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Does anyone know why we’re defederated from beehaw.org?
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Anyone who cares about downvotes needs to get their head examined. A downvote can mean the person doesn't agree with your comment, doesn't like your tone, thinks you are incorrect, thinks the comment doesn't add to the discussion, hell they could downvote you just because they don't like your username. None of that matters. All it does is show you if your comment goes against the zeitgeist or not.
The whole point is that people can downvote you for any stupid reason and doesn't accurately reflect why a post is being rejected by the community. People will do it simply because they want to silence you.
And it causes issues with brigading, botnets, etc. It's why hexbear and lemmygrad are being defederated -- and their members are able to get around it simply by making accounts on other servers and going right back to the brigading. Removing the voting option and giving admins tools to IP ban everyone from an instance upon defederation would go a long way toward fixing the problem. Just putting the hurdle of needing a VPN to regain access alone will deter a lot of idiots.
That’s my biggest problem with downvotes. I want to know why someone disagrees. That can initiate an interesting conversation.
If I’m factually incorrect, I want to know. Same goes if I expressed myself poorly. A downvote alone doesn’t tell me anything.
I've had plenty of times where a comment I made got downvoted like crazy, but a response I made to a comment asking for clarification got a lot of upvotes. It seems people really like to jump on that downvote button, especially if they see something already getting downvotes (i.e. maybe they don't even read it, they just downvote on reflex).
Votes happen to be really easy to deal with in software, which is probably why they're so commonly used. However, when it comes to people actually casting votes, they behave a lot differently than software creators expect.
So perhaps we should try something else, like maybe sort by "activity" (how many times the comment was replied to) to sort of counteract that reflex-like urge to use it as an agree/disagree button (if you agree or disagree strongly, you're likely to comment).
You can also be "downvoted into oblivion" if you're 100%, objectively correct, but your conclusion goes against the "hive mind." I have had comments with a ton of sources and detailed analysis that got downvoted like crazy, and then the top comment is like "X group, amirite?"
You're 100% correct that reddit rewards snark far more than constructive discussion. That's part of why I'm here, and why I'll probably be perennially disappointed with social media.
So what is the desired end result of a voting system, to promote popular opinions, or to promote interesting opinions? Because as implemented, voting-based SM tends to promote the former, and I think many people prefer the latter.
So to me, it is a problem because it's not meeting the goals that presumably most people have.
Many platforms, like Reddit, hide comments that get too many downvotes. So many people just won't see the interesting, controversial discussion, and I think that's a problem.
We should be sorting based on likeliness of being interesting, not popularity.
It only really works in smaller communities imo, as the community gets larger, it just reflects what's popular, and that's a separate scale from good vs bad, especially once your community has self-selected itself into a common way of thinking.
So the question is, how do we mitigate that self selection? How do we promote diversity? Voting doesn't seem to cut it, and I don't think moderation is the way either (we just need the "right people" argument). So yeah, I'd like to see a lot more experimentation with different ways of sorting comments and posts, because I think promoting diverse content is better long term.
It's both. You're not wrong with the groupthink thing, but they absolutely do help to combat disinformation and useless comments. I get that you've made a decision, but you don't need to rationalize away the negatives.
Actually, on Beehaw, you can. If Beehaw has the equivalent of kbin’s “activity” info, I haven’t found it.
Votes still get federated. Even if not exposed via UI anyone running their own (federated) instance can query for who voted on beehaw posts. Only a matter of time before that's directly exposed as a mod tool.
I upvoted this post even though I don’t agree with it. See the downvoted pic of the girl taking a shit to see why I think downvotes are needed at times.
Isn't that something that mods need to take care of though? Why should that burden be on the community members?
The word "community" goes a long way in answering that question imo.
If we look to the mods take care of everything, we're a group of content consumers, not a community.
And then we have to deal with the community collectively adopting shitty or evil ideas and enforcing them, shutting down victims or anyone who opposes them. So who checks the community? Who protects the individual?
Exactly!
I left Reddit because I felt it was toxic and I really didn't like the direction the platform was going. If a community here on Lemmy goes bad, I can leave for another. It's not hard.
