Ask Fediverse: can you please stop downvoting posts in communities you do not participate?
Ok, I get it: the majority of users on Lemmy are browsing by "all", which puts a lot of content on their feeds that they are not interested in. I've already got in many arguments to try to explain this is kind of absurd and everyone would be better off if they went to curate the communities they are interested in. But I also understand that this feels a bit like saying "you are holding it wrong".
But can we at least agree to a guideline to not downvote things in communities you are not an active participant, or at least a subscriber? Using downvotes to express "I don't like this", "I don't care about this", or "I disagree with this" is harmful to the overall system. It's not just because you don't like a particular topic that you should vote it down, because it makes it harder for the people that do care about it to find the post.
Downvotes should be used as a way for us to collective filter out "bad" content, but what constitutes "bad" content is dependent on the context and values of the community. If you are not part of the community in question, then you are just using up/down votes as a way to amplify/silence the voice of majority/minority. By downvoting in communities you don't participate, you end up harming the potential of smaller communities to grow, and everyone's feed gets dominated only by the popular/lowest-common-denominator type of content.
Instead of downvoting, a better set of guidelines would be:
- If you don't care about the post, leave it alone.
- If you don't want to see content from a specific community, just block it.
- If the content is actual spam and/or not according to the rules of the community, report it.
Another thing: don't forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I'm tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we should make some improvements in the software side to have a more flexible rule system for scoring downvotes, but until such a thing does not exist, I'm seriously considering creating a "Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame" community to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.
If I can see it and I view it as bad content it’s getting downvoted. Especially since such content usually is inflammatory political post from niche politic subs that have no problem espousing their politics in a “either you agree with us 100% or you're wrong/the enemy”. The rest of the time it’s weird fetish porn.
I browse by all because it’s a good way to see communities/content I wouldn’t otherwise see if I stuck to a curated community list. Not being part of the community doesn’t matter because I’m still seeing the content and still behaving consistent with using the downvote button to collectively filter it out.
I think a better option is these communities opting for the post not to get sent to all. Which won’t happen because a lot of previously mentioned post; the target isn’t the community who already likely agree with them, it’s everyone else. Better yet these communities could implement rules against post that are clearly inflammatory/flaming but then where would they grandstand?
Is this even an option? If it is, it must be fairly hidden. I've certainly never been prompted to not send a post to /all when creating a post.
I also don't think this is a good solution, as it would further stifle the growth of small communities.
I put some examples on another comment: I'm talking about the most inane, sports-related posts.
Also, if you think that your policing is going to help the other communities you think are "bad", then why not just block the posters or the whole community and solve the problem once and for all?
I don’t view inane content as bad. So that rules me out for that case.
Me using functionality of a website in its intended fashion isn’t “policing”. I usually do that afterwards if it’s bad enough but usually a sub has to have a pattern of doing it before I filter it. I know sport subs that were just match/race titled would cop downvotes on reddit, which again sounds like an issues better addressed by the community it’s being posted too.
Look, I'm upvoting you here because you are at least trying to have an open conversation about the post. I don't even necessarily agree with you, but I don't think your post is something that should be silenced or pushed away from view of other people.
On the other hand, you:
Do you see the problem here?
I appreciate the first part of your comment and the overall candour. However:
So you are downvoting because you disagree with something, or because you don't like how I phrased it.
You really don't see that is exactly (part of) the problem I am describing?
My point is: the votes on a post are not a poll. Downvoting the post does not work as a way to signal you object to the content. By downvoting my post, you are just trying to silence this conversation down and make it harder to reach other people that might be interested in it.
I mean if you want me to be specific then unfortunately I can do so. It’s more than I just disagree with you. It’s that I think your reasoning in the OP is very flawed and misrepresents the situation you are attempting to portray. Which felt dishonest initially but given your attempts to engage people who disagree I now assume misguided, sorry to say. Also I think people stating their views under the pretence of a question should be discouraged due to proximity behaviours like concern trolling (not implying that’s what you’ve been doing, just an example). Lastly, I super strongly oppose being shown content on a site like this that I can’t interact with. For your case it may make sense but I can super easily see it being abused by the cases in my example; where people can grandstand shitty politics(again as an example) but then the onus is on me for some reason to not engage with said content.
