When I first found out it was an interesting concept that I was pretty neutral on but the more I engage/lurk with the community the more I enjoy it.
I generally don’t post/comment much on Reddit because I tend to be extremely sincere and that’s not always well received. Usually I don’t get much hate, but what I do get is a lot of non-interaction mixed with downvotes. And it’s just really discouraging when I’m just trying to share my thoughts.
But having no downvotes here is so nice because I’m not afraid that I’m going to get silenced into oblivion. Either people will actually engage with me (and maybe disagree, but in a meaningful way), or they’ll move on and not randomly share their disdain via downvoting.
It’s such a small change but makes a big difference. I bet a lot of people feel the same as me - it’s more comfortable to engage here.
You must log in or # to comment.
I think it also fundamentally changes the conversation. Valid but “unpopular” comments can’t get buried in downvotes. The voting system on Reddit was based on a sane logic that totally neglected to consider how people actually behave… the idea of up and down votes to crowd-source relevance and quality of content makes sense, but all anyone did was use it as an agree / disagree button which broke the idea entirely.
How does it work if a user on another instance (that has downvotes enabled) downvotes comments on BeeHaw.org communities? Are they ignored? Can other instances see them?
At least on Jerboa it displays a notification saying that downvotes are disabled.
Well you’re a beehaw user. I’m not, and I can actually downvote things here. I’m just not sure if it actually effects anything.
I mean, does it seem to change the vote numbers when you do it? Like, try downvoting my reply and we’ll see if it results in us both seeing a 0. :P
Downvoted as well. Looks like no since other people have also downvoted you and you’re still at 1
I’ll have to test- maybe other users on my instance can see my downvotes, but they won’t federate because BeeHaw rejects them. And therefore no other instance can see them.
Edit: Okay so I’ve confirmed it.
When downvoting content on an instance that doesn’t allow downvotes, you can see only the downvotes that come from other users on your instance. I can see two downvotes now, which happened just after I used a second account to downvote.
I am pleased for my role in performing science today. :D
Science is not that hard as people think :P Thank you my friend.
Kinda get the reasoning behind it, however some commonality here would be good over time as Lemmy is developed
Downvoted from my instance and it’s a zero. No record of the other downvotes being tested here though. Maybe it’s humouring me with a fake downvote but not really transferring across to your post?
deleted by creator
That’s what seems to be the case. So, it’s looking like it’s basically a placebo button for y’all. :P
Just chiming in to remark how hilarious and wholesome these downvote comments are! =D
I’m still tickled hours later at how eager folks were to figure that out. :D
Downvoted for testing purposes, showing score Of 0 for this comment for me currently
I’m seeing a 1 on my end, so either things are lagging out for different users and I’m about to see a massive chunk hit…
Or it’s all localized. :P
Downvoted… :)
I’m still seeing a 1 here. So, I think the downvote is literally just a placebo for you. :P
Hehe I think that’s awesome. :)
Okay so I’ve confirmed it.
When downvoting content on an instance that doesn’t allow downvotes, you can see only the downvotes that come from other users on your instance.
Well you’re a beehaw user. I’m not, and I can actually downvote things here. I’m just not sure if it actually effects anything.
it does not, and if it looks like it does then that’s all on your end (presumably because whatever you’re using can’t quite parse the lack of downvotes and gets a bit confused) but doesn’t register on ours
As I was able to confirm, looks like anyone else on the same instance can see my downvotes. But not anyone on any other instance, even if they have downvotes too.
I gave you a downvote, not to be mean but to test it. Can others see it?
I am on Beehaw and see a downvote count of zero when I long press on the vote count. I have been curious about how it works when people from other instances interact with Beehaw communities and others that don’t allow downvotes. I didn’t know if Beehaw still receives that external vote data through federation, tallies it, and hides it or if it was dropped entirely. I guess there’s also the possibility that votes are only registered to the local instance where a comment is viewed, but I hadn’t considered that.
So that is why a lot of down votes are used in this thread! It all makes sense now. I thought it was very weird because this is my first time seeing down votes on lemmy and there were so many everywhere. I got worried for nothing thankfully :D
I’m on lemmy.sdf.org and I currently see 18 upvotes, 0 downvotes on bdonvr’s comment.
Yes, I can see the downvotes on comments and posts. I’m registered to the lemmy.world instance
Edit: But not sure if I’m seeing downvotes from all instances or just mine?
