cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/1332080
downvoting everything i disagree with seems excessive and unhealthy, considering i can just ignore and move on. Beehaw doesn’t have downvotes at all, reasoning that you can ignore it and move on or report it, and it seems to work fine for them. i do think downvotes have a use though, i’m just not sure what it is. what do you all think?
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I generally use it for “you’re a twat” in general-discussion posts, or “that’s actually misleading people” in factual-resource posts. Stuff that doesn’t warrant reporting, but I feel should be discouraged nonetheless, by my own personal standards.
Shit takes, unpleasant ideology, aggrieved stupidity, a senseless waste of perfectly good electrons, etc.
It is the crow of jugdement staring back at them.
Disagreeing is fine; I can disagree with people all day and not downvote them over it. Being wrong about stuff doesn’t make someone an asshole. However, being an asshole about stuff does frequently make people wrong, which is where the confusion may lie.
Depends on the disagreement. “I don’t like shoes that have separate toes”. Yeah, okay, that’s your choice, I love my VFFs anyways. “I think Jews should be murdered”, no, sorry, you don’t get to have an opinion about the rights of other people to exist and occupy space.
Exactly my point.
Yeah, I think of downvotes as crowdsourced moderation:
Posts made in bad faith, with a toxic attitude or wildly offtopic get a downvote
I personally think people “should” use the downvote feature on comments that are objectively false, are unrelated to the topic of discussion or on troll/harmful comments
Things that are particularly low effort or that don’t really fit in the sub. Blatant marketing outside of AMAs. Rudeness that doesn’t break the rules. Double/triple/howevermanyposts. Blatant misinformation that could hurt someone. Anyone that tries to say something nice about spez.
I think that sums up the major categories, off the top of my head.
This take is so agreeable, I wonder who downvoted it.
It is public data, however, I don’t believe there is a frontend for retrieving it yet. You could probably pull it by hand from an api endpoint if you really want to know.
Upvote high quality, downvote low-quality.
Examples of low-quality:
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off topic
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misinformation
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bad faith
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partisanship
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stereotyping
Low quality does NOT mean “things I disagree with”.
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For me:
- this opinion is different from mine, but I respect it: ignore
- this opinion is different from mine, and I do not respect it (e.g.: racism): downvote
- this opinion is spreading misinformation: downvote
- this comment is an insult to someone, regardless on whether it was “deserved” or not (e.g.: “this is a stupid question”): downvote
- this comment is breaking community rules: downvotes
I downvote people who post a million comments or replies instead of just using the edit feature. It makes discussion and following a thread super hard for no reason, especially if one reply gets a long chain of direct replies going, and context in the form of a sibling comment to the highest comment of the chain gets lost.
Normally, you should downvote something that does not contribute to the discussion or is unhelpful.
I don’t downvote because I disagree with something. I don’t think that was the intention.