I'm a proposing a guideline, not a law. I don't want to forbid you from doing anything. I'm just saying "hey, Lemmy doesn't have any type of recommendation engine based on your voting history, so maybe consider the context of the community where the post is coming from before voting on whatever it is?"
If you think that you are gaining anything by voting "shitty politics", ok. You do you. But when there are people saying "our non-english community has a bunch of downvotes from english-speaking people", and you understand that this might be an issue, perhaps it would be a nice gesture if you voted this up to help this message reach others?
That’s fine and I’m saying that it is not a good idea to do so. I had figured my providing you with examples how intended voting behaviour can violate your proposed guideline would demonstrate that. Non English communities getting downvoted for… not being English is not intended or desired behaviour and deserves a more direct fix than a guideline.
No because that has nothing to do with why I downvoted the OP. Also, as I pointed out in an edit, my engagement with this post has likely driven it up in this specific instance anyway. Even if it doesn’t this went from being engaged by 2-3 people to a lot more real quick despite the OP largely neutral votes for the first hour, and now being -10 so clearly it doesn’t just drop the post off the face of the planet due to downvoting and probably other factors are considered.
Anyway, throughout this I’ve done my best to address every point you’ve brought up. Yet I’ve had multiple questions, some even asking for clarification, go ignored. So I think now is probably a good time for the old “agree to disagree”.
Let me go for one last attempt:
What would you say of "people downvoting posts about football and basketball because they don't care about it"? Or my posts that were on the emacs community, which has about 10 active users per month? Or some other niche TV show that someone wants to talk about and is trying to bootstrap the conversation?
The thing is, your argument is that "big communities can have bad content. I don't want to see that, therefore I should be able to downvote it". And your assumption was that my post was talking about this case. I replied to tell you that this is not the case, and that it's the smaller communities that are hurt the most by those doing drive-by downvoting. You seem to understand that we're are not talking about your case, but you still want to keep your downvote based on a flawed assumption.
Engagement, probably. But would you agree that there is still a lot of herd behavior in sites like this? The people that see this post being at -10 are primed to downvote it further. I'm not saying that you downvote is responsible for every other downvote, but I am saying that it certainly didn't make people more receptive to the idea I'm talking about.
Alright and then this can be it for me as I’m pretty sure we won’t reach a consensus.
I would say the edge cases for this don’t justify the blanket guideline and if they did it could be worded (and likely similarly ignored) like reddit did. I would also say situations like the language one can be implement with a UI fix. Plenty of small communities both here and on reddit grew despite being “niche” or even just not popular.
No. You don’t seem to understand that you’re providing guidelines that are incompatible with voting. You want to talk about edge cases in which your guideline can function and makes sense. I’m providing you far more likely and apparent cases where it doesn’t. Your guideline means someone would be breaking them even if downvoting content that breaks the rules of conduct I.e using it directly as intended. I’d consider guidelines for not downvoting stuff solely because you don’t like it for “reasons” before your guideline. Which I’d argue being a lot of former redditors, Lemmy largely inherited.
The idea of even a guideline against shielding communities from negative engagement while affording all the benefits of positive engagement isn’t worth the odd niche community post being spared a couple downvotes from people who don’t know how to use it. If individual communities want to only display upvotes, then goes nuts since that makes way more sense. I doubt I was the first but I’d guess most votes are from people who share my numerous strong views on it. Anyway, as I alluded to before if you can’t understand my position after this many paragraphs then we probably better call it a day. Have a good one.
What you call "edge cases" is all that I'm seeing. I don't browse by all and I don't go around chasing communities which I know I won't like. I find all the popular ones (news, technology, meme ones, etc) boring beyond belief.
There is already a "UI fix", which is to let people to determine which languages they accept. Thing is, most people don't use it.
