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?
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?
I barely posted on Reddit due to the thought of people hating what I said or posted 😊 I think here is more friendly since it’s not huge, I share what I like and if people don’t agree that’s cool! As long as it makes someone happy it’s worth it ✨
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.
This sparks a few different thoughts for me:
- I believe there are a few Lemmy instances that don’t have downvotes enabled. (Beehaw might be one of them, but don’t quote me on that.) If downvotes are a stress point for you, you could try joining one of those instances.
- I personally find both upvotes and downvotes to be useful as a way for me to quickly see the community’s reaction to a piece of content. If I’m scrolling through my feed and see a post with many downvotes and few upvotes, for example, I know that post is unlikely to interest me and will move on. Conversely, a highly upvoted post or one with a mix of both upvotes and downvotes is more likely to have a good conversation in the comments in my experience.
- If I make a post that receives a large number of downvotes - or if most of my posts tend to be downvoted - that’s a signal to me that I’m either not communicating my message well (confusing, passive aggressive, etc.) or that my message itself may not be welcome (hate speech, misinformation, etc.). In either case, I use that as a mental trigger for me to reflect on my posts rather than a reason to become unhappy with the community/platform as a whole.
I would also add that getting a post mass downvoted can be a sign that a community might not be a good fit for you.
Like, using reddit as an example, if you see someone spreading anti-lgbt hate and getting upvoted, but when you try to be like “Hey that’s not cool” or explain why they’re wrong you get massively downvoted, it can be a really good sign that maybe it’s not a great place.
I agree, and I would extend this thought to also include situations where it’s simply the wrong audience for your post. The content itself may not have anything wrong with it, but if you post a casual joke or comment without much depth in a community that’s built on deep conversations and well thought out replies, for example, you’re likely to be downvoted simply because the context wasn’t appropriate.
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.
