The problem with downvotes is they're supposed to be used to push irrelevant things down and bring forward the "productive conversation", but...
...it's easier to use them as an "I disagree with you, get lost loser" button, and I feel like that doesn't usually help the discussion. And upvotes already bring up the good comments (although sometimes the most voted stuff is just memes and you miss the interesting stuff).
Would separate votes for agreeing/disagreeing, and separate for relevance work?
My local newspaper attempted "well argumented" and "agree/disagree" scores years ago. Later they removed the "agree" score, and I recall some accusations of orwellian moderation, but I think this is a cool idea that deserves more experimentation.
Also, clearly naming the upvotes and downvotes might affect their usage.
I personally prefer Kbin over lemmy for a few different reasons. But reputation isn’t one of them. I forget it even exists.
Literally just learned that it exists today from this post.
i learned about it because i noticed my profile has -1 reputation. i didn't even know this existed. I agree with others, karma on reddit was stupid and people used low karma as a way to gatekeep subs. you couldn't post until you have 100 karma, that sort of thing. It's bad for business in my opinion.
I hate gamification of... Everything, but if it's just "oh hey I've been here for X years and at some point I got 5000 upvotes / 800 downvotes, that's cool I guess", I'm kinda for it actually.
It's like with videogame achievements. They're not super important for most people, but sometimes it's nice to look back at the stuff you've played or what you had to overcome. Some are addicted to it too. Real life doesn't give you much satisfaction in this way.
On reddit it was pretty useful to be able to check if an account had -100 karma before deciding whether to interact with them.
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