Hey! Thanks to the whole Reddit mess, I’ve discovered the fediverse and its increidible wonders and I’m lovin’ it :D
I’ve seen another post about karma, and after reading the comments, I can see there is a strong opinion against it (which I do share). I’d love to hear your opinions, what other method/s would you guys implement? If any ofc
my take: up only, no down, per-post only, no account. if someone is repeatedly a problem mods can show them the door.
karma systems have been around forever allegedly to decrease mod/admin workload managing users by having them “self moderate” and that has NEVER been the actual effect - they’ve only ever been an engagement metric for advertising and it didn’t matter positive or negative if people were angry downvoting they were still engaged. I’ve witnessed site after site add these systems and then the userbase turn into a toxic cesspool after. In almost 30 years I’ve only seen one roll back the change even partially. Their culture never fully recovered and its still dominated by people agitating to get attention and to one-up their perceived rivals.
Let reddit things die with reddit. Long live Lemmy.
I very much disagree with the “no downvote” opinion. It leads to homophobic, racist and generally bigoted comments getting much more displayed appreciation than they should (see: any YouTube comments interaction).
You can say it’s the job of the moderation to take care of that kind of hateful content, but I prefer that content to be displayed as a rejected and challenged onpinion rather than not addressed or ignored. And for that, a quick downvote + sourced debate is better than an unending thread of wordsoup where even the most hateful argument only gets shown some love in the form of upvotes.
I can and I do :) …also its usually what will happen anyway, downvotes or not.
youtube comments are a very special kind of cesspool. The things you describe should be removed by moderator, downvotes aren’t enough to detur that. Those types of comments should be reported, the post removed, and the user kicked to the curb for saying them. No tolerance for that. No debate is going to change anyone’s mind, its just giving them room to argue in bad faith to further spew their hate.
Anything not worth a ban, is very perfectly debatable without a negative number telling me who’s opinion the unpopular one (or had more/less puppets to influence it, as sometimes is the case).
Beehaw runs without downvotes, and so far it’s encouraging. I had a civil discussion with someone in what on Reddit would have been a downvote-fuelled flame war.
I have felt the same way on several lemmy instances now - that whole culture just isn’t here so far. People speak what they are thinking and aren’t randomly crapped on for it. if someone disagrees, they just say so and why. Its wonderful.
I’d also add a (funny/informative/opinion) vote button aswell. These spaces can become noise drowners where information can be drowned by repeated jokes that get upvoted to the top. Too many times I’ve seen conversations like “Does this mean I can do A or B? - Yes.”
Itgets really exhausting. Having an easy filter to skip the noise would be great.
2nd time on this topic I’ve said it but then we’re just recreating slashdot’s old system.
I mean was that really bad? I heard slashdot died when it tried to change their system?
That doesn’t mean it was really all that effective in letting the cream rise and the crap sink. More often than not perfectly reasonable comments would get crapped on but some random BS someone found funny as soon as it was posted would get to the top.
Honestly it wasn’t terrible, most of the time. But that’s more saying “eh, coulda been worse”.
Eventually it was “worse”, because people being given tools to anonymously judge each other fosters a culture where they do exactly that while finding more reason to. And then they crave the dopamine hit for it without realizing. and if you later try and take that away by changing things that doesn’t go well either. Most of the types of ppl I used to encounter on slashdot, I started encountering on reddit instead. I really don’t want to encounter them on Lemmy too soon.