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.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      535·
      9 months ago

      And I downvote anyone who reads any post and assumes malicious intent and tries to grandstand before looking for common ground.

      This is not about telling people what they should vote on, it’s about trying to make the system work better for everyone.

  • muntedcrocodile@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    9 months ago

    I feel its a feature not a bug. It theoretically should filter the overall content to a more “average” viewpoint be the one that bubbles to the top this should mean that the more extreme views will be downvoted more and help solve the massive political divide that the existing echochambers have helped create.

    Downvotes will always be used as a “i dont like this” and “i disagree with this” thats just what people gonna do when they have an emotional responce to somethibg they see. I recon its fine tho cos all people are going to dislike bad content but only specific groups will dislike other content. Might lead to some groups getting targetted but only the extremists like the nazis, communists, and vegans will be targeted and thats fine they are extremists.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      76·
      9 months ago

      The problem is the opposite of what you are describing: I’m seeing downvotes on content that is perfectly fine on sport-related instances, and people are downvoting it… why? Because they don’t care about it?

      What is “extremist” in posts about football, American Football, basketball?

      • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        On Reddit, where downvotes are anonymous, my niche sub (20k members but far fewer active) would continually get someone who would come in and downvote every single comment in an entire post. The time that it started and stopped was fairly obvious too b/c like in a Help & Questions megathread with literally 1000 comments, all of the replies would have a baseline value below the starting one (i.e., they would show 0 rather than 1), up until it stopped after which point they would all start at 1. That’s a pretty clear indicator that they were subverting the rules of Reddit. As a moderator, I repeatedly complained to the Reddit admins, who did not seem to give a shit.

        I even had screenshots of people on an associated discord server calling out for such brigading attempts. I offered them to the admins, who never took me up on that. It also happened in a much larger, I guess you could say parent sub of 200k members. Hundreds of thousands of people getting downvoted… b/c of one unhappy kid, or someone acting like it.

        At least here in the Fediverse we have tools at our disposal that were not available on Reddit. e.g. if you were to block all of those people, I think they cannot vote against your future posts any more? Though it could also be due to a simple misunderstanding of how to use Fediverse tools. And for someone who made their own instance, you could literally adjust the rules - I would guess? - so as to only show the results of voting e.g. for accounts older than X days, or only by members of that community, or something. Though that would take significant effort, both up-front and then to stay in compliance with future Lemmy updates if it was not integrated into the main code, and it would only benefit members of your specific instance.

        For someone who so rarely downvotes anything - I usually either just block a troll entirely or at least ignore someone who looks like they may be having a bad day yet feels the need to share that with the entire world - I might not be providing much perspective here! But I hope these thoughts at least were somewhat interesting.

      • muntedcrocodile@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23·
        9 months ago

        I dont see a problem here wont effect the people who sub to sport and thus care cos if all the sports getting downvoted nobody is.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
          53·
          9 months ago

          I don’t browse by all, I use “sort by scaled” and I still see content from the most popular communities first.

          • muntedcrocodile@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            Scaled sort is busted allegedly and the big communities are dominating on all the sort options thats a real problem that needs fixing.

            • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
              46·
              9 months ago

              There is the technical issue, and there is the social/cultural issue. I really dislike the idea of just pushing blame to one side as a way justify a problematic behavior without external dependencies.

              What do you think is harder:

              • Implementing the recommendation engine that can sort and score things appropriately, and work well for people that are browsing by all vs subscriber only?
              • Adopting/promoting the simple guidelines that I mentioned?

              The first option puts at the mercy of someone else. The second is completely up to the people using it. Seems to me a lot easier to just take some responsibility for my own actions than waiting for the devs to do as I wish.

  • Snoopy@jlai.luEnglish
    71·
    9 months ago

    With your great suggestion, i got an idea for lemmy software : why not activate vote only to subscribed community ? You haven’t subscribed, you can’t vote. But you can hide /filter the community.

    The frontpage also need a rework because when you cross-post it flood thus people tend to downvote those posts. And lot other things.

  • fl_sp@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    it’s pretty clear reading this thread that different folk have different ideas about what or how downvotes should be used. what is intented behavior for one is wrong for another. i doubt that even clearly defined rules would change that as they woud be essentually the same thing - someone’s opinion on how it should work. plus different instances have different rules.

  • Blaze@dormi.zoneEnglish
    21·
    9 months ago

    I usually see a lot of people downvoting posts in a language they don’t speak, presumably because they don’t care.

    I would suggest those people to select their languages in their settings so that they don’t see this kind of content.

    • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      The language settings do not work. Some hugely high percentage of comments and posts have an “undetermined” language because Lemmy doesn’t force you to choose a language when submitting something. And then there is federated content from programs that don’t even have a language setting.

      If you block “undetermined”, you block almost all content, and then there’s no point in even being here.

      What we might need is code to identify the language of a comment and assigning it automatically while allowing it to be changed if it makes a mistake. I imagine it would annoy multilingual people having to switch their configured language every time they make a comment, so just make it automatic by using a language model. That’s the kind of thing a language model would be really good at.

      Until we have something like that, the language settings are useless.

    • Snoopy@jlai.luEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      I confirm it, we have lot issue with it.

      On the software side, I think the language setting shouldn’t hidden in setting. I would move it in the filter bar along side “local, all, moderator view…”

    • CTDummy@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      Now that is just lazy, doesn’t even fix the problem when you could just filter it and never see that sub again.

  • CrayonRosary@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    9 months ago

    I’m sorry, but I will continue to downvote exactly one post in every stupid anime community right before I block it. We don’t need a separate community for every single anime ever made clogging everyone’s feed with boring pictures of characters.

    My single downvote in each community is helping to shape Lemmy as a whole, and I’m certain it’s very effective at doing so. It’s definitely not just a childish tantrum. No, sir!

  • Kayn@dormi.zoneEnglish
    5·
    9 months ago

    People will never use downvotes the intended way. They haven’t done so on Reddit either.

    I see no productive use for downvotes, so I’ve disabled them.

  • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
    62·
    9 months ago

    I sincerely doubt it. The main reason might be that people actually think that they are “helping” by downvoting?

    In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes? (most especially in the “those leopards surely won’t eat my face off” sense)

    And tbh, isn’t that what a downvote button is meant for? So however sparingly we may choose to use it, can we really complain all that bitterly if others choose to use it more often?

    As someone who already follows these guidelines, I believe that most other people will never follow these guidelines. Far worse, even if >95% of the people across the Fediverse were to, that’s still an awful lot of downvotes, compared to the number of people that have heard of a brand-new sub that is trying to get up off the ground.

    Lemmy is at best beta-version software - the apps I hear are amazing but Lemmy itself is still relatively undeveloped (most of the time lately whenever I try to up-vote something, I have to do it 2-3 times for it to “stick”, and getting comments to go through is also problematic, sometimes I have to cancel and try again, across multiple platforms and OSes including Android and Mac, Firefox and Chrome). We are desperate for a place that is not Reddit or X, but if we want something, we have to build it.

    My suggestion: make downvotes public, not just to admins and mods but to everyone. Tbh I doubt very much that that would do the trick, but it is a thought to try to help people break out of that system of “I am anonymous so I can be as insensitive to the needs of others as I wish” mindset. i.e., if they thought that there might be consequences, then they might behave ever-so-slightly better? But ofc that would only reach the subset of people who actually cared.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      54·
      9 months ago

      In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes?

      That’s the thing. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but going from “votes are used to signal what matters to the community” to “votes are used to signal what matters to me” was a monumental cultural shift that can probably correlate with the deterioration of social media.

      • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        Literally: yes, e.g. https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

        For-profit enterprises hijacked people’s various needs to increase their profits, so that they can haz moar profitz while they earn their profits, as they chase even more-er-est profits. It is the same reason why when you go to a website that you have literally never visited before, much less do not have an account on, they have an icon that looks precisely like a “notifications” button, with a badge saying that you have “messages” waiting to be reviewed. 🤮

        At least when piracy websites have such things, they also offer to let you download an interesting item, whereas when you visit a legitimate “news” page that someone sends you a link to, they show like 2 sentences before fading out into a full-page blocking advertisement that lets you sign up to pay money in order to continue to read even more click-baity headlines followed by maybe some tiny amount of content, if you are lucky - and even that is most often like one tiny new fact that happened in the last couple of days or weeks but appearing only after 5 pages of knowledge that has been known for decades, or worse yet they just forgo the latter entirely and the entire article is only a paragraph or two.

        I am saying: if the true goal of most news websites was truly to impart knowledge then they could have done so better in the 10-second read of the TITLE itself than all the lead-up to get you to come to that page, full of ads and tricks to get you to scroll down further to see more ads, all while wasting your time reading through something that absolutely was not worthwhile.

        I am spoiled by such things as https://www.youtube.com/@crashcourse that essentially throw multiple whole entire college curricula at you - THOSE ads would be worthwhile to watch, for THAT content. That is like turning a firehose of knowledge onto yourself. But then other people want you to watch even more ads, in return for far less content.

