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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Appreciate the comment. I agree voting in theory is a good idea but I think a majority of people use it as not intended and it’s creating a net negative experience for the social media that utilizes it. Too many people use downvoting to show dissatisfaction with an opinion instead of the intended this doesn’t add to the conversation. Dog piling is a major issue IMO, psychologically many see negative votes (or many downvotes) and are inclined to treat those comments or posts with more derogatory comments or oppose the commenter before even reading the full post or comment. That’s a very real general example of functionality that’s shutting down engagement and being contradictory to the intent of the social media system being used. For a specific example, browse all with the new filter on lemmy and look at how many posts get downvoted right out of the gate that are perfectly legitimate posts for the communities they’re posting in. The moving good content to the top of your feed intention of upvotes doesn’t really work well in the fediverse without algo based feeds and the top filter could easily switch to views and comments to get the desired results without all the downside of how it is now.

    If this were a minor issue I wouldn’t be commenting and would support the standard just ignore votes spiel but it seems to be that most people cannot handle the current voting system so I still see no benefit to them in their current form. The fediverse is the perfect environment to iterate and innovate on a system that doesn’t work as intended.


  • ClarkDoom@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    I think upvoting and downvoting should be removed in its current form. There should be a way to report content that doesn’t contribute to conversations or is hateful and if you want to know how popular a post is go off of alternate engagement metrics like views/comment count.

    I genuinely see no benefit to upvoting or downvoting if the above mechanisms are in place. Upvotes are something many folks get obsessed with and downvotes are too easy to spam, especially on a social network that consists of mostly anonymous users. This post is a good example - it’s adding to the conversation and trying to spur engagement with the community but at the time of me commenting it has -1 upvotes (via Voyager since it aggregates downvotes/upvotes). What is the point of these mechanisms - they should be left to Reddit and the fediverse should innovate in this area and make something better than what we already had.











  • One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.