The "browse by all" is a similar situation. The system was not designed for it. It's just because the Lemmy network is still too small that people are still using it like that. As soon as the network grows, most people will hopefully realize that it will be impossible to follow the firehose on any instance that is reasonably federated.
I think our misunderstanding is not about the values, it's just a matter of perspective. If you value the same type of content / interaction that of the average Redditor, then you will want different things from those that used to like Reddit because of its niche communities.
Perhaps it's because they think there are too many of them in the all feed?
This is a guess, I don't use the all feeds so I haven't seen any of them.
That's not the fault of the all feed. That's the fault of the user for either not subscribinng to communities they are interested in or not blocking communities they are disinterested in.
Either people browse by all because there is not enough content in the communities to follow, or there is already "too many" of the things that they don't want to follow on all, and they should start curating their feed by browsing their subscribed communities.
Which is it? You can not have it both ways.
You are trying to enforce rationality on inherently irrational humans. It's not going to work.
It's even worse, because I'm not enforcing anything. I can not enforce it. I am saying "The current way of doing things seems bad. How about trying something different?" and instead of trying to take a look, people are responding by doing exactly the bad things that they deny to exist.
I usually see a lot of people downvoting posts in a language they don't speak, presumably because they don't care.
I would suggest those people to select their languages in their settings so that they don't see this kind of content.
Now that is just lazy, doesn’t even fix the problem when you could just filter it and never see that sub again.
Definitely
The language settings do not work. Some hugely high percentage of comments and posts have an "undetermined" language because Lemmy doesn't force you to choose a language when submitting something. And then there is federated content from programs that don't even have a language setting.
If you block "undetermined", you block almost all content, and then there's no point in even being here.
What we might need is code to identify the language of a comment and assigning it automatically while allowing it to be changed if it makes a mistake. I imagine it would annoy multilingual people having to switch their configured language every time they make a comment, so just make it automatic by using a language model. That's the kind of thing a language model would be really good at.
Until we have something like that, the language settings are useless.
You can configure languages per community, every post in that community will automatically be tagged in that language.
Example: https://feddit.de/post/9930318?scrollToComments=true. All of the comments are tagged, and this hasn't been done manually by users.
The Undetermined point you are bringing is valid for some communities which are not configured, but most of them are.
Ah, I did not know that. Must be a lot of mods that don't know that either because I see foreign language communities all the time.
Never hesitate to politely ask them to do so, some of them are indeed not aware!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !thenetherlands@feddit.nl, !france@jlai.lu, !chilepedalea@feddit.cl
I confirm it, we have lot issue with it.
On the software side, I think the language setting shouldn't hidden in setting. I would move it in the filter bar along side "local, all, moderator view..."
I was sorta with you until the "Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame" bit at the end.
You can ask people to try and think about their voting behavior, but that's just a bit weird and obsessive.
Users do users because humans do humans. The only way to change how humans use the software is by changing the software. Trying to instead change the humans is sure to fail.
Yeah, maybe a big ignore community button could do.
There is such a thing as "culture" as well. Agree that the software can make it easier or harder to tips the scales one way or another, but it's not like people are unable of learning something just because it's not the default setting.
Until there is a proper hide feature voting is the only way to hide a post across apps and the web-ui.
Remember fake internet points don't matter.
Yeah, hiding the post would be good.
But like I said in the post... It's not about "internet points", it's about visibility of "minority" and niche content getting completely eclipsed by the majority.
As the Fediverse grows and more people come with their own niche interests, there will be more and more smaller groups. If the people on the majority side thinks it's fine to downvote because "they don't care about that", then it stands to reason that every minority will be outnumbered and then the whole system becomes a popularity contest, only "common denominator" topics will get enough traction. This makes the whole system super bland and boring for everyone.
Very good point.
Isn't that what the scaled sorting in v0.19 is supposed to fix?
It is supposed to, but it isn't working. Niche communities are still outnumbered by posts from more active ones and people in the larger instances see content from smaller communities and use the voting system like they are training some algorithm.
I'm gunna down vote this
A little before I started using Reddit, my mate who told me about it said upvoting was used as a means of promoting posts or replies that people may be interested in, not because you like or dislike a post or reply.