        Kurzgesagt is another example. Rather than simply downvote others or reply with a childish “your (sic) stoopid (sic)”, they instead add to the collective body of human knowledge and experiences by taking an ENORMOUSLY complex subject such as vaccine side-effects, and break them down into <10-20-minute videos that are watchable by the general public, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU. THIS IS THE WAY, imho. But, they already do it, and other corpos want/need to make their own profits, hence they use “tricks” like Google SEOs to increase their own rankings while decreasing those of legitimate content such as these from Kurzgesagt or Crash Course.

        So, whatever votes might have once meant, or should mean, then or now, at hand is what they are, for good or ill. Just exactly like how vaccine active disinformation exists, so it is no longer enough to cure a pandemic merely by doing all that hard work to create a vaccine - now you also have to work against the disinformation that exists.

        And wrapping back to the matter at hand: while *I* might follow these guidelines, and *you* may do so as well, *most* people will not. The likes of Facebook have spoken, training those kids who have now grown up and moved on to other platforms but now others have followed in their wake, and this is the world that we live in now, for good or ill:-(.

        You might also be interested in a reply I gave to another post entirely, so linking it here just in case it helps: https://startrek.website/comment/7601231.

  • mark@programming.devEnglish
    8·
    9 months ago

    This assumes that people who are interested in a community are subscribers, which isn’t always the case. Users like me who subscribe to RSS feeds for communities, for example. This also doesnt account for people who might create a new or alt account. Wouldn’t they have to resubscribe to every community just to get their votes counted?

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      314·
      9 months ago

      Users like me who subscribe to RSS feeds for communities, for example.

      If you are using RSS, you are just lurking, then you wouldn’t get to vote.

      Wouldn’t they have to resubscribe to every community just to get their votes counted?

      Migrating accounts should not be difficult and there are already tools that can “port” your subscriptions.

      • mark@programming.devEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        If you are using RSS, you are just lurking, then you wouldn’t get to vote.

        Sorry but the assumption that people using Lemmy RSS feeds are just lurking and not actively participating comes off as a little naive.

        In fact, the whole post makes a lot of assumptions that I dont think are accurate, which makes it difficult to wrap my head around whether a solution is necessary or if this is really a problem to begin with.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
          35·
          9 months ago

          the whole post makes a lot of assumptions

          Ok, let’s talk about it then: I’ve noticed that almost every post that I make on any smaller communities that I’m trying to bootstrap is met with 2-3 downvotes after a few minutes.

          Why is this happening?

          • Is the content bad? No, I’m posting news links that are completely related to the topic of the community. Emacs tutorials on the emacs community, NFL news on the nfl community, basketball, TV shows on their shows, etc.
          • Is it because the intended audience is not interested in the post? No, the people downvoting are not subscribers. Eventually, the (few) subscribers that are still around do vote it up.
          • Is it because I’m violating some instance rule? No, because I’m posting the content in topic-specific instances. Except the Emacs community, all the others community are on the set of topic-specific instances I created.
          • Is it a personal attack? No, the people downvoting are not the same. I’m just noticing that while the post will be downvoted by random people until it is “new” and likely to be in the “all” page.

          So, the “lots of assumptions I’m making” can be summed up as: posts are getting downvoted by (a) non-subscribers (b) who browse by all and © think that downvoting is going to help with curating their feed.

          difficult to wrap my head around whether a solution is necessary.

          It’s not the end of the world, and it’s not a hugely complex problem. I was just hoping to get people aware that this “downvoting anything that is not interesting to me” behavior is learned from Reddit (and other Social media sites) and do not translate as well to a place that is so much smaller and has no filter bubble.

          I’m not surprised that so many people are acting like I called their baby ugly or something. I know that most people take this learned behavior as the “natural way” of doing things, so I was expecting some pushback. I’m just finding a bit ironic that so many people did nothing but pile on my comments and downvote everything without any further thought.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    9 months ago

    Until there is a proper hide feature voting is the only way to hide a post across apps and the web-ui.

    Remember fake internet points don’t matter.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      176·
      9 months ago

      Yeah, hiding the post would be good.

      But like I said in the post… It’s not about “internet points”, it’s about visibility of “minority” and niche content getting completely eclipsed by the majority.

      As the Fediverse grows and more people come with their own niche interests, there will be more and more smaller groups. If the people on the majority side thinks it’s fine to downvote because “they don’t care about that”, then it stands to reason that every minority will be outnumbered and then the whole system becomes a popularity contest, only “common denominator” topics will get enough traction. This makes the whole system super bland and boring for everyone.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          It is supposed to, but it isn’t working. Niche communities are still outnumbered by posts from more active ones and people in the larger instances see content from smaller communities and use the voting system like they are training some algorithm.