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Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say (github.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

shifts focus to how the community values of the content.

Ok, I think I get your point, but I can tell you that in my experience is the exact opposite:

The hivemind effect is strong, and a lot perfectly-acceptable content gets up/downvoted by people just because the score is already high/low.
I have been posting quite a bit since I joined Lemmy in the different niche communities from the instances that I run. Invariably I see downvotes from people who are not subscribers. I've sent DMs to some of them asking what was wrong with the post, and the answer was simply "this is not interesting to me". I replied saying "Look, this isn't Reddit. There is no algorithm. If you are not interested in the content from this community either block it or don't browse by all". Their response was a basic "how dare you tell me how to browse Lemmy?!" Unsurprisingly, when I tried to bring this up for general discussion, I was mass downvoted for the majority that thinks that "downvotes-as-disagreement" is okay..

So, yeah... In my view, for better or worse votes are part of the conversation. If people were using votes as a valid filter for content quality, I'd totally agree with you. If there is a mass of people downvoting a comment or post that seems to be aligned with the community's values, I feel like I should know why about the comment is deserving of the downvotes. At the very least, I think it's important to know who is downvoting for legitimate reasons and who is downvoting just because they are a whiny brat that should be ignored/muted/blocked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I agree that it would be better if people used votes as a marker of quality, but strongly disagree on moderation action based on voting.

Personally, there's three scenarios when I use downvotes w/o commenting:

Someone has already voiced the reason
I don't have time/energy to comment
The target is a censored echo-chamber that will ban anyone who disagrees (can't vote/show disapproval if you're banned) - example would be .ml communities having moments about how stalinist USSR did nothing wrong.

Anyway, once a post from a community rises sufficiently to pop up on all, it becomes a part of the larger discussion, and voting will shift towards the opinions of the larger fediverse. This is also usually when communities get discovered by more people. If a community doesn't want the engagement of the wider user-base, a closed blog may be more suitable as a forum, or alternatively have an instance w/o downvoting.

When browsing all or new I do so both to break out of my bubble and to vote on content (usually stuff I find interesting).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, unfortunately it seems that I am in the minority when it comes to how this "should" be used. I genuinely believe that one of the reasons that open platforms are better is because it's not designed to constantly get me engaged. If they are not meant to keep me constantly engaged, then I shouldn't be repeating/missing the behaviors that were learned when using the more addictive platforms. This means:

Browsing by all is a fundamental mistake. No sane person should be trying to drink from the firehose. It doesn't matter that the firehose is "small" compared to the larger networks. If this network is out of interesting content, then either go elsewhere (and maybe share what you find here) or just close the app and move on.
If a community/instance/person is not open to a healthy discussion, it's better to just block/mute/defederate and move on.
If I don't have "time/energy to comment", then just take a break and move on.

This is why you'll never see me commenting on stuff like politics/news. Not only I find these discussions boring beyond belief, I feel like they are completely pointless. These places serve only as a "two minutes hate" type of thing. No amount of voting/commenting/arguing will ever change anyone's minds.