Specifically applies to places like Lemmy and Reddit. But also other social media like Facebook with thumbs up and down reactions. I’m mostly talking about Lemmy here though.

There’s no benefit to having this system on Lemmy. It results in people who disagree with your content leaving a drive-by dookie on your doorstep. If you disagree with someone, you should actually have to leave a comment as to why, instead of just downvoting. If downvotes are removed, things would still be sorted by popularity correctly. The only thing we would lose is the “controversial” sort function, and could just be replaced with a “most comments” or “least upvotes”.

People are going to say, just ignore them they don’t mean anything. But they do mean something. If you see -13 on a thoughtful post you worked hard on, it makes you feel bad. That’s just the human condition.

Yes I know I can turn votes off in settings here, but many people only respond with an upvote to show they read and acknowledge your message, so you’re missing out on a whole stream of communication if you disable it.

Anyway, it doesn’t keep me up at night, but I think it’s lame when people just downvote and leave. It turns comments into this weird popularity contest where you feel unwelcome, especially on a discussion-heavy place like here.

Edit: here’s an interesting discussion a while ago that had some ideas: https://lemm.ee/post/30635232

  • Zarobi@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
    11·
    13 days ago

    You can see even in this thread that completely innocuous statements like explaining the reason I do something in response to a question are getting downvoted. The same 2–4 people keep coming back here to downvote everything I post. I’ve also had people going through my post history and just downvoting everything indiscriminately, across multiple communities.

    That’s before we even get to the group think. Once a “side” is “winning”, there’s a real cognitive bias to continue that trend. That’s just human psychology. Most people look at the vote first, and that biases how they read the comment. If it’s -4, obviously there’s something wrong with it, otherwise why would it be negative? That makes you see negative things that weren’t there before. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

    It doesn’t really have anything to do with improving the community’s content. Maybe a few people use it that way, but I think most people just use it as a dopamine button to “kick people while they’re down”, so to speak. You can check my post history yourself to see if I’m a racist or not.