Ok, I get it: the majority of users on Lemmy are browsing by “all”, which puts a lot of content on their feeds that they are not interested in. I’ve already got in many arguments to try to explain this is kind of absurd and everyone would be better off if they went to curate the communities they are interested in. But I also understand that this feels a bit like saying “you are holding it wrong”.
But can we at least agree to a guideline to not downvote things in communities you are not an active participant, or at least a subscriber? Using downvotes to express “I don’t like this”, “I don’t care about this”, or “I disagree with this” is harmful to the overall system. It’s not just because you don’t like a particular topic that you should vote it down, because it makes it harder for the people that do care about it to find the post.
Downvotes should be used as a way for us to collective filter out “bad” content, but what constitutes “bad” content is dependent on the context and values of the community. If you are not part of the community in question, then you are just using up/down votes as a way to amplify/silence the voice of majority/minority. By downvoting in communities you don’t participate, you end up harming the potential of smaller communities to grow, and everyone’s feed gets dominated only by the popular/lowest-common-denominator type of content.
Instead of downvoting, a better set of guidelines would be:
- If you don’t care about the post, leave it alone.
- If you don’t want to see content from a specific community, just block it.
- If the content is actual spam and/or not according to the rules of the community, report it.
Another thing: don’t forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I’m tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we should make some improvements in the software side to have a more flexible rule system for scoring downvotes, but until such a thing does not exist, I’m seriously considering creating a “Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame” community to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.
I put some examples on another comment: I’m talking about the most inane, sports-related posts.
Also, if you think that your policing is going to help the other communities you think are “bad”, then why not just block the posters or the whole community and solve the problem once and for all?
I don’t view inane content as bad. So that rules me out for that case.
Me using functionality of a website in its intended fashion isn’t “policing”. I usually do that afterwards if it’s bad enough but usually a sub has to have a pattern of doing it before I filter it. I know sport subs that were just match/race titled would cop downvotes on reddit, which again sounds like an issues better addressed by the community it’s being posted too.
Look, I’m upvoting you here because you are at least trying to have an open conversation about the post. I don’t even necessarily agree with you, but I don’t think your post is something that should be silenced or pushed away from view of other people.
On the other hand, you:
Do you see the problem here?
I appreciate the first part of your comment and the overall candour. However:
So you are downvoting because you disagree with something, or because you don’t like how I phrased it.
You really don’t see that is exactly (part of) the problem I am describing?
My point is: the votes on a post are not a poll. Downvoting the post does not work as a way to signal you object to the content. By downvoting my post, you are just trying to silence this conversation down and make it harder to reach other people that might be interested in it.
I mean if you want me to be specific then unfortunately I can do so. It’s more than I just disagree with you. It’s that I think your reasoning in the OP is very flawed and misrepresents the situation you are attempting to portray. Which felt dishonest initially but given your attempts to engage people who disagree I now assume misguided, sorry to say. Also I think people stating their views under the pretence of a question should be discouraged due to proximity behaviours like concern trolling (not implying that’s what you’ve been doing, just an example). Lastly, I super strongly oppose being shown content on a site like this that I can’t interact with. For your case it may make sense but I can super easily see it being abused by the cases in my example; where people can grandstand shitty politics(again as an example) but then the onus is on me for some reason to not engage with said content.
I’m a proposing a guideline, not a law. I don’t want to forbid you from doing anything. I’m just saying “hey, Lemmy doesn’t have any type of recommendation engine based on your voting history, so maybe consider the context of the community where the post is coming from before voting on whatever it is?”
If you think that you are gaining anything by voting “shitty politics”, ok. You do you. But when there are people saying “our non-english community has a bunch of downvotes from english-speaking people”, and you understand that this might be an issue, perhaps it would be a nice gesture if you voted this up to help this message reach others?
That’s fine and I’m saying that it is not a good idea to do so. I had figured my providing you with examples how intended voting behaviour can violate your proposed guideline would demonstrate that. Non English communities getting downvoted for… not being English is not intended or desired behaviour and deserves a more direct fix than a guideline.
No because that has nothing to do with why I downvoted the OP. Also, as I pointed out in an edit, my engagement with this post has likely driven it up in this specific instance anyway. Even if it doesn’t this went from being engaged by 2-3 people to a lot more real quick despite the OP largely neutral votes for the first hour, and now being -10 so clearly it doesn’t just drop the post off the face of the planet due to downvoting and probably other factors are considered.
Anyway, throughout this I’ve done my best to address every point you’ve brought up. Yet I’ve had multiple questions, some even asking for clarification, go ignored. So I think now is probably a good time for the old “agree to disagree”.
Let me go for one last attempt:
What would you say of “people downvoting posts about football and basketball because they don’t care about it”? Or my posts that were on the emacs community, which has about 10 active users per month? Or some other niche TV show that someone wants to talk about and is trying to bootstrap the conversation?
The thing is, your argument is that “big communities can have bad content. I don’t want to see that, therefore I should be able to downvote it”. And your assumption was that my post was talking about this case. I replied to tell you that this is not the case, and that it’s the smaller communities that are hurt the most by those doing drive-by downvoting. You seem to understand that we’re are not talking about your case, but you still want to keep your downvote based on a flawed assumption.
Engagement, probably. But would you agree that there is still a lot of herd behavior in sites like this? The people that see this post being at -10 are primed to downvote it further. I’m not saying that you downvote is responsible for every other downvote, but I am saying that it certainly didn’t make people more receptive to the idea I’m talking about.
Perhaps it’s because they think there are too many of them in the all feed?
This is a guess, I don’t use the all feeds so I haven’t seen any of them.
That’s not the fault of the all feed. That’s the fault of the user for either not subscribinng to communities they are interested in or not blocking communities they are disinterested in.
Either people browse by all because there is not enough content in the communities to follow, or there is already “too many” of the things that they don’t want to follow on all, and they should start curating their feed by browsing their subscribed communities.
Which is it? You can not have it both ways.
You are trying to enforce rationality on inherently irrational humans. It’s not going to work.
It’s even worse, because I’m not enforcing anything. I can not enforce it. I am saying “The current way of doing things seems bad. How about trying something different?” and instead of trying to take a look, people are responding by doing exactly the bad things that they deny to exist.