I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
Somewhat off topic as the question was answered: Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I believe votes should be scrapped all together. Make it chronological per default with the option to sort by count of comments in the last 24h. I hate the beehive mind that gets promoted with votes.
I disagree. In theory, the crowd-sourced curation and moderation is a great concept. Comments still accomplish that to some degree, but I like the votes.
There are a lot of problems. Bandwagoning like you mentioned - people are more likely to up/downvote if they see it’s already going one way. And the almost opposite problem, where low-effort votes only look at a headline or title without clicking through or actually reading the content.
But to me it’s almost a moot point on Lemmy anyway. Sorting by Hot or Scaled surfaces new content heavily regardless. Even when it’s spam and getting downvoted to oblivion, seems like the posts still show up on my feed just by virtue of being recent.
Yeah, i like the concept of crowd-sourced curation as well and it it’s a privilege to not be in much need of it right now. If the community grows too large and so the spam we are receiving a voting system might be the knight in shining armor.
I still would then hide the score though. So maybe don’t scrap the whole voting system but just hide the score behind some menus per default so the sorting algorithm can still be transparent.
It is unpopular, because there’d be no way for communities to distinguish quality vs. poor quality or trolling content.
Voting in itself isn’t necessarily the issue. It’s users being able to see those scores that feeds the echo chamber.
It affects posting and commenting habits because people quickly learn what’s popular and what isn’t. That leads to both self-censorship and just shouting out popular views for validation without putting much critical thought into it.
It also primes users to approach posts or comments with a strong bias - positive or negative - based on the up- or downvote count before they’ve even read a word.
You are right. Thankfully Mlem (Client) is fairly customizable so I can disable it client side.
To be clear, most users can’t easily see votes. Only community moderators can quickly access vote data within communities they moderate - and instance admins can see all votes. Yes, people /can/ go to lemvotes, but it’s often just not worth it.
I think it being transparent in this way is good for the fediverse.
I think in this case they just mean the total count and score, not who voted what. For that, I think most clients readily display it. I see it on both the desktop website and in Voyager.
Should be pretty simple to make a client display things like that without voting UI stuff
Yea, I use Mlem and have it disabled everywhere i’m able to. Do not see an option for that in Photon.