Moderation, IMO, should largely focus on removing trolls and reminding people to be civil. That's really about it. It's not their job to police a community, it's merely their job to respond to consistent complaints from users. I.e. it's your job to report people and posts, and mods should only step in if there are multiple complaints for the same thing.
There's a reason I'm here and not on Reddit, and that's one of the biggies.
I want to be somewhere where the community takes responsibility, not one where they just dump it all on unpaid mods.
Well yeah, I'm describing what I want.
There are certainly instances (like Beehaw, Lemmygrad, and Exploding Heads) that are managed in a way that I'm not interested in, so I don't associate with them. If others want to, that's completely fine, and it's completely in line with other forums and whatnot.
I personally think that if lemmy is to truly succeed, it needs to be different from those other SM sites. If we're just a poor copy of Reddit or an overly complicated alternative to forums, what value does it truly offer? It needs to be different in some meaningful way, and imo that meaningful way is through community investment in the platform.
So that's what I try to do. I have contributed code to lemmy-adjacent projects, I have contributed constructive posts and comments, etc. I want this to be a real community instead of just another place to argue about pointless things. We probably won't get there, but that's what I want.
So please, if you just want to post memes and whatnot, Reddit is probably the better option. If you want to argue, go to Twitter. If you want to promote yourself, go to Facebook, Instagram, or Facebook. But if you want to help out and build something special, please hang out here on lemmy.
Or if it clearly violates the rules set up by the mod.
Precisely.
But it should be on the users to report rules violations. I don't expect a mod to read through every comment in every post looking for rule violations, I expect them to mostly read reports and step in if something looks credible.
We're a community, so we should all help out.
Sometimes mods are asleep or not locked to their desks. Downvotes help get shit like that (pun fully intended) out of most peoples feeds unless they are browsing by new or are way way way down on the hot scroll list.
I totally agree here. And I want to take it a step further and instead of sorting by average votes, we should merely be including it as one of many indicators, such as:
And so on. But instead, we seem to just sort by
upvotes - downvotesand call it a day.Sometimes comments are just wrong, and detract from the community. Downvotes (plus an interface that hides negative voted comments) clean things up without need for formal moderation.
Whatever can be said about downvotes (an automated system for marking one's disapproval) is probably true of reporting (a human reviewed system for marking one's extreme disapproval), too.
But if downvotes (and upvotes) are well correlated with quality, then what's the problem? Your complaints are about community culture around downvotes, not about the mechanism itself.
I'd love to see a system where votes can be correlated between users so that the ranking algorithm weights like-minded voters and deemphasizes those voters you disagree with, but that would probably create a pretty significant overhead for the service.
And I'm saying that some communities have a "dominant mentality" that's pretty obviously correct. The only thing worse than a person who says "just because it's popular doesn't mean it's right" is the person who swings the pendulum too far in the other direction of saying "it's unpopular so it must be right."
Minority use case? I'm talking about how downvotes are useful for communities to enforce their own norms, or ensure that erroneous information is excluded. Someone who insists on a proof that the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180º is probably going to get downvoted, especially if he's being an asshole about it. Same with someone who insists that the common cold is caused by exposure to cold air, or that the earth is flat.
Or there are broad consensus beliefs about what is or isn't off topic for a discussion, what types of insults break the forum rules on civility, etc. When a community largely agrees that someone is being an asshole for using racial slurs, downvotes quickly sort that out. In other words, toxicity can get filtered out through the downvote/hide mechanism, as well.
Even for beliefs that are simply matters of opinion/taste/preference, the community can decide what's actually up for debate and what's not, within that space. A forum dedicated to fans of Real Madrid doesn't have to tolerate trolls coming in and saying "Real Madrid sucks" or "lol soccer is a stupid sport you Europeans are so stupid" or "sports are dumb." Same with a vegan forum downvoting someone's brisket recipe (or a BBQ forum downvoting a "meat is murder" manifesto). These "echo chambers" are just how people organize with people who share their interests, and it's weird not to be able to see that there's value in those communities.
So yeah, I think that you have a problem with people's desire to organize into groups of similar interests, not with the actual mechanism by which those groups enforce those norms. It wouldn't be any better with a mod-enforced echo chamber, either.