Absolutely. Your only choices for not getting downvotes was to say something everyone will agree with, or cloak yourself in 1000 layers of sarcasm and jokes so no one can shut you down anyways.
And as I mentioned I am extremely sincere and don’t care for defensive irony. Not for me.
Always just stuck to the smaller, interest/specific topic focused subreddits as a result.
I’ve seen a lot of comments that were against the grain but still upvoted on reddit. I’m not saying they never downvote comments they don’t like but if you are getting downvoted consistently and without interactions it might be more than just being sincere.
I’m not saying that I got downvotes consistently. Just that it has happened for really innocuous reasons, and in general the threat of downvotes keeps me from engaging much at all.
I can understand how you might think that not knowing who I am, but I assure you I really do try to be genuinely nice and don’t court controversy (I haven’t the energy for it). It’s fine if you don’t believe that though, I’m just a random person on the internet.
That’s my experience too. Downvotes are not supposed to be for disagreeing but they are used like that since people can’t handle someone disagreeing. :)
And a tool that can be used by bots or people with multiple fake accounts to burry comments.
Yup 100%.
I’ve already seen (and reported) some anti-trans bigotry on here, but it had more upvotes than the posts calling it out for what it was because the bigotry was of the “polite and pretending to be well-researched” variety
without downvotes as a tool against crap like that, what have we got? is it against our instance’s “be nice” policy to tell nazi punks to fuck off?
without downvotes as a tool against crap like that, what have we got? is it against our instance’s “be nice” policy to tell nazi punks to fuck off?
nope! we’re not going to ban for telling a TERF or nazi to eat shit or whatever. we as admins do try to be nice where possible, but you as a user really aren’t obligated to be because that’s dumb lol. you can also report it to us and in general we dispatch users who are like that as possible (although sidenote: if it’s a post off-instance and you report it, unless the user is really, really bad we probably won’t do anything immediately because we just can’t keep an eye on every possible bad actor.)
Thanks for clarifying!
I’ve been super impressed by moderation so far. This morning I saw a post justifying sexism because of Bible verses and by the time I’d mustered a reply it was gone, to my delight.
That’s nice to see. When I first saw the policy of having no downvotes, I wondered if that would leave no recourse against trolls and scumbags, but I guess strong moderation is the key.
I probably wouldn’t want the entire internet to be so strongly moderated, but I’m really glad there are some popular places that are. Thanks for doing that.
I’ve seen a lot of toxic crap upvoted on reddit. Personally i prefer moderation over puplic vote any day.
Both options are non-ideal. Some mods are on a power trip and public opinion can vary wildly depending on the thread/community
I will say, public vote is sometimes nice because you can more easily understand the values of a community through the voting.
The admins have taken a stance where this should be a safe space and those being insulted/harassed/discriminated against are welcome to respond in kind. The most important part is to report it so the mods/admins can review and take action as needed.
While it may not be nice to tell nazi punks to fuck off, it will ultimately make for a nicer community if they do - we don’t mind community members saying “hey, this isn’t cool” in whatever manner they feel necessary.
I’m glad that’s the case! it alleviates a lot of my worries around recommending beehaw to my LGBT+ friends
I’ve had similar worries, but overall I’m coming around to the idea that for cases of bigotry it’s better to just report the bigot and maybe also yell at them (which is allowed) than to put it to a public vote and hope that lands them at -200 downvotes or whatever. Not being able to downvote them stings a bit, but if they get reported and booted reliably, I think it’s worth the tradeoff.
Especially since reddit definitely had the same problem in a lot of cases anyway. Sometimes, in some subreddits, transphobia would be downvoted. But in others, the “”“polite”“” or even blatantly not “polite” transphobia would be upvoted. Sometimes even in places where I didn’t expect it.
(looking at you, gaming subreddits mad about some trans people asking you not to buy a wizard game, jesus. That ~2 weeks was hell on the internet. And meanwhile, posts calling for people not to pre-order games, or to boycott games that have microtransactions - those are acceptable and go right to the top, apparently! Ugh.)
I highly recommend reviewing this post from Gaywallet: https://beehaw.org/post/107014. Specifically, the Spirit of Beehaw and What is (and isn’t) Beehaw. These sections go into what I paraphrased above at length, if you want the admin’s full thoughts.
The initial intent of reddit was to have downvotes be for off topic stuff, and yet most people use it as a silent “your opinion sucks” button. That stuff just adds to the hivemind feel of reddit. I wish there was a way to have an alternative system of weeding out misinformation or rude stuff without having to deal with something like downvotes. I suppose moderation could serve the purpose of weeding out the bad stuff instead, but then each community would need to be moderated properly.
