Every comment in this post got 1 downvote for literally no reason. Like... it's a post about cats, nothing controversial at all. Do people just go around downvoting every post? Why?
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
21 points (100.0% liked)
Fediverse
757 readers
2 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's a hangover from Reddit culture. People think that the ALL page should be curated for them, not realising that it's for everyone and that downvotes are for wrong content, not what they consider bad content in respects to their personal taste.
A downvote isn't "I don't think this should be here". It's just "I don't like this", don't agree, thing it's bad/wrong, whatever. Up/downvote systems work under the process of the wisdom of the crowd, and as a result, works under the assumption that while the ways in which people use these tools and the reasons may be different, having a simply up/downvote system means they'll average out into something more useful. It doesn't work all the time of course, but it does work generally.
I think you're wrong. Downvotes are literally meant to be to provide a community powered mechanism to push irrelevant content into out of view, as per the community's purpose. They are not going to be used as part of an algorithm to push more relevant content to you specifically. Of course, that's not how a lot of people end up using them, so whether it's an effective mechanism is another question.
Meanwhile, I'm on an instance that doesn't federate downvotes, so they don't affect ranking here, maybe for the better?
What they don't seem to understand is that in the fediverse it's them who are responsible for curating their own experience, there's no big content algorithm doing it for them here.
It's their job to join communities they may like and then set their main page to "subscribed". They don't have to keep it set in "ALL" if they don't want to see content from all the servers their server federates with/isn't defederated from.
Lemmy and kbin may be discussion platforms/link aggregators, but they aren't reddit.
It doesn't need to be more complex than "more votes = shows up first when sorted by 'hot'"?