TLDR: 3 people working together can gatekeep content on the “active” and “hot” feeds on smaller servers/communities.
After some playing around, I noticed posts disappear after reaching a threshold. A quick search later and I’m in the Lemmy docs reading about how this all works.
In plain English, any three people working together (or one person with three accounts) can stop posts from appearing on the default feed. Once a post reaches -2 it will only appear to people who browse “new.” Edit: Of course, it reappears after it climbs above -2, but it’s a race against the clock.
As a smaller server, we’re vulnerable to this. But we also have some extra mitigations - namely, @seahorse@midwest.social has to approve everyone who joins, and that might weed out bad actors.
So what can you do? Upvote content liberally, downvote sparingly.
Beehaw just got rid of downvotes entirely. I’m mildly convinced that’s the way to go, but I don’t hold strong opinions about it.
I think getting rid of downvotes can also make social media more negative, since people feel the need to reply to things they don’t like instead of down voting and moving on. Of course, I now can’t find a source to back that claim, so take it with a grain of salt.
Source: personal experience. Usenet was a wretched hive of trolls and flame wars. I will gladly sacrifice a few unpopular takes if that’s what it takes to do away with that nonsense. And I can tell you, from experience, works. For every unpopular take at a score of -2 or so, there are probably ten more at -9000 that we can totally do without.
Yes, it means that people expressing an unpopular opinion have to be very careful with tone and phrasing. But they ought to be doing that anyway. Nobody ought to think they can just waltz into a community, say something that completely contradicts their raison d’etre without any attempt at respectful framing, and expect to be welcomed with open arms.
What I dislike about this is that people who might have something interesting to say or discuss would be discouraged from posting altogether because of the effort involved in carefully crafting their “tone and phrasing” . Like we could still have a report function so a moderator can identify and take down obviously inflammatory -9000-type posts, right? I think people tend to back into their shells when they see their post (which could very possibly already be well thought-out) downvoted to shit for no other reason than the ‘monkey-see monkey-do’ downvote behavior. In the long run, it seems like it leads to stagnation. I’ve seen it happen on some of my favorite subreddits as they get more popular and sadly echo chambered. Just my opinion tho.
A comment is usually a lot more expressive than a downvote, adding valuable context to something other than just marking something as bad.
I feel like this could go either way, depending on moderation. A good response to something you don’t like can make an interesting and nuanced convo for third parties to read. A bad one can just lead to arguments.
I think in a large anonymous place like reddit you end up with arguments because there’s no built-in good will and not enough moderation. Lemmy communities might be able to mitigate some of that to encourage substantive disagreement.
I think right now that’s easy, but when the servers get too big (as some of them already are), moderation becomes increasingly difficult. I’m not convinced the instanced strategy will solve that problem in the long run, but so far so good I guess.
I can already tell the difference from some instances on my feed from just my smaller local.
Did they get rid of them, or did they hide it from the UI? Bots are the ultimate threat here, and they won’t use the UI.
Both. Downvotes aren’t taken into account for all beehaw posts and comments. Even if someone downvotes a beehaw post from another instance, it just won’t send.
The reason reddit worked so well for so long was primarily due to downvoting. There’s drawbacks and it could certainly be improvedb, ut having a system where those who contribute rise to the top, while those who don’t get filtered out makes it worth it.
Yeah, I was against it at first, because I don’t like options being taken from me, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.
The whole idea is based on the false equivalency that upvotes and downvotes are equal, when in fact people feel negatives much more strongly, and they also tend to have an oversized impact, like mentioned by OP.
People from instances where it‘s active or even kbin would still be able to downvote though, wouldn‘t they?
They can hit the button, but Beehaw won’t register the downvote. In fact, as best I can tell it changes them into upvotes. I use Jeroba, so when I’m looking at Beehaw I still see the downvote button, but when I try to use it, I get error messages.
I think it’s important to remember not to downvote someone because they have a differing opinion on a subject. I reserve my downvotes for when I am pretty sure the commenter is purposely and consciously spreading misinformation, or is being otherwise hateful.
I’ve been trying to upvote nearly everything to try and help with engagement. As others have mentioned, at this point I mainly downvote hateful content or misinformation.
I didn’t consider federation. I’m not sure what prevents me from creating an instance with three users that vote on other servers. I can’t run this test tonight. Hopefully someone gave that some thought.
I wonder if long term it would be feasible to push more of the “algorithm” onto the client side where it could be tweaked by the user (or more likely, by extensions or built-in options).