an up-only based vote system though. Downvotes had a lot to do with the reddit culture that I don’t want taking over Lemmy.
Downvotes are part of the reddit culture I miss and what I came to lemmy for. Toxic positivity on reddit, youtube, etc is so annoying. Some content sucks and we should be able to downvote it into oblivion.
Mhm yeah you are right, but was that how it was used, really? It wasn’t a “This is bad content”-metric. It was a “I don’t agree and I think you suck”-metric. At least quite often
How it was used is how I want it to be used. I want to know the consensus of the community of which I participate. I DO NOT agree that downvote should only be used for comments that “do not contribute”. That’s reddit and I do not want lemmy to be reddit.
Downvote = I think this content is bad
If I’m in an instance for the latest Marvel movie, and the community overwhelmingly hates it, I want to know that by seeing how many downvotes it received.
Cool! Yeah, what you’re saying makes sense. I might be changing my mind a little bit, we’ll see how it all turns out. Thanks for the response! :)
upvote-only does make the comment section look dead
That’s how it’s always going to work especially politically, and that’s not necessarily a negative in a decentralized model like Lemmy.
Yeah I… wait what?? Toxic positivity…in youtube comments?!
Have I been transported to a parrellel universe where youtube comments aren’t a high 90’s % cesspit of the most vile personalities known to humankind? Does this mean I’m on the good timeline now? Is climate change still poised to make the world super uncomfortable and maybe deadly?
Up and down is interesting, ain’t it. I use UP to mean good point, great idea, I agree, etc. But I use DOWN differently: not for I disagree, don’t like, but “YOU ARE SHITTING UP OUR CULTURE HERE”, bigots and totally wrong facts that the poster insists on which is different than ‘the answer is X’ but its wrong, it’s Y, and you reply Y is the answer, we disagree, that’s fine, even if I’m annoyed etc. Downvoting to me is, you are not being a good citizen here, fuck you. A meta-comment on the posting.
Sometimes I fail, lol.
Disapproval has its place in deterring bad behavior. It’s not toxic to disagree with a person. If the only two choices are approval and indifference it promotes toxic behavior as there is nothing to suppress the toxic behavior.
Edit: I understand what you are getting at though and one thing I didn’t like is people using the downvote button as a disagree button. I only ever use it to downvote off-topic, spam, or toxic posts/comments; but I’ve been on Reddit and gotten massively downvoted because I’ve expressed an opinion counter to general consensus (hive mind)
Yeah we’re kinda on the same page there, its just intent and what it evolves into later down the road tend to drift apart over time. A down buttom isn’t inherantly bad, but it seems inevitably mossed used by a large portion of users. And right now lemmy is taking in a mass influx of refugees from a place that -already- had large numbers of users doing so.
I didn’t try lemmy till like a week before all reddits recent drama. I wish I had found this ages ago. I actually found this via github instead of reddit! But once thay drama happened I knew a lot of folks would be looking for a replacement.
Hopefully I’m not comimg off as concern trolling. Things have worked as is for lemmy for some time. Best case scenario is the former reddit users get used to lemmy’s kinder culture and no systems adapt from it.
I disagree on it meaning there is nothing to stop toxic behavior though. If somethings truly toxic it has -always- taken action beyond a simple downvote to excise.
I turned off downvotes and no karma in lemmy is nice. It’s overall a friendlier experience IMO.
Another example of YSK. The lack of a karma system is a fallacy. It’s only because the devs haven’t surfaced the data, as karma, in the user interface.
Going by Reddit standards, your post karma is 54 and your comment karma is 527.
The data is all there and there are alternative clients who do provide it in that manner.
Well you’re no fun 😝 . I get it though, I saw a userscript the other day that could add it to your interface.
At least lemmy shows votes as seperate upvotes and downvotes, do you can see that someone agrees. (But please dont vote based on if you agree, only downvote misinformation, attempts to incite flamewars, spam. If its high quality an on topic don’t downvote)
I agree, I think separate tallies for up and down might be a really great thing.
On that other place, while lots of downvoting is “obvious”, a lot is really odd, like someone posting a technically correct, documentable, verified answer, and it gets downvoted? Also black-supportive or LGBTQI+ stuff gets downvoted at times. 9000 ups and 9000 downs at the same time would be umm interesting.
Yeah, that in itself is a major improvememt over every post and every i dividual having a “score”.
Yeah I agree - I don’t really see the need for downvotes to be honest