An old forum I used to frequent had a downvote system that required you to specify a reason for why you felt that post or comment required a downvote. That reason (and the account that submitted it) was visible to the person whose post got downvoted and to the moderators, but to no one else.
It still worked well for filtering out troll posts and spam, and legit posts were almost never downvoted as you couldn’t do so fully anonymously and moderators could take action when you abused the system.
I could see this becoming highly impractical when communities become as huge as on Reddit though, but for a smaller forum that one had a few hundred active users it worked really well.
That… Sounds fantastic, actually. Although I could see people just generating puppet accounts to send harassing messages that only the victim and mods see, and switching accounts when they get banned. Could go especially bad in situations where the mods are also kinda in on it, as can happen (see also: organizations that turn out to have been “secretly” openly racist all along, in a way that was invisible to white workers but blatant to black workers, and that kind of thing).
That’s actually genious
Your text is almost exactly my thought process too. But unlike Reddit if you don’t like how a community is moderate you can go start the same community on a different instance and lead its moderation efforts the way you think is appropriate. Then the communities will follow natural survival prices where whichever community is liked more will attract most people from the other community
Yeah. And I love that the people who think beehaw is “too nice” or “too anti-tankie” or whatever can just… Continue on elsewhere that they like better, leaving this place bee.
Some subreddits managed to do it when the topic was very specific and the mods were dedicated. I’m thinking of r/AskHistorians and r/Askphilosophy
It’s kind of unrelated but I think the lack of downvotes pairs well with lemmy’s lack of vote counting (a.k.a karma score). Counting your internet points always feels so performative to me and kinda ruins the point of upvotes in the first place.
I think that will turn out to be really important in the long run. The gamification aspect of karma score let to posts and comments leaning more to the quick and funny, and less to long and thoughtful. Especially in bigger subreddits. And then bots started to just repost and reuse previous highly upvoted stuff to boost their numbers even further.
I’ve mentioned my thoughts on this a few times now, but you’ve summed my opinions up nicely! I tend toward longer, overly-drawn-out comments and replies, so it was kind of pointless for me to comment on stuff on Reddit. It went entirely against what was promoted by the culture on Reddit, which developed as a result of turning comments into a popularity contest. If you didn’t have a gimmick (ShittyMorph, poem_for_your_sprog, shittywatercolor, etc.) then you were basically stuck using jokes, references, and acerbic jabs to try to get attention (as evidenced by karma). Even downvote farmers fell into this pattern, they just did the opposite of what the typical person would do, which resulted in even more toxicity.
Yeah it’s the lack of vote counting, more than the lack of downvotes, that I really appreciate. (Not to say I really miss downvotes or anything, I just really don’t care either way.)
I’m also on Tildes and they also lack downvotes, but once you’ve been on there a week you get the ability to label things (noise, jokes, malice), which sort of functions as a more nuanced downvote button. But they share the lack of overall karma score, which keeps that same nice non-performative vibe.
once you’ve been on there a week you get the ability to label things (noise, jokes, malice), which sort of functions as a more nuanced downvote button.
I’m glad to see other platforms doing this, it worked pretty well on Slashdot for a while.
That’s my same thought too, on Reddit you’re always scared of “saying the wrong thing” because your fake internet points will go down
The good thing is the karma system is no longer here to torment you. You also won’t be shadowbanned for arbitrary reasons like on Reddit. I personally do prefer downvotes to use them against bad faith discourse or trolls (there was a user posting female scat pics on random communities in lemmy.world)
Now we have infinite fake internet points.
can we even see how many points we have tho
We can even hide the fake internet points!
I like see my little piles of upvotes though. But maybe it’s bad because ultimately it means I’m giving importance to the external validation of strangers, and the flipside of that is being easily affected by downvotes too. It might be better to hide scores (in profile settings). But I also kinda don’t want to because it shows someone read my comment/post and I didn’t waste my time, even if nobody replies.
omg i can troll now no downvotes omg nice!
I just downvoted you. But you can’t see it bwahahaha!!
i’m not on beehaw tho, i could see it, if it had federated correctly, but it seems it hasn’t cuz:
You can, but that doesn’t make it consequence free. You know that bans exist, especially for a more egregious trolls.
What’s funny is that I see that people down voted you for that comment.
