Does the reddit style format inherently make for a toxic environment? Or is it a culture of toxicity from the influx of reditors? For lack of a beter example, on stackoverflow, when someone down votes you, it comes with a comment saying how to improve. On mastodon, people can’t downvote you. These platforms are a joy to use, lemmy is depressing if you post. Its depressing because every post or comment, no mater the quality comes with downvotes, and usually no criticism to accompany it, you are left not knowing if youve made a mistake, or if its just trolls, bots, or idiots. At the end you feel insulted not improved. What do you think?
People on Lemmy try to rationalize that they’ll use the downvote as intended (off topic content) but our ape brains eventually just make downvote = I don’t like said thing.
I wish we could do away with upvotes and downvotes altogether.
I think having some form of “I agree with this” or similar helps to make you feel engaged with the content (for better or worse).
I think perhaps the actual person responsible for the post or comment shouldn’t be able to see the results, though, otherwise it just becomes another ego building thing, and you see people strategising explicitly to build karma like on reddit. instead, the author should see a rating, like “slight approval” “mixed feelings” “strong dissent”, etc.
NO! YOU SUCK!
More seriously: downvotes can be disabled on Lemmy instances on an instance-by-instance basis. I have them disabled on mine, for example, because I too find them difficult to deal with. If you don’t like downvotes, that could be an easy solution for you.
I think that the current downvote system is far from ideal, and ideally there should have some piece of “forced” feedback when you downvote someone, but keep in mind that a downvote is just “this should be less visible”. For example, people often downvote OK answers because an even better answer popped up, and they want the later to rise to the top. So a lot of times there’s no actual hostility in the downvotes.
And for other Reddit behaviours that people often call toxic (I call them SNOO - stupid, noisy, obnoxious, obtuse), I think that it’s cultural. The Reddit admins bred that behaviour into the users; and users are likely to carry it with them elsewhere, including Lemmy. I think that most of those individuals will get better over time here, and the ones who don’t will end leaving.
I feel like the issue with forced feedback when you downvote is you’ll get a lot of comments where its just 1-2 words, doesn’t say much, just a “No” or “Bad”. And if you require a min characters like the bneg forums you’ll just get “No. 10chars”
Requiring comments will cause people to half ass it at best, I think. Which, sure then people can downvote them, but are people going to write a well thought out comment for every “No”?
Is having 40 “I disagree” comments really better for discussion than just 40 downvotes?
By “forced feedback” I was thinking more like having multiple types of downvote (“off-topic”, “rude”, “incorrect”, “I disagree”, “unfunny”…), so users need to pick one when downvoting something. It gives people a better clue on why a certain piece of content is being downvoted than just letting them assume, and it’s way less noise than 40 “I disagree” comments.
I’m not trying to be negative here with you - but anyone complaining about downvoted will often get another downvote from me. Say what you want to say, stand by your convictions, and don’t worry about what the internet thinks about that.
I don’t see the poster explicitly complaining about getting downvoted. How I read it is that they think that downvoting encourages people to be negative and weaponise their downvote. And, given what you’ve said, they’re spot on and you inadvertently proved their point.
I saw the post more as someone who is too worried about what the group will think of their comment to allow for dissent.
That being said, what I meant about people who complain about downvotes was the old Reddit trope of “edit: really? Downvote me for asking a question?” On a comment less than an hour old.
Just post what you want to post and ignore the votes. A few downvotes is to be expected. Try not to read into them so much.
Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?