I think Facebook has changed that and I will admit I will thumbs up a post/reply because I like it, but I will also upvote posts I think other users may be interested in.
Yeah in theory it was about promoting content that you felt was a "good link to share" and was "good content". Not about your personal feelings on it. Never quite worked that way of course, but eh.
Yeah, it's definitely shifted that way. I just use them both interchangeably.
I downvote and upvote whatever I wanna 🤷. Deal with it
This assumes that people who are interested in a community are subscribers, which isn't always the case. Users like me who subscribe to RSS feeds for communities, for example. This also doesnt account for people who might create a new or alt account. Wouldn't they have to resubscribe to every community just to get their votes counted?
If you are using RSS, you are just lurking, then you wouldn't get to vote.
Migrating accounts should not be difficult and there are already tools that can "port" your subscriptions.
Sorry but the assumption that people using Lemmy RSS feeds are just lurking and not actively participating comes off as a little naive.
In fact, the whole post makes a lot of assumptions that I dont think are accurate, which makes it difficult to wrap my head around whether a solution is necessary or if this is really a problem to begin with.
Ok, let's talk about it then: I've noticed that almost every post that I make on any smaller communities that I'm trying to bootstrap is met with 2-3 downvotes after a few minutes.
Why is this happening?
So, the "lots of assumptions I'm making" can be summed up as: posts are getting downvoted by (a) non-subscribers (b) who browse by all and (c) think that downvoting is going to help with curating their feed.
It's not the end of the world, and it's not a hugely complex problem. I was just hoping to get people aware that this "downvoting anything that is not interesting to me" behavior is learned from Reddit (and other Social media sites) and do not translate as well to a place that is so much smaller and has no filter bubble.
I'm not surprised that so many people are acting like I called their baby ugly or something. I know that most people take this learned behavior as the "natural way" of doing things, so I was expecting some pushback. I'm just finding a bit ironic that so many people did nothing but pile on my comments and downvote everything without any further thought.
I feel its a feature not a bug. It theoretically should filter the overall content to a more "average" viewpoint be the one that bubbles to the top this should mean that the more extreme views will be downvoted more and help solve the massive political divide that the existing echochambers have helped create.
Downvotes will always be used as a "i dont like this" and "i disagree with this" thats just what people gonna do when they have an emotional responce to somethibg they see. I recon its fine tho cos all people are going to dislike bad content but only specific groups will dislike other content. Might lead to some groups getting targetted but only the extremists like the nazis, communists, and vegans will be targeted and thats fine they are extremists.
The problem is the opposite of what you are describing: I'm seeing downvotes on content that is perfectly fine on sport-related instances, and people are downvoting it... why? Because they don't care about it?
What is "extremist" in posts about football, American Football, basketball?
On Reddit, where downvotes are anonymous, my niche sub (20k members but far fewer active) would continually get someone who would come in and downvote every single comment in an entire post. The time that it started and stopped was fairly obvious too b/c like in a Help & Questions megathread with literally 1000 comments, all of the replies would have a baseline value below the starting one (i.e., they would show 0 rather than 1), up until it stopped after which point they would all start at 1. That's a pretty clear indicator that they were subverting the rules of Reddit. As a moderator, I repeatedly complained to the Reddit admins, who did not seem to give a shit.
I even had screenshots of people on an associated discord server calling out for such brigading attempts. I offered them to the admins, who never took me up on that. It also happened in a much larger, I guess you could say parent sub of 200k members. Hundreds of thousands of people getting downvoted... b/c of one unhappy kid, or someone acting like it.
At least here in the Fediverse we have tools at our disposal that were not available on Reddit. e.g. if you were to block all of those people, I think they cannot vote against your future posts any more? Though it could also be due to a simple misunderstanding of how to use Fediverse tools. And for someone who made their own instance, you could literally adjust the rules - I would guess? - so as to only show the results of voting e.g. for accounts older than X days, or only by members of that community, or something. Though that would take significant effort, both up-front and then to stay in compliance with future Lemmy updates if it was not integrated into the main code, and it would only benefit members of your specific instance.
