Really loving the new experiences here on Lemmy.one. But I’m seeing many subs with off-topic posts. Community downvotes will help overworked mods find and remove such posts. I understand no one likes to be downvoted but it’s a necessary tool for our community and only helps users understand and refine what and where they are to be posting their content.

    •  yuun   ( @yuun@lemmy.one ) 
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, the downvotes are really unnecessary. Just a lazy way to be negative.

      Speak up, report, or move on with your life. Whatever is appropriate to the situation.

  • I don’t miss it. For a lot of people down vote is just a I disagree with your take button instead taking the time to leave a comment instead of refuting it.

    If a comment is really problematic better to just report.

  • I disagree. Initially, I thought lacking downvotes was an issue as well, but I’ve changed my thinking.

    If it’s a post or comment I disagree with, I try to reconcile WHY I disagree, and then use that to participate in the discussion, as opposed to just dropping a downvote and moving on.

    If it’s a post or comment that needs active intervention by a moderator, reporting it is the best solution anyway, not simply downvoting it.

    • Vote counts are a great way to measure public sentiment at a glance. It’s also mostly (but not always) correlated with the quality and/or accuracy of the post. If people only judge a post based on that number, it’s a problem with the people and not the voting mechanism.

      I recently had the experience where I was looking for a squid farm design in Minecraft. A Youtube video came up that explicitly said it worked with my version. As you probably know, Youtube recently decided to hide all downvotes. But the video had a few thousand views and ~50 upvotes, so I spent 3 hours collecting the resources and building the farm in my world. And then it didn’t work at all. There wasn’t even an adjustment I could make to fix it. If I could have seen the probably 100+ downvotes, I would have known to look into it more and not waste my time and effort on that stupid design.

      • I agree with this sentiment, however wouldn’t an actual text post saying it doesn’t work with your version have been more beneficial than downvotes? I think that is a good example of why downvotes are, to me, the “lazy” option. Not having them means more direct engagement is required.

      •  falcon   ( @falcon@lemmy.one ) 
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        1 year ago

        I recently had the experience where I was looking for a squid farm design in Minecraft. A Youtube video

        you would never know if the downvotes are because of video quality, someone not liking the narrator’s voice (or the content creator itself). As someone else mentioned, an actual comment saying it doesn’t work on a version is way clearer

        it’s also mostly (but not always) correlated with the quality and/or accuracy of the post

        it hasn’t been my experience in quite a few communities. People will downvote things they don’t wanna hear, even if it’s the truth, or just an opinion.

        • You’re right that people may downvote for a variety of (possibly bad) reasons, which is why that metric shouldn’t be the only one you use. In addition to just being interesting and informative, I see overall negative sentiment as an indication that the content deserves more scrutiny. Not to discount it, but maybe verify claims that I would have otherwise taken at face value.

          Also, the process of manually reading and categorizing comments as positive or negative and then adding them up is much more labour intensive than just looking at a number. I can appreciate that there are some benefits to that approach, but I don’t think it’s worth it considering that there’s a native feature specifically for that purpose.

          •  falcon   ( @falcon@lemmy.one ) 
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            11 year ago

            I guess people in general prefer this way - which is probably why 99% of Lemmy instances have downvotes enabled. You can choose any one of them :)

            For me, it makes me more stressed about posting stuff, specially since you can be downvote bombed just for saying you didn’t like X book, or whatever.

            It also makes me more stressed when reading comments, for some reason. Either when I see an innocent random comment with negative points - I feel bad for the commenter - or when I end up using it as a disagree button and get more stressed. IDK why.

            So for me, not having it is way better. Otherwise I maybe wouldn’t even have created a Lemmy account, and used the “opportunity” (Reddit down in flames) to be less online - which I guess would also be a great outcome.

            TLDR: some people prefer no downvotes, but most instances allow them. Your user is already on lemmy.ml, so why do you care?

  • In my experience, downvotes do little but encourage dog-piling and echo chambers. I have a few accounts on instances that disabled downvotes, and few that enabled them. The difference is very clear. The instances that disabled them have noticeably more rich and diverse discussion, with users being less afraid to disagree with each other and have proper debates.

    The instances that have them enabled vary a bit, but I noticed a pattern that certainly reminds me of The Hard R: Most comments on a popular and highly upvoted post are basically people agreeing with the post over and over again with different words, and then there a few comments that actually disagree, but you’ll have a hard time seeing them because they were downvoted into oblivion. This isn’t always the case, certainly not as much as the other place (at least not yet) but I have already noticed it happen.

  •  bankimu   ( @bankimu@lemmy.one ) 
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    171 year ago

    Oh crap. Lemmy.one doesn’t have downvotes - this is bad.

    Without downvotes it is not easy to know which comments are controversial. I don’t want to join another tiktok or instagram, I want to join something informative and thus a proxy of the value of the information (while not perfect) is critical.

    I thought it was community specific, but looks like I can’t downvote even on other instances.

    I need to look for an alternative now.

  • I’m conflicted when it comes to down votes. In the reddit universe I’d watch within a small community where things were corgial and welcoming that for inexplicable reasons posts and replies would get down voted. This was a fountain pen group.

    It might take hours or days for the up votes to take the comment or post into positive territory. The best the group could figure out was it was bots. I suspect some curmudgeon who didn’t like when you’d mention Kaweco or what have you because they had a beef with them.

    I believe an option just to report is the best option.

  • I dunno. I realize the intent behind downvotes, but on reddit this led to dog piling. And regardless of whether you were “right” or not, if the first 1 or 2 down votes, by pure chance, didn’t like you, your post/comment was basically nuked to the phantom realm.

    If it’s that bad, just report it. If its not worth reporting, its not worth the dog piling either

    •  hemmes   ( @hemmes@lemmy.one ) OP
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      61 year ago

      I have to disagree, as I’ve seen posts get an initial few downvotes well into negative playing field and come back after the rest of the community has had a read. We’ve all seen the back up comments to a post like that “not sure why you’re getting downvoted…”

  • unfortunately downvote are not only used on off-topic posts. it could also be about disagreement, not about the quality of the post.

    so it’s not always a good indicator of the value of the post and can be use in a way to shut off divergent opinions, encourage a single point of view. not always a good tool.

  • Yeah I don’t think it really makes sense to disable downvotes for everyone on the instance. Why should I be unable to downvote something on an external community when everyone else viewing that community has the ability to downvote?

    • As far as your instance is concerned, no one can downvote, even outside of your instance, because downvotes are rejected by your instance. This means that downvotes from other instances aren’t visible to any users of your instance or any other instance that has downvotes disabled, and they don’t affect the sorting of posts.

    • I agree with this, I have no problem with Lemmy.one disabling downvotes for its communities, but it’s frustrating not to be able to have the option in external communities which allow downvoting.

    •  falcon   ( @falcon@lemmy.one ) 
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      11 year ago

      because I don’t want anybody downvoting me on any instance, and I don’t want to see downvotes in discussions or have discussions being weighted by downvotes.