- Exclude explicit software bugginess or missing features
- Include experiences or knock-on effects that may have arisen from (1)
- Comparisons to Reddit are ok. We know the reasons for the differences, but this is just about expressing yourself
How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?
You read it and when it’s good you respond with a contribution or expansion on the ideas presented.
Maybe you quote the post but write nothing, or put an emoji nodding and smiling and pointing at the quoted text.
When something’s spam you either ignore it or tell that person to fuck off. Maybe you report their posts, then a mod drops in and confirms that they should fuck off and either gently corrects them or bans them with whatever level of granularity is appropriate.
Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e…, high effort posts)?
If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let’s one person’s time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.
No, that assumption is wrong. That phenomenon didn’t become common and problematic until systems to remove the human element were put in place. Like voting.
Think of the forum you go to for your niche hobby. No, not the subreddit or lemmy !, the forum with all those old guys (they are guys for my hobby) with signatures that have pictures of their pets and Miata and a proud listing of the equipment they use to do their thing. Do those places have problems with spam, advertising, trolling or low effort posts?
Of course not! Spam gets removed, advertising is relegated to the buy/sell/trade subforum, trolling is accepted or moderated out based on the community’s preference and ditto for posting effort.
Votes are very important if you’re trying to create a system that encourages a parasocial relationship between users. If you don’t want to encourage a parasocial interaction then there’s not much reason for votes.
