cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/665784
Some Lemmy instances (e.g. Beehaw) do not support down votes for whatever reason. When an instance does support down votes, authors often get zero feedback with the down votes, which ultimately supports a communities of haters. I’ve noticed some communities struggle to get content because of some malicious down voters who just down vote every post to discourage activity and effectively sabotage the community.
The fix:
An instance admin should be able to flip a switch that requires every down vote to collect a 1-line rationale from the voter. These one-liners should be visible to everyone on a separate page. Upvotes do not need raionale.
Perhaps overkill, but it might be useful if a moderator can cancel or suppress uncivil down votes.
Indeed… I actually predicted that. How can kids resist the urge? The fact that kids and adults are in the same forum supports the idea of having rationale for down votes. There is only justice when down votes (which lead to suppression) are attributed to civil justification.
I’ve expanded the original post to cover this.
Some users simply interpret the upvote/downvote mechanism differently, although I don’t think this has anything to do with the age of the user. It’s simply that some users express their agreement or disagreement with the message of a post with upvotes or downvotes - admittedly in a rather lazy way (no explanation, just a click to agree or disagree). However, this somewhat contradicts the logic of reddit clones like Lemmy, because here these metrics are used to evaluate whether a post was useful, informative, helpful, funny or whatever and to rank them accordingly on the front page etc. - completely independent of whether you agree with the content of a post or not. If it were handled differently, i.e. in the sense of downvote if you disagree with the contents message, this would mean that there would no longer be any posts on the Lemmy front page that say, for example: a well loved celebrity has recently died - nobody would upvote such a post if this meant that they wanted to signal that they thought it was a good thing that the celebrity in question had died. So unlike Facebook, Lemmy & Co. use upvotes and downvotes in a somewhat value-neutral way. However, not all social media apps in the Fediverse follow this logic - some applications don’t even have downvotes or upvotes and others use them more like Facebook does. This is precisely why I find your post important. I can’t understand why there is so little participation from other users - it’s a perfectly sensible suggestion that should at least be discussed.