I never cared about karma on reddit so I just said what I wanted and didn’t care. Here, so far, haven’t dealt with anyone just being randomly aggressive for no reason so, at least I hope, my comments have been fairly neutral.
I unchecked the ‘Show Scores’ option in settings (desktop site) and I enjoy the experience a lot
feels like old school forums where people just communicated instead of all this useless gamification
Man, do I miss a good forum.
I still have an account on a really great college football board that has taught me a TON about the most random things. All while being generally awesome people. Hoping at least some of this new (to many of us n00bs) world stays this way.
Nice. I didn’t know about that option.
The lack of voting is why I still prefer forums over reddit-style sites. Voting, both up and down, stifles discussion and encourages repetative meme comments for upvotes.
I remember a reddit thread from years ago where a guy was trying to deal with a spider infestation in his car and almost every reply was a variation of “kill them with fire” or “it belongs to the spiders now”. Many comments were made by different people at the same time with the exact same wording. The guy got almost no serious replies. I don’t think that would have happened without the culture created by the voting system.
Dopamine is a hell of a drug.
Honestly I like the idea of downvotes, but the way the reddit community has implemented them is just toxic. But that’s the great thing about Lemmy and the fediverse: Don’t like it? Go to an instance that’s disabled it!
If downvotes had been used as originally intended, they would be perfectly fine. But the cultural shift over time on the site from “downvote things not adding to the conversation” to “downvote what I don’t agree with” made their existence more toxic to conversations. Weighing down unpopular opinions in the sort feed made it even easier for echo chambers to build up. Having a way to give comments that are productive a bump is enough for effectively sorting things.
I was on kbin for an afternoon and got downvote brigaded for calling out a highly updated post for spreading false info. I probably I could’ve worded my comment all fluffy and nice, but I was frustrated at the op for making things further confusing for everyone and the tone of my comment reflected that. I since deleted my kbin account and hoping that downvote brigade trend and hivemind stays on kbin.
I don’t think it helped that there were incredibly salty people (or even bots) in some of the smaller subs that would just downvote everything.
I frequented a few subs where honest questions or helpful answers would sit on 0 votes.I think nobody has the same feeling for how much a downvote or upvote weighs, too.
One might person might think, hmm, I disageee mildly = downvote, and the downvoted person might see that and think “oh, they hate this, why are they so mad?” and then you get the useless little argument about votes after that sometimes.
Especially with negativity bias making 1 downvote feel worse than 1 upvote, to most people.
Agree entirely. Down voting encourages a hive mind mentality which builds echo chambers and is whats wrong with most social media platforms.
Did we already forgot about YouTube that literally mask shitty videos because of the no downvote counter? Or Facebook that can spread fake news and shit because of it? Downvotes can be bad but imo only upvotes can be worse.
Downvotes can be bad but imo only upvotes can be worse.
This is true too. I can only hope disinformation and harmful content can be reported to moderators that will take action to remove it.
If people are spreading conspiracy theories or harmful content, we do remove it of course. I think the example of Facebook is exactly where moderation is important. Not where downvotes are important.
Because to put it simply, conspiracy theories and harmful content usually get posted in echo chambers where people will agree anyways so a downvote does nothing to solve the problem imo.
Reddit also spreads fake news and shit, though. The communities you participate in determine whether you see it, to a degree, but nonetheless. Like, when Bernie was running for Pres, the Bernie Sanders subreddit had everything that looked good for his chances upvoted, and everything that looked critical of his opponents (including the same accusations of Biden being a pedo that the far right likes to make) upvoted, and comments or posts that were like “… Wait a minute this doesn’t seem to be true” or “this over here isn’t a good sign” or “Bernie isn’t popular with these Black voters for xyz reasons” or whatever would get downvoted to the point people didn’t see it. Voila, echo chamber. I say this as someone that voted for Bernie.
That said, I do wonder if a system that eschewed votes altogether might be better. Like old forums.
You nailed it in 2 sentences.
Having only upvotes is still a bit of an echo chamber, but it’s moreso affected by how many people have seen the post (and in a related fashion, how early a comment was made in a thread), not whether people agree with the post. As someone mentioned, youtube’s dislike scenario is a good example of this in the real world. Downranking harmful/unhelpful videos is important for users on youtube, and it’s still useful on a platform like this. Without downvotes, if I came across a comment with 12 upvotes, I would have to mentally weigh how many people I think saw that post, and how many thought it was bad information.
I’ll note that I fully agree with almost all the points in favor of having no downvotes, but I think the utility of downvotes is just more important in my opinion.
