I’ve been so used to judging a post just by its popularity on reddit, but it’s actually so much more useful to have an idea of the downvote ratio. I’m glad we have that here.

It was a scandal when it disappeared from YouTube, but I didn’t realize it was missing from Reddit too for much longer!

  • manned_meatball@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    at least Reddit showed the upvote - downvote balance, YouTube only shows upvotes, which is a completely useless number.

  • LootGoblin42@lemmy.oneEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    hm. The instance I’m on, lemmy.one, doesn’t have a downvote button or a ratio. Can each server owner configure it to remove that? Maybe I should switch instances! Is there an easy way to export all of my communities and migrate to lemmy.ml?

    • SpeedyCat2014@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yes, servers can disable downvotes. Beehaw does that, for instance. I’m on lemmy.world which allows both. I prefer both because I think it helps silence bad faith participation with less active moderation, but I respect that some places don’t want it.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        It also enables bad faith participation such as down-vote brigading.

        • BrooklynMan@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          while that’s true, people will always find a way to be jerks. if people can’t be jerks with a downvote, they’ll express their jerkitude verbally, which is certainly worse. i just wish we could move beyond the point where a downvote (or a bunch) was enough to emotionally devastate a person-- or where people feel the need to do that to others.

          this is such a nice place now, but, then again, so was reddit in the beginning.

  • Matt@netmonkey.techEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    It’s something that can be configured, at least at the server level, which is cool.

    I’m running my own personal instance, and I’m keeping downvotes enabled. It’s something that I’d really like to see, personally, but I have absolutely no judgement or concern for instances that choose to disable downvoting.

    I do wonder if that’s something that can be managed at the community level, though. I can definitely imagine some communities opting to disable downvoting, if their server admin(s) allowed it.

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    What I really hope to see is some client-side algorithms that can let you track who vote-voted-for-what. This way, you (your client) could ignore downvotes if you detect brigading or rings and it could boost a particular post if it happened to be upvoted by a friend of yours.

  • LostCause@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Same, first positive thing I noticed. This really feels like Reddit in the beginning–I like it!

  • 133arc585@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    I really like that you can hide scores on posts and comments altogether. I don’t like seeing the upvotes or downvotes. I don’t want to base my opinion on a comment or post on what other people have felt about it, and so just not seeing their reaction to it at all helps prevent that. I don’t think popularity is necessarily a useful factor to consider in judging a post or comment. This is one complaint I have about the Jerboa app right now, is that it doesn’t respect the Hide Scores preference.

    • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Everytime I loomed at my most upvoted comments/submissions on reddit, it would just be populist low effort crap that I wrote.

      The meaningful insightful comments that I wrote barely got more than a handful of votes.

      The voting system really isn’t that indicative of anything in my opinion, other than how willing we are to lower ourselves to pander to the lowest common denominator.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I absolutely agree … have an upvote!

        Snark aside, I do agree, but my time on the microblogging side of the fediverse has habituated me to using “like”/“upvote” as just a nice pleasant gesture to the author of acknowledgement and appreciation. Of course there aren’t any algorithms on the fediverse (yet?), so a “like” can only be a gesture, and it’s actually wonderful.

        So I do the same here. If I really think something is problematic, I frown in concern with a downvote. Thinking of it as human gestures to actual people is actually a nice way to interact on social media IMO.

        And while pandering will happen, I, as a lurker/reader don’t always want to highest voted comment and often sort by new and old to see other comments. So it really can be about what habits and mentalities we bring to this … a readjustment of which being something the fediverse has to offer.

    • LostRedditor@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I agree that score is not indicative of the quality of posts. However, it’s useful to measure what people who read this post or comment think of it positively or negatively or neutral.

      • 133arc585@lemmy.mlEnglish
        01·
        1 year ago

        Sure, but if you can see the score ahead of time (and especially if comments in the UI are sorted by score), all it does it create an echo-chamber. It’s self-reinforcing. If the post’s score only showed after you up/down-voted and then you couldn’t change your vote, that’d be entirely different (not perfect either).

        I also don’t care if other people found a post “positive” or “negative” or “neutral” in general. Truthful, well thought-out comments get downvoted into oblivion despite being true, simply because they aren’t mainstream views. Likewise, mainstream views with no basis in reality get upvoted incessantly, probably because humans psychologically like believing that their beliefs are true and seeing “confirmation” of their beliefs is seen as a good thing. This is what is meant by self-reinforcing echo-chamber: fringe or dissenting opinions get hidden, and “more of the same”/“towing the line” conformity get promoted.