Answer questions if I can
This + I like to just give people answers. I find too often online somebody will ask a question and a lot of users will often try to be helpful but fail because they didn’t actually answer it.
Dumb example Q: “What’s the best Indian food in this city?” A: “There’s not a whole lot of Indian food but you might have luck with a burgeoning southeast Asian store”
Downvoted unkind discourse.
Upvote is for quality. No vote is for noise/disagreements. Downvote is for hate.
In theory, the lower a score, the less people see something. If I disagree with something that’s said (like a civil political opinion), then I won’t ‘like’ it. That takes away one potential point. But if someone is being unkind to others (mean, rude, trolling, etc) then I’ll downvote, which I see as removing two votes. The one they could have had from me, and one from someone else. Hopefully, that means they won’t get as much attention.
If it’s really bad, then I’ll also report
Upvote is for quality. No vote is for noise/disagreements. Downvote is for hate.
Yep. This, I think, “is the way”. The downvote for disagreement is not a good pattern and probably never was IMO. This is a good way of putting it. Another way someone else put it was essentially that the downvote is about the way in which something is said and the upvote is about whether you agree with it.
I honestly think separating them out in some way, so that we can still use the downvote as an effective tool of aggregating the quality of a post, but not in a way that is simply there to offset upvotes. Like, maybe two “scores”, number of upvotes and number of down votes with different filters for each? In a way, the “controversial” sort achieves something like this.
If i have something bad to say, i don’t.
- Report spam, scam, racism, hostility and clickbait
- Don’t engage trolls
- Don’t answer questions I’m not sure I have the correct answer for (or else point out that I’m just giving a “best guess” response)
- Try to be neutral or positive/affirming in replies. If I can’t, I’d rather not reply at all.
One thing I’ve started doing more than ever is blocking a ton of people. For example if I see someone making a post about twitter/elon/trump etc. I go to their profile and see if it’s just one time occurance or a patter and in the latter case I block them. If I see someone posting fuck this and fuck that and I hope this person dies etc. I block them without even viewing their post history.
There’s just so many users on a platform like this that I simply can’t pay attention to everything so by blocking the people commenting in bad faith is the least I can do. Some might say I’m creating an echo chamber and maybe so but this really isn’t about wether I agree with them or not but wether your comments bring any value to the conversations.
Over the long term this really does help keep your browsing experience enjoyable and your mind optimistic. Its way to common to get depressed from constantly seeing a torrent of bad news and negative posting.
Log off occasionally.
When I see people going through something that resonates with me I acknowledge that its hard and encourage them to keep trying and that they will make it to the otherside.
I’m building a peer-to-peer search engine
Curate my feeds so I mostly don’t see negatuve content (doomers, cynics, trolls, etc)
I do this, and employ frequent and rapid blocking on social media.
Instead of engaging, dick wads get blocked without comment.
Not feeding trolls.
I try to contribute to OSS, host my own services, seed (legal) torrents.
Radical optimism. Hell yeah! Basically anti-doomerism.
Force all social media to become non-profits.
Commenting to creators with specific things that I like about their work
I write a lot of comments that I feel add important information and context, I add links to save other people clicks, and I back down on the odd occasion I make a mistake.