Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
Speaking of downvotes, I don’t think comments in a moderated forum should even have a downvote button. Every situation where a comment can be legitimately downvoted, like spam or bigotry or trolling, the comment should just be reported and removed by a moderator, instead.
People’s intuition about downvoting is simply that it’s the opposite of an upvote because that’s how it is presented in the UI. That might make sense for articles, but not for comments.
You didn’t list one of the main uses of a downvote: lowering the visibility of poorly made or unfitting content. If you believe that a post or comment does not contribute to or belong in the community or discussion, your only recourse in most places is to downvote. Yeah ideally mods would remove every such post but that ignores the fact they are few in number, often absent, and generally follow their rules to the letter instead of moderating on vibes.
If it’s poorly made, then you’re supposed to simply upvote other comments if they’re better.
If a comment is unfitting, then it is off-topic and can be removed by mods.
I honestly think comment downvotes should be disallowed, or if that isn’t possible, then the users who downvote each comment should be easy to find, like with a “click to expand and list downvoters” sort of link. I think you’d find downvoters to be mostly trolls and non-participators. Low value accounts.
To me, though, that sounds like calling the police to resolve a mild disagreement. It just escalates situations more than needed and creates drama where things could have otherwise been settled quietly by simply letting the content be buried and ignored.
I believe in using best judgment with downvotes and not simply using it as an “I disagree” button (which is why I did not downvote your comments, as some inconsiderate people seem to have done), but I do believe they have a place. They’re a form of community self-moderation that help keep discussions on topic and civil. I only really use the report button for content that I actually feel is somehow dangerous or detrimental that needs to be removed.
But I also do completely understand the instances out there that do choose to remove the downvote button entirely (check out blahaj.zone for one option if that’s what you’re looking for), and I know that is a preferable way for many to use Lemmy. I have an alt on blahaj myself, but I prefer being on instances with downvotes because it’s nice to see bigoted/heinous content be buried when moderators don’t or refuse to step in.
I think they’re downvoting my comments to try to be funny in this particular situation.
If people used the downvote like you suggest, it would be less of a problem. But speaking of policing, there is no real policing of votes. There’s just a button.
You give people a downvote button, and they’ll simply go through threads going up, down, up, down, up, down. It’s like they double their vote and it drowns out any more ethical downvotes. It hasn’t happened much on Lemmy, but it happens as a matter of course on Reddit. It will eventually be here, too, if Lemmy continues to grow. There is nothing to stop it.
Besides, apart from your point about essentially unmoderated areas, I think the upvote button is enough to achieve all the goals you listed. And if it’s unmoderated, it’s going to become unusably toxic no matter how people vote.
Downvoted