• Trihilis@ani.social
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    2 days ago

    Honestly, I don’t even like the downvote/upvote system because it promotes censorship and a lot of the times it’s just an agree/disagree button. I feel that no matter how right or wrong someone is, they should always be able to express their opinion in a civil manner (obviously there are mods for removing rule breaking posts/comments). Downvoting just kills any discussion.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      I’ve been places without upvotes and downvotes and they’re just garbage piles of spam and useless replies.

      The Steam Comminity Forms for instance: if you’re trying to get any useful information on a recent release go somewhere else, as half of what you’ll find is people complaining that the game is *woke" (because there is a woman or a minority in it somewhere), and the other half is people complaining that the game isn’t a completely different genre.

      With downvotes the useless, troll, and off topic comments can be filtered out to not clutter up the useful posts.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      2 days ago

      Not really, it’s removing the comments that isn’t violating is the real problem. There are definitely comments that should be downvoted for many reasons

      • Trihilis@ani.social
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        1 day ago

        Well ideally that’s how downvoting should work yes. In practice it’s abused a lot as a “I disagree” button.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          I’d rather people just downvote and move on than engage with trolls or trade insults with each other.

          • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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            19 hours ago

            i dont mind downvoted, but auto-removal by mods is kinda worst, because they will just set the filter to remove certain words, and then the account gets flagged.

          • Trihilis@ani.social
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            1 day ago

            Well, I don’t disagree with you. All I’m saying is that I’ve personally seen the downvote function being abused a lot. It kinda works for making interesting posts visible but in the comments it usually leads to certain arguments (even civil ones without insulting or trolling) being downvoted and hiding the comment. Karma is honestly meaningless to me, I just enjoy conversations and seeing different opinions even if I disagree with them. I see why it exists and in a perfect world it’s a great way to make moderation manageable on bigger platforms (like reddit and lemmy). Sadly we don’t live in a perfect world.

            Trolling and insults usually break rules and can be reported. Comments like that deserve all the downvotes they get since they detract from discussion and don’t add to it. Although honestly most forums I visit deal with that pretty well too (with no karma system in place).

            • OpenStars@discuss.online
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              3 hours ago

              Is it really the fault of the system then, if it was set up with one intention but then was abused?

              Btw, reddthat.com has downvotes disabled, so if you made an account there you would never see them again. The downvotes would still affect the sorting of the comments on other instances though, and thereby the frequency of replies.

              I for one want downvotes, if I say something incorrect then I deserve it, but I don’t want downvotes from people who are just trolling - nor upvotes from them, nor replies either - bc then it takes some of my time and attention to try to guess what is going on, and sort true facts from their fictional views of the world.

              So for me, it’s not “voting” that I would like to see addressed and fixed, but rather the presence of trolls. Which PieFed (and the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect) provide many tools to help with, e.g. it can block all users from an instance, unlike the Lemmy feature of the same name that merely acts as a community muting but does not actually block the users themselves in any way.

              I love how PieFed is heavily pushing towards the democratization of moderation, but that’s another subject altogether I suppose:-).