I think I’ve settled on the latter. Disagreement is maybe best communicated by the absence of an upvote? And downvotes work best when they signal something that is just off base, and while not reportable, is not appreciated at a broad cultural level.
Originally up- and down votes were intended to crowd source filtering and rating content in a community. So voting up for things you want to see more of and vote down spam or content that is unfit for the community. But people will tend to upvote things they agree with and downvote those they deem wrong - I also find myself doing something like that. I now try to follow these rules:
It helps that lemmy currently shows the number of up and down votes instead of just the score, it gives a bit more inhibition before downvoting stuff.
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Good question. I think reporting is left to cases where a post is so bad that a moderator needs to take action to remove it or the user from the community. So downvote things that are of low quality and report things that are against the community or instance rules?
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Yes, up/down votes are inherently subjective and reports are to be used for objectively bad content. It is up to the users to decide whether they feel that opinions they don’t agree with are worthy of downvoting or not. In the end the voting system tries to give the community a voice to mirror what content they like to see - within the rules that are enforced by moderators. I think it would be better if people downvote content they don’t like instead of using it to “punish” people they argue with. That’s why I think it is a slight improvement that lemmy shows up and down votes separately - it gives the downvote a bit more gravitas and in consequence “not voting” receives some, too.
Then it will always be a race to the bottom and people will decide to misuse it to punish users and manipulate the community. Clear evidence of this happening on Lemmy is rife and the technical level for abusing downvotes on the fediverse is quite low.
A single up or downvote function would take care of that function. In the end the separate up- and downvote system gives the community a tool to punish users who they don’t agree with.
I agree, too bad
REAL communismNOT using the downvote to punish people haven’t been tried.Downvotes on Lemmy? Like on Reddit?
Interesting. I have buttons for voting up and down in the web UI and on mobile in voyager. Is that a setting of the home instance?
I’m not sure what you mean with single function and the separate voting system. Voting on threads vs voting on posts?
Yes. Lemmy instances can disable downvote federation. I will never see a single downvote at the price of not being able to downvote others myself. Which is fine because I either upvote what I consider good content or report content that shouldn’t be in the community.
I don’t need downvotes to see the content the community consider good rise above the not so good stuff. It’s the same to me if people downvote or don’t upvote, both means they’re not endorsing it for what ever reason.
So there’s a way to separate good content from bad content through upvoting. And there’s a way of removing content wrong for the community by reporting it.
So what’s left for the downvotes to do? I mean, besides letting angry people do something more than just shout at their screen?
Don’t think the moderators need to action every instance when a person or two thinks something doesn’t belong here. The down vote can take care of that. Moderators can focus on blatant issues.