this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Asklemmy
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The universal problem is that there’s no shared definition of what a downvote represents. Is it “this is spam and should be removed”? “I don’t like this”? “This doesn’t belong here”? “I want to see less of this”? “I disagree”?
That’s not even a Reddit problem - it’s innate to any social media voting apparatus. Extend it to Facebook, even. Does the laugh reaction mean I’m laughing with you or at you?
Most comments and posts I’ve downvoted have been because I accidentally swiped too far right and my upvote changed to the downvote action and I didn’t even notice. So those downvotes don’t even mean anything!
I think the right answer is to stop worrying about votes. Even if they all mean the same thing they’re still meaningless. It’s better to change your post and comment sorting setting than to try to social engineer a way out of it.
It makes me wonder—would the dynamic change if there was only an upvote? So you could choose not to upvote, but the default action would be a neutral one, and if you liked/wanted to support/etc you could signal that.
I see tons of posts on here now that are downvoted to oblivion, because they are a legitimate article that says something a group doesn’t like. There won’t even be comments on the post. So like a Reuter article that discusses Palestinian casualties and no comments and like -20. This doesn’t seem like a super useful mechanism. Or at least, it’s just functioning today as a content preference “I don’t want to see this typed content” as opposed to “this is bad info, out of line with the community, etc.”
And despite ranking my list by either hot, or top day/six hours, I still see the downvoted posts regularly so the mechanic doesn’t even really do anything in terms of visibility. Or possibly there’s just too little content on a given community for it to get filtered out.
Not sure if you realize, but a lemmy instance can turn off downvotes for the entire instance. So we'll see if instances with downvotes disabled will do better.
No I didn’t know that, would be interesting to see more of them try it, just for curiositys sake.
Blajah doesn't have downvotes, so I can't downvote anyone and also can't see if anyone downvotes me. It has helped me break free of the Reddit hivemind and truly be myself.
+1 and -1 is not representative of the full of ways you can feel about a content. This is what happens when convenience for the system outweights human expression.
One thing I always liked about slashdot is the ability to tag votes with things like "funny" or "informative".
Ultimately moderators do not wish to cede any discussion shaping power to the unwashed masses.
+i
Thinking scores are "added" is part of the problem. 5000 people voting 1/10 is not equal to 500 upvotes.
-1/12
Giving someone 1+2+3+4+5+... votes seems excessive
Normal humans would understand that by amplitude, I probably meant a x/10 score. And then the algorithm would put that in context of every other score your account has given out to properly weight relative to your baseline. Then perform sentiment analysis on that specific post relative to all the other posts you've passed judgement on as context and isolate your relative score with respect to that specific sentiment.
Dude, it was just a maths joke and I wasn't even replying to you
-1/12 is the result of putting the sum of all the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) through the Riemann zeta function.
Get off your snarky high horse and treat people with kindness.
"Normal humans" good gracious.
OK sorry but it sounds like your saying "votes with values other than +1 and -1 ? Ridiculous ! What next ? downvotes of amplitude -1/12 ? Cats and dogs living together ?"
Which I assume the reason the designers of these platform only give us binary +1 and -1 expression and that's IF they don't take away the negative option entirely.
In my defence I plead reddit brain
Someone replied to you with the expected use is the downvote button, but contrary to your comment, I believe there is a de facto use of the button and it more or less corresponds to your "I don't like this" interpretation.
Now, they could have done something to address this issue, even completely eliminate the downvote button. I don't think they will do it any time soon because it would affect their profit.
Reddiquette says
If people followed that there would be no problem.
Unfortunately, the downvote button is mostly used as an "I disagree" / "I don't like your opinion" button.
Vice versa, I think Reddit upvoted a lot of the same old boring memes/jokes with the idea that maybe they would benefit if they get there first then next time.
Any post related to WWII, Top comment: "I did nazi that coming" 10,000 upvotes.
It's not that bad on Lemmy but I have noticed an up tick in non helpful very unoriginal jokes in threads with serious topics.