this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Well, you could refrain from voting entirely. I haven't experimented with reskinning Kbin/Lemmy but I've heard people have come up with skins that hide the voting buttons and vote totals. Beehaw has famously removed the downvote button from their instance.
I used to be against removing the downvote button, but honestly, it's used a weapon more than anything else. It's also used as "I disagree with this person" instead of an indicator of the value or veracity of a given post, which is not the intent. As such, I've now come around to the position that removing downvotes is the way to go.
Upvoting if you like a post, or do nothing if you don't is the correct answer I think.
This. Very much this.
There are other ways to sort posts than aggregate difference between arrows. Replace up votes with favourites, or even emoji reacts for fun, and remove downvotes.
They're just not a good tool. They're a crutch from websites that didn't want to invest in moderation and so bet on crowd sourcing.
They ended up with moderators anyway.
My ideal system would have two things to vote on.. whether you like/agree with a comment and whether you think it contributes to the discussion. So you could upvote an entertaining quippy comment but also vote that it doesn't really contribute anything meaningful, and you could downvote something you disagree with while still indicating it adds to the discussion.
I doubt people would use it correctly, but I think its a nice idea in theory.
Hmmm, so on kbin.social we already have that actually! Or we have something close to it.
We have upvotes, downvotes, boosts and reports. Upvotes don't contribute to your reputation right now (apparently that's a bug though, but maybe it's a feature haha). Boosts are supposed to be like a retweet, but I think they're taken into account for sort order too.
So we can already boost meaningful content, and report irrelevant content! Nice! And then for personal takes, we could continue using up/downvotes.
Unfortunately downvotes currently affect reputation, and they're publicly listed, so there's definitely conflict around people unhappy about their negative reputations. I've been fairly liberal with my boosts to try to balance that out lol.
I think that's a great way to think about it, it almost makes me think the comments should stay sorted by the number of boosts
I have thought about the reacts a bit since I saw it brought up. I kind of like the idea. Might make the comments look a little....busy? But they're more expressive than voting and sometimes I just wanna tell someone their comment was really insightful.
Biggest downside, people would inherently call for an Angry react, which would lead to the same behavior we already have with the downvotes. As would absolutely any user-handled way to combat spam
People don't interpret angry reacts as downvotes on other sites. If that's how Redditors have been conditioned to see something like that, maybe reconditioning is necessary?
@HamSwagwich I think that's where I'm at too. Replace downvote with report button. If it's really irrelevant or otherwise breaking the rules let's remove it properly. If it isn't, well. It isn't, so let it stay without punishment.
Edit: Oooh, okay wait. Maybe let downvotes stay but make it benign. We're okay with casual upvotes for agreement. We should be okay with casual downvotes for disagreement. Its does let people see that their comment has been seen as is unpopular, compared with just unnoticed. I'm okay with that style of downvote being private.
I think that's the fundamental problem though. Just because a comment is unpopular doesn't mean it's not valuable or even correct. It's often the unpopular opinions that are the most important. No always, obviously, but social change starts from unpopular opinions. It's a double-edged sword.
@HamSwagwich Oh, yeah, that's why I'm suggesting we just make it benign. Like cosmetic only. We can see the downvote count, but it doesn't affect reputation or sorting.
"There's a bunch of people in the back grumbling about this comment lol." It's anonymous but ignorable. Actual sorting is by upvotes, actual content moderation is by reports.
I really like HackerNew's approach to this. There is a downvote button, but only older, higher reputation accounts get it. Tildes has something similar (ish), in the sense that accounts with reputation get different features.
It's something i want to experiment with some Fediverse software too. I think features like these can help shape community.
@FaceDeer Beehaw removed the downvote button? That's interesting. Did they say why?
I'd guess their argument would be that that the downvote's main purpose is supposed to be to mark irrelevant content, but that's just as easily handled by a report?
That's actually a compelling argument to me. A spammer with a negative reputation almost certainly doesn't care. I'd rather have mods look at someone with too many reports and just ban them and be done with it.
People with acceptable but unpopular opinions ("peanut butter and mayo is the best sandwich") can just have a low non-negative reputation, no need to treat that like a bannable offense lol.
If I remember, it was to foster actual discussion instead of blindly downvoting things. Idk how well that's played out or not. It was one of the things that made me interested in them, initially, Unfortunately, that does not mean whatever petty user who would normally end up downvoted is willing to listen to grievances, and I feel like one of the admins has capitalized on that immunity a few times on a bad day by being more aggressive than they should be. But overall, I can imagine it probably does do more than a little to keep the peace.