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.
Let me go for one last attempt:
What would you say of “people downvoting posts about football and basketball because they don’t care about it”? Or my posts that were on the emacs community, which has about 10 active users per month? Or some other niche TV show that someone wants to talk about and is trying to bootstrap the conversation?
The thing is, your argument is that “big communities can have bad content. I don’t want to see that, therefore I should be able to downvote it”. And your assumption was that my post was talking about this case. I replied to tell you that this is not the case, and that it’s the smaller communities that are hurt the most by those doing drive-by downvoting. You seem to understand that we’re are not talking about your case, but you still want to keep your downvote based on a flawed assumption.
Engagement, probably. But would you agree that there is still a lot of herd behavior in sites like this? The people that see this post being at -10 are primed to downvote it further. I’m not saying that you downvote is responsible for every other downvote, but I am saying that it certainly didn’t make people more receptive to the idea I’m talking about.
Alright and then this can be it for me as I’m pretty sure we won’t reach a consensus.
I would say the edge cases for this don’t justify the blanket guideline and if they did it could be worded (and likely similarly ignored) like reddit did. I would also say situations like the language one can be implement with a UI fix. Plenty of small communities both here and on reddit grew despite being “niche” or even just not popular.
No. You don’t seem to understand that you’re providing guidelines that are incompatible with voting. You want to talk about edge cases in which your guideline can function and makes sense. I’m providing you far more likely and apparent cases where it doesn’t. Your guideline means someone would be breaking them even if downvoting content that breaks the rules of conduct I.e using it directly as intended. I’d consider guidelines for not downvoting stuff solely because you don’t like it for “reasons” before your guideline. Which I’d argue being a lot of former redditors, Lemmy largely inherited.
The idea of even a guideline against shielding communities from negative engagement while affording all the benefits of positive engagement isn’t worth the odd niche community post being spared a couple downvotes from people who don’t know how to use it. If individual communities want to only display upvotes, then goes nuts since that makes way more sense. I doubt I was the first but I’d guess most votes are from people who share my numerous strong views on it. Anyway, as I alluded to before if you can’t understand my position after this many paragraphs then we probably better call it a day. Have a good one.
What you call “edge cases” is all that I’m seeing. I don’t browse by all and I don’t go around chasing communities which I know I won’t like. I find all the popular ones (news, technology, meme ones, etc) boring beyond belief.
There is already a “UI fix”, which is to let people to determine which languages they accept. Thing is, most people don’t use it.
The “browse by all” is a similar situation. The system was not designed for it. It’s just because the Lemmy network is still too small that people are still using it like that. As soon as the network grows, most people will hopefully realize that it will be impossible to follow the firehose on any instance that is reasonably federated.
I think our misunderstanding is not about the values, it’s just a matter of perspective. If you value the same type of content / interaction that of the average Redditor, then you will want different things from those that used to like Reddit because of its niche communities.