There are entire communities full of bad faith actors, spammers, and echo-chamber-enforcing mods. We as individual users downvote them with 0 effect. We can block and hide users/communities/instances but that does nothing for the community as a whole. Ignoring them and “not feeding the trolls” is simply not making them go away. Just try blocking UniversalMonk, we all know they have dozens of accounts with hundreds of downvotes across every comment and post and yet they keep going. Or any of the conservative communities who’s total post score is in the red.

I’ve blocked so much garbage that my feed doesn’t change very often. I barely check Lemmy once a day now. This does not make for a healthy online community.

Many of us came from reddit where there are many valid complaints for how they run things but one thing I’d like to see return is downvotes slowing down how often a user can post, comment, and vote in a community. If a single user’s score drops too low within an instance or community, that user should be rate limited or maybe even auto-banned or maybe an entire third option I can’t think of. But right now it’s not even a slap on the wrist.

  • KichaeEnglish
    10·
    17 hours ago

    Downvotes are already a questionable design choice, which encourage passive-aggressive drive-by behaviour rather than engaging with and countering challenging ideas. They’re kind of a dark feature, which give the user a sense of participation, or worse, the sense of being a cop, while contributing nothing.

    They are catharsis without praxis, and they almost certainly contribute to online toxicity.

    Actually giving them forum or site moderation power is… Well, it sure is doubling down on that feeling like a cop thing.

    And what are all cops?

    • prototype_g2@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      15 hours ago

      True… I suppose. Fortunately there are instances that have downvotes disabled. In the settings of your account you can also hide downvotes.

    • enkers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      16 hours ago

      This right here. If anything, I prefer Slashdot style mod points to upvotes/downvotes as there is an opportunity cost to voting. I find it fosters more interesting and less echo-chambery discussions.

      Most of us are probably guilty of this at least on occaaion, but the down vote button isn’t intended to be a disagree button.

      • prototype_g2@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        15 hours ago

        I prefer Slashdot style mod points to upvotes/downvotes as there is an opportunity cost to voting. I find it fosters more interesting and less echo-chambery discussions.

        I got no clue what “Slashdot” is. Wikipedia says:

        Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a social news website that originally billed itself as “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters”. It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.

        It doesn’t really explain how the voting system works there. Mind to explain it?

        • enkers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          15 hours ago

          Sure! I’ll repost someone else’s explanation:

          Each comment has a score from -1 to 5 (most comments start at 1), and each user has a score from -10 to 50 (start at 0). Any account that is at least a year or two old, has a high enough score, and has a certain amount of recent activity will occasionally get a package of “mod points” that can be used for increasing or decreasing the score of a comment in any thread to which the user hasn’t already posted along with the score of the user who posted the comment. (Site administrators get unlimited mod points.)

          Just to add a few minor bits: Comments that reached -1 would appear collapsed by default. When voting, you’d also choose one out of a preset list of reasons (insightful, funny, etc.), and the dominant reason would tag your comment as that.