For someone who so rarely downvotes anything - I usually either just block a troll entirely or at least ignore someone who looks like they may be having a bad day yet feels the need to share that with the entire world - I might not be providing much perspective here! But I hope these thoughts at least were somewhat interesting.
I dont see a problem here wont effect the people who sub to sport and thus care cos if all the sports getting downvoted nobody is.
I don't browse by all, I use "sort by scaled" and I still see content from the most popular communities first.
Scaled sort is busted allegedly and the big communities are dominating on all the sort options thats a real problem that needs fixing.
There is the technical issue, and there is the social/cultural issue. I really dislike the idea of just pushing blame to one side as a way justify a problematic behavior without external dependencies.
What do you think is harder:
The first option puts at the mercy of someone else. The second is completely up to the people using it. Seems to me a lot easier to just take some responsibility for my own actions than waiting for the devs to do as I wish.
Its foss go ask chatgpt and submit a pull request.
With your great suggestion, i got an idea for lemmy software : why not activate vote only to subscribed community ? You haven't subscribed, you can't vote. But you can hide /filter the community.
The frontpage also need a rework because when you cross-post it flood thus people tend to downvote those posts. And lot other things.
Hi there, you seem to be getting a lot of pushpack on this, so I thought I'd just chime in that I agree with what you've written, and have noticed the same problems in the smaller niche communities that I frequent. I worry that this behaviour could be a limiting factor in the growth of niche communities, which Lemmy desperately needs more of.
Do you think moderators could or should consider banning users whose only interaction with the community is downvoting posts? It would seem that the user isn't interested in these posts anyway, and the result would be very similar to if the user had simply blocked the community to begin with.
Note that the votes are currently only public to admins, there was an issue to extend that to mods that are modding the specific community the upvote is in but not sure the status on that
edit: seems to have been merged in a day after 0.19.3 released so it would probably be in the next version
Huh, interesting. Do you have link to the issue on GitHub?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4386
What if upvoting and downvoting IS an active method of participating in those communities?
People will never use downvotes the intended way. They haven't done so on Reddit either.
I see no productive use for downvotes, so I've disabled them.
I sincerely doubt it. The main reason might be that people actually think that they are "helping" by downvoting?
In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes? (most especially in the "those leopards surely won't eat my face off" sense)
And tbh, isn't that what a downvote button is meant for? So however sparingly we may choose to use it, can we really complain all that bitterly if others choose to use it more often?
As someone who already follows these guidelines, I believe that most other people will never follow these guidelines. Far worse, even if >95% of the people across the Fediverse were to, that's still an awful lot of downvotes, compared to the number of people that have heard of a brand-new sub that is trying to get up off the ground.
Lemmy is at best beta-version software - the apps I hear are amazing but Lemmy itself is still relatively undeveloped (most of the time lately whenever I try to up-vote something, I have to do it 2-3 times for it to "stick", and getting comments to go through is also problematic, sometimes I have to cancel and try again, across multiple platforms and OSes including Android and Mac, Firefox and Chrome). We are desperate for a place that is not Reddit or X, but if we want something, we have to build it.
My suggestion: make downvotes public, not just to admins and mods but to everyone. Tbh I doubt very much that that would do the trick, but it is a thought to try to help people break out of that system of "I am anonymous so I can be as insensitive to the needs of others as I wish" mindset. i.e., if they thought that there might be consequences, then they might behave ever-so-slightly better? But ofc that would only reach the subset of people who actually cared.
That's the thing. I don't know exactly when it happened, but going from "votes are used to signal what matters to the community" to "votes are used to signal what matters to me" was a monumental cultural shift that can probably correlate with the deterioration of social media.
Literally: yes, e.g. https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.
