What annoys me about Reddit-like communities (yes including Lemmy) is that there’s this downvote feature.
The whole idea of these discussion boards is to have… discussions. Well, perhaps not so much this particular sub lol. So it’s annoying when you make a post or reply to someone with a constructive reply or argument, and then people can’t be arsed to actually reply, they just downvote to disagree and move on. It’s like the equivalent of people just going like “lol no” and then walk away.
Frankly it’s a feature that feels like it completely contradicts the point of online forums.
But also downvoting is very useful as community moderation tool. I participate in some communities with regular, scummy spam posts that are technically off topic and not quite bannable. They’d get naive, hype driven upvotes if left alone. And I like that there’s a community mechanism to bury them.
What annoys me about Reddit-like communities (yes including Lemmy) is that there’s this downvote feature.
The whole idea of these discussion boards is to have… discussions. Well, perhaps not so much this particular sub lol. So it’s annoying when you make a post or reply to someone with a constructive reply or argument, and then people can’t be arsed to actually reply, they just downvote to disagree and move on. It’s like the equivalent of people just going like “lol no” and then walk away.
Frankly it’s a feature that feels like it completely contradicts the point of online forums.
I agree.
But also downvoting is very useful as community moderation tool. I participate in some communities with regular, scummy spam posts that are technically off topic and not quite bannable. They’d get naive, hype driven upvotes if left alone. And I like that there’s a community mechanism to bury them.
Yeah I don’t think it’s entirely useless, it’s mostly useful for filtering out spam posts and unrelated stuff from communities.
Just on a comment/discussion level it feels like it’s not that great.
There are instances who don’t have 'em and even frontends that allow you to hide it.
That’s one reason I picked blahaj for my instance- no downvoting