Right there is inherent inertial momentum with upvotes.
I’m still on the fence, because understandably the potential (and actual) for abuse makes downvotes very unproductive as a feature, but there are also situations where they are very powerful.
It takes significantly more effort to refute a wrong position than it takes to make it. Downvotes serve as an explicit balancing point against that in ways that a well written response does not. Additionally, nested comments usually get less upvotes than their parent comments.
It is what it is I guess.
Does that really balance it out, though? A downvote or pile of downvotes won’t persuade the person who made the bad argument that they’re wrong, nor will it persuade any lurkers. The bad argument can stand without an explicit refutation, or without the person who made it even knowing why they were downvoted (always a frustrating experience).
Here, you can still see which argument is the most popular, because you get the initial argument A, then because there are no downvotes we’re more likely to get a counter argument B, and then you can see easily which of the two has more upvotes.
And if people keep talking, there be more nuance this way, I think. It’s not limited to a binary option of bad vs good, and you can maybe more “I agree with x, or think you might have a point about y, but I disagree with z because…” Vs someone with a nuance opinion instead just deciding if they think it’s overall more bad or more good and voting in a way that erases the nuance.
Edit: also, people arguing in bad faith because bigotry can just be reported and booted altogether
You’ve got a point. I was bothered with no downvotes until your post and it’s true, we are free to actually have open conversations here instead of be received with being downvoted. Cool!
haha not that you should care, but guess you can be downvoted via other instances.
You can’t - it’ll look like your downvote went through on your side, when you downvote from another instance, but it doesn’t actually show up for anyone else or change the comment score.
i didn’t downvote bro that was just what was there
lol this is hilarious, I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing :)
Hmm, I see that same post with zero downvotes presently and I’m on neither beehaw nor lemmy.world. I suspect that downvoting beehaw from a remote instance might be local to that specific instance, but I’m not certain.
I agree wholeheartedly. I didn’t like downvotes, but I didn’t realize how terrible the concept of downvotes really was until I lived without it.
Here’s my comment from another thread:
I wasn’t a fan of Reddit’s downvote system. It was a pointless, vague way to show displeasure without actually providing any useful information. I never knew if a downvote was because I made a comment that was factually wrong, the reader had a differing opinion, or simply because I made a grammatical error. Plus, there’s brigading. By itself, a downvote doesn’t really tell you anything.
I’m sure that in at least some cases, a genuine discussion (rather than a simple downvote) would have been more thought-provoking for everyone.
Maybe an unpopular opinion of mine, but I don’t mind downvotes, but there doesn’t need to be a calculation of the sum of the upvotes and downvotes imv. That way both are observable for the users. If something is unpopular, you can see it but it doesn’t affect its overall standing in post hierarchy, pretty sure this is how reddit used to be about a decade ago.
true!
I’d like to see what it’s like the other way, you never see any of the upvote or downvote scores so you don’t get influenced by the hive mind (but you still see the popular comments sooner, and can filter out the mass-downvoted)
You can actually do that. In your settings on Lemmy, you can disable “Show scores”.
The down vote visibility should be a user settings option for everyone IMO
This is one reason why I like it here. What annoyed me on Reddit sometimes was discussing “unpopular opinions”.
For example on my local subreddit people would constantly argue for more housing density, which is great for affordability but any mention of “but what about transportation infrastructure then” got mercilessly downvoted. I really don’t mind people disagreeing in replies but having a whole conversation downvoted and subsequently hidden is annoying. It generally made me not want to comment on Reddit, and just let the hivemind be.
I like the hackernews approach where downvotes on comments aren’t seen, the comments are just faded out. The more downvotes = the more invisible it is.
Also thought this could be a cool approach with nice side effects - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/jun/social-media-trustdistrust-buttons-could-reduce-spread-misinformation
That sounds kinda awful to me, because it could be used to just disappear unpopular comments complaining of racism or transphobia or whatever, or even just to disappear a comment saying “I hated this really popular game actually because xyz”. It sounds like something that would exaggerate the hivemind effect of downvotes rather than alleviating it, and probably be used to silence even justifiably angry or emphatic comments, if now you can’t even see the few comments that disagreed with the majority in a thread.
I do wish there was another way to hide posts. I don’t want to upvote everything.
You can collapse comments on the web interface (don’t know about the apps), but it doesn’t appear to persist across page reloads. Might be a good feature request
Yeah, specifically threads/posts though, I mean. Since if you don’t up- or downvote them, they persist forever.
