Insulting or attacking other users, even so much saying “fuck you”, “fuck [this group of people]”, “you’re an idiot” or anything like that while debating IS against the rules of Lemmy.ml. This goes for every political view, you DO NOT get free passes no matter if you’re leftist, rightist, communist, anarchist, liberal, etc. If you’re confident of your position you should be able to debate in a civil manner without cursing someone else out. I understand that debates can get heated and frustrating, hell I’ve debated with a good bunch of users, but you can still express that without resorting to name calling or insults.
Check the modlog, we HAVE removed replies of this nature from every political view, and even if we don’t say it every time, we DO keep track of both removals per user and general behaviour even if it doesn’t get removed, and too many infractions WILL result in a ban.
That said, it is NOT against the rules to present countering facts or opinions, or to have political opinions in general. Don’t report comments for “being pro communist” or “being pro China” unless they have broken an actual rule, namely the ones about being civil. Don’t attack or insult people from Lemmygrad just because they’re from Lemmygrad or they’re arguing for Marxism-Leninism or supporting a country you don’t. If they’re presenting their points in a civil manner (which had been the case for almost everyone from Lemmygrad), you can either read it and respond in kind with your questions or counterpoints, or just move on. People coming over from other instances is not brigading if they’re mostly being civil, that’s the whole point of federation.
Things people disagree with getting down voted is also acceptable, it’s not considered an attack on you if your comment has a negative score, and it doesn’t even significantly affect the ranking because of the relatively low comment volumes currently on Lemmy. It’s just imaginary internet points, relax.
Honest question: Then why are we having these points? If they are of no actual use, and nobody should care about them, why are they implemented? For what reason?
To show whether you like/dislike and/or agree/disagree with something. Why are you confused?
Read further, I explain it further down. I guess you voted down, despite not reading if you even agree or not. Did I guess correct? If yes, do you see that as a problem, or is that completely okay?
The entire purpose for downvotes in Reddit was to allow people to weed out comments that do not add anything to the conversation, but people of course misused it as an “I disagree” button. All the downvotes contribute is further ruining the conversational culture here by turning them in to gladiator fights of egos. Lemmy is actually just worse than Reddit in this regard when its downvote feature doesn’t even have a stated purpose. Lack of downvotes alone is a good reason to support Beehaw.
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Further ruining the conversation when you can simply press a button to devalue someone’s opinion without contributing anything yourself.
And yes, they’re used as agree/disagree buttons and it cheapens the conversation.
Most big tech platforms have gotten rid of the downvote as well. They only want you to express liking, not disliking.
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The votes are really more about helping sort popular / unpopular content more that anything, so emojis wouldn’t help with that.
Without scores or voting, its back to the days of forums where you have to scroll through hundreds of pages to find something decent.
I should mention that I’m only against comment voting. It makes sense for the content itself, but in discourse it only leads to fights of wits.
What does decent mean? Something popular? Or something with quality content and comments?
All three I suppose? Here’s an example from xdadevelopers of what dealing with old-school forums is like. A 17-page thread of people trying to discover the best practices / things to do for battery life. Without any scoring or voting, you have to read through hundreds of replies.
Some threads have thousands of comments, going through each of them to find what’s good might take days.
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Then you’d have to assign numbers for the different reactions (otherwise how would you compare a heart to a poo emoji ) and we’re back to where we started.
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I agree. I don’t like the aspect that votes are seen as “lol internet points” by the devs and admins of Lemmy. I don’t even understand why it was implemented if they see it like that. If the votes are of no meaning, then… why take the time and implement a system for something that should be without any use?
The original “Reddiquette” was really well written in regards to voting. It was humane and about quality discussion. But… the new owners of Reddit, whoever it is, don’t care for quality discussion. If you want to sell data, you want votes and comments to be emotional gut reactions. So they actually are A/B testing to replace votes with literal “likes” and “dislikes”.
I think the “up” and “down” arrows suggest something that doesn’t easily align with the original Reddiquette. The upvote is not really the opposite of the downvote. It has different meanings, and should be two different buttons that do not look like opposites. That would help users to understand the Reddiquette. Also, that the final number is a simple “upvote-downvote” calculation contributes further to that problematic user interface communication.
100% agree. The original Reddit was a bit of a wild west, but Reddiquette itself is great as a founding document and as a basis for all conduct in all communities.
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So its bad when we disagree, but not when you libs do that.
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could it be that you’re just wrong?
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It sounds to me like you may just hold some genuinely distasteful opinions. I’ve been “victim” of mass downvoting before, and more often than not it’s a result of me stupidly speaking out of ignorance. Try not doing that, and maybe pay less attention to your internet points and more on the quality of discussion. For instance, you should consider the value of this discussion wherein you tell people how to “properly use” Upvotes/Downvotes from a prescriptive lens.
In my experience, the Upvote/Downvote system generally works in large threads, even if people have their own philosophies by which they choose to use the functions; the very principal of the Wisdom of the crowd is the means by which it functions. Of course when others come to interrupt this by means of brigading/raiding/whatever the current terminology is for this behaviour, things go off kilter, but having a large prescriptive agreement as to how you should go about Upvoting/Downvoting is no cure for intentional disruption.
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