this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
274 points (80.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43159 readers
1609 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
if you don't have downvote, you don't have a tool to negatively select some content other than reporting. this way, if mods are overworked, which is always, you don't see difference between content that is irrelevant to most people and content that is actively harmful
I bet that 99% of comments that are downvoted are not breaking any rules at all, and a mod would do nothing.
I don't know why people keep thinking downvoting is helping the mods... It really isn't about anything other than pushing down opinions you don't agree with. That's how downvoting is used, upvoting is the opposite of that.
consider the following: technical question gets posted. you get two answers, one wrong but posted quickly, and another correct and more elaborate, but posted much later. the first one will get more upvotes just because it appears first, and the other gets less attention as a result. one way you can counteract this is by introducing downvotes, it's not perfect solution, but it kinda works
Yep also a valid usecase. I agree it's useful for technical discussions but at the same time, it's harmful for opinion based discussions.
Which is why you shouldn't downvote everything you disagree with. That's not what it's for, and we should actively discourage people from using it incorrectly. As Sisyphean of a task as that is, it still matters.
You cannot change how people use them, no matter how much you want them to use it correctly.
this works better in specialized, technical spaces with little place for opinion (i'm talking about places like r/chemistry where i contributed previously). you can spot very quickly who's wrong by downvotes
Yeah I guess it makes sense when it's not about opinions.
i'm guessing that this property has made reddit a good place for technical discussion in the first place