For-profit enterprises hijacked people's various needs to increase their profits, so that they can haz moar profitz while they earn their profits, as they chase even more-er-est profits. It is the same reason why when you go to a website that you have literally never visited before, much less do not have an account on, they have an icon that looks precisely like a "notifications" button, with a badge saying that you have "messages" waiting to be reviewed. 🤮
At least when piracy websites have such things, they also offer to let you download an interesting item, whereas when you visit a legitimate "news" page that someone sends you a link to, they show like 2 sentences before fading out into a full-page blocking advertisement that lets you sign up to pay money in order to continue to read even more click-baity headlines followed by maybe some tiny amount of content, if you are lucky - and even that is most often like one tiny new fact that happened in the last couple of days or weeks but appearing only after 5 pages of knowledge that has been known for decades, or worse yet they just forgo the latter entirely and the entire article is only a paragraph or two.
I am saying: if the true goal of most news websites was truly to impart knowledge then they could have done so better in the 10-second read of the TITLE itself than all the lead-up to get you to come to that page, full of ads and tricks to get you to scroll down further to see more ads, all while wasting your time reading through something that absolutely was not worthwhile.
I am spoiled by such things as https://www.youtube.com/@crashcourse that essentially throw multiple whole entire college curricula at you - THOSE ads would be worthwhile to watch, for THAT content. That is like turning a firehose of knowledge onto yourself. But then other people want you to watch even more ads, in return for far less content.
Kurzgesagt is another example. Rather than simply downvote others or reply with a childish "your (sic) stoopid (sic)", they instead add to the collective body of human knowledge and experiences by taking an ENORMOUSLY complex subject such as vaccine side-effects, and break them down into <10-20-minute videos that are watchable by the general public, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU. THIS IS THE WAY, imho. But, they already do it, and other corpos want/need to make their own profits, hence they use "tricks" like Google SEOs to increase their own rankings while decreasing those of legitimate content such as these from Kurzgesagt or Crash Course.
So, whatever votes might have once meant, or should mean, then or now, at hand is what they are, for good or ill. Just exactly like how vaccine active disinformation exists, so it is no longer enough to cure a pandemic merely by doing all that hard work to create a vaccine - now you also have to work against the disinformation that exists.
And wrapping back to the matter at hand: while *I* might follow these guidelines, and *you* may do so as well, *most* people will not. The likes of Facebook have spoken, training those kids who have now grown up and moved on to other platforms but now others have followed in their wake, and this is the world that we live in now, for good or ill:-(.
You might also be interested in a reply I gave to another post entirely, so linking it here just in case it helps: https://startrek.website/comment/7601231.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/@crashcourse
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
bruh you literally are advocating for echo chambers
it's pretty clear reading this thread that different folk have different ideas about what or how downvotes should be used. what is intented behavior for one is wrong for another. i doubt that even clearly defined rules would change that as they woud be essentually the same thing - someone's opinion on how it should work. plus different instances have different rules.
I'm sorry, but I will continue to downvote exactly one post in every stupid anime community right before I block it. We don't need a separate community for every single anime ever made clogging everyone's feed with boring pictures of characters.
My single downvote in each community is helping to shape Lemmy as a whole, and I'm certain it's very effective at doing so. It's definitely not just a childish tantrum. No, sir!
For me, downvoting posts means either "this post is not appropriate for this community" or "this post is not appropriate for the 'all' view."
If the community is not relevant to my interests, I just block the community.
Edit: actually, after reading your post, I amend my earlier list. I also downvote posts if the author is an arrogant cock nugget.
You don't know whether someone has a good reason for downvoting or not, and every time you think you do know, you're making yourself a little dumber.
The fact that this post get as much ↓s as ↑s strengthens OPs whole argument.
How does getting ratio'd strengthen the OP's argument? It just shows how controversial it is, which diminishes the support for what's being suggested.
Me: Downvoting for disagreeing and not being interested in the content is a bad behavior inherited from Reddit and the recommendation engines. It should be used in the proper context.
Them: I disagree. Downvote should be used for disagreement. Take my downvote without any context. Goodbye.
If you look at the people commenting, though, you will see how mostly those arguing in favor, explaining why it is bad. There is a tiny group that saying "Yeah, I downvote when I disagree, but only on ". But the large majority of drive-by downvoters are doing just that: sticking their fingers in their ears and trying to push their opinion down.