this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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Too many morons use the downvote button as a “Dislike/Disagree” button. It’s why I like that downvotes are disabled here. If you disagree with someone, you’re encouraged to actually have a discussion instead of lazily pressing the downvote arrow and leaving.
Yup.
I've seen it used quite effectively as a way to supress discussion, actually.
In the France subreddi, which I was quite active in, as I'm French, if you sorted by controversial, you would often find Queer related topics. Especially Trans issues related threads. Just downvoted to oblivion. But, It's not like people were disagreeing or anything, all of the few comments on there were positive. It was just a really effective way to suppress discussions about those topics.
As most people sorted by Best, all it would take was a couple of initial downvotes on your thread to bury it for the vast majority of people.
And it worked. Every so often, I would check what was in controversial that day, or that week. Without fail, I would see some of those topics on there, topics which were rarely discussed in this sub, because it was actively being suppressed by the downvotes.
Once I noticed this pattern, I began to check some subreddits, and I noticed the same thing happening on a bunch of them. Often, targeting the same subjects.
Yeah, I’m really loving the downvote feature being gone. I’ve been on another forum that had a noticeable decrease in toxicity when they removed their dislike reaction too.
Voting is also public, so when people do use them they need to be prepared to stand by it a opposed to using it with anonymity.
I'd suggest not calling them morons. Maybe people don't know how stuff works. That's normal, and it's up to the people who do, to provide some guidance.
If I'm being called a moron for being ignorant I can easily get defensive, and other people might turn aggressive. It just fuels the vicious cycle.