Yes. It can also trick you into thinking a reactionary opinion is actually a popular one. For example in my country, ireland, there’s been a few incidents were people of different nationalities have done unsavoury things caught on camera. This usually results of the comment section of the ireland sub to have a debate about whether there’s too many immigrants in the country. Whichever side gets more upvotes is widely perceived to have “won” and bystanders will in turn adopt that position.
I don’t think I’ve ever changed an opinion of mine to go along with the hive mind but the karma system has definitely discouraged me from commenting things because I would been downvoted into oblivion. It’s not worth getting into arguments when you can clearly see people not siding with you.
How does this system solve that? Comments still have vote counts and reactionary comments still make it to the top of threads, there’s just no visible count of total aggregated votes.
You’re correct, the entire system is already in place. The only thing that is currently missing is adding up all of someone’s ‘karma’ from their their posts and having it shown on their profile. Some of the apps already have this implemented since it’s easy to incorporate.
That’s not the only thing that’s missing. A total upvote count on my profile page wouldn’t be the problematic element that Reddit has. I would welcome a total upvote count on my profile page.
I’m fine being downvoted to oblivion by some anti-good astrotufing campaign, but it’s getting honest, legitimate opinions slid down and out of discussion that feels risky
I’m definitely anti right wing, but that doesn’t automatically make the left right about everything.
What is true about both sides is that some people just wanna look for a fight/argument and dehumanize their political ‘other’. It’s easy dopamine and righteous rage that drives engagement in every human.
Any good faith comment that points this out in an argument and has credible examples is always worth its salt.
I actually like finding out I’m wrong or my information is incomplete/outdated. I don’t care for unfounded opinions in myself or others regardless of how they make me feel!
It did the opposite for me. I see those threads in r/canada or other posts and I’d comment trying to get downvoted because I hated the circle jerking and manipulation of threads with cliché comment chains intent on being dog whistles. I hated karma and somehow ended up with a stupid amount of it.
The big thing for me is that I’ve seen a lot of people say they’ve had their accounts stalked and harrassed for saying really mild things. With how many times I’ve read “I read your post history and…” over even the most mild disagreements, I absolutely believe this happens on a regular basis. Dropping an obviously unpopular opinion feels like an easy way to become a victim.
I’ve had my account stalked! Right in the middle of it I switched from Kbin to Lemmy (so I could try out the apps) and had to inform my stalker about the new account.
Frustrated and annoyed at having to look for my posts in many different places, they seem to have given up 🤷
This is a clear win for the Fediverse! I was able to switch instances and get subscribed to all my previous communities in no time at all while this doubled up stalking efforts 👍
Yea there’s some psycho’s out there. I picked a few up. Nothing really crazy from them and surprisingly most of them had poor infosec so I was never too concerned that they were anything to worry about. Really emotionally invested people who don’t like when they read things they disagreed with
100%. I’d even be ok with getting rid voting mechanisms all together. The comment and responses to it should be indicative of it’s quality instead of some vague numerical value which somehow makes it better than the other because more people voted for it based on their own understanding on how a vote works.
Discussions shouldn’t be about what’s popular. Social media has corrupted our ability to have intelligent discussions because non popular viewpoints aren’t entertained anymore and people with non popular viewpoints don’t want to contribute due to the retaliatory nature of likes/votes.
It’s eroding our ability to reason and we need to stop it.
That and the “hivemind” mentality Reddit encoruages often means you get power-tripping mods banning people, not for doing anything wrong, but for “Dissenting with the group”
The average user is probably banned from a quarter of the site over shit like this.
Interesting. How do you know this? That the bystanders looked at the upvotes and decided their opinion on immigration based on this? Were there polls or something?
I mean, it kind of does mean something small, which is credibility. Karma wasn’t ever a flawless way to determine credibility, but it was a decent first pass, like an online ocular patdown.
Example: replace this entire comment with a portion of a highly upvoted comment below from this same thread, combine that with an official experience that only shows one or two top level comments and those copies can also get lots of upvotes. Reddit was rife with these kinds of bots.
You’re completely missing my point. I’m not saying you should worship the guy, but he has more credibility than a troll with negative karma or a 3 month old tshirt bot with a few hundred karma from plagiarized comments.
You’re conflating post karma and comment karma. Post karma is shit and almost everyone on reddit with super high post karma is awful. Comment karma however is often a decent measure of credibility. The problem is people conflate the two, or worse, inappropriately value post karma over comment karma.
If I’m on Reddit it’s to Reddit, it’s not to change my vocabulary and content to fit each individual subreddits niche.
Imagine being in a country bar and a table only wants to talk about and listen to rap music. The rest of the place shouldn’t have to bend to their will or create some safe place for them.
And that makes sense to some degree. I used to mod a large community on re**it and usually rage bait/flaming/troll accounts got filtered out by our automod which was set to 50 karma iirc. Most communities that use a karma filter have it set really low so farming a lot of karma is really unnecessary
Y’all act like that can’t happen on Lemmy. The total score is already visible via API. Nothing’s stopping a community from running a bot that auto removes anyone below a threshold. It’s entirely possible right now to write that code.
I always thought it was amusing if I got into an argument with someone and they downvoted each of my comments before replying as if that meant something. Dude, I already get that you don’t agree with me. Why are you bothering?
That Rick quote is like the wojak where he’s got the smirking mask but is crying behind it. It always cracked me up when I saw people use it. If the downvotes mean nothing, why mention them at all?
Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes?
I’d argue anyone who did that probably had nothing interesting to say and/or didn’t actually care about what they were saying. Same with the people who complained about downvotes.
/me watches some dude post hateful contrarian bullshit on a light hearted comic.
"It’s not even funny and this shit comic comic has been done before. Quit self promoting on reddit bitch!
Edit: Why am I being down voted!? Fuck you know it’s true! Mods temp banned me apparently. I don’t care I’m never going to block her so I can always down vote!"
Somehow everyone who commented on his parent comment has every comment in their profile down voted for the last 50 comments…
I think you are envisioning something a little more intentional/thought out than it is. We do this socially all the time. You gauge the audience and you adjust what you’re going to say to better fit it. Or to upset them if you’re trolling but that tends to be more deliberate.
I bet if you took your comments from a hobby sub/forum/group/etc. you frequent, and then one from a meme community, you will find your tone and rhetoric are very different. And again this is not a bad thing! You are doing and saying what is appropriate for the context. It is very natural to do. But the point is you probably don’t sit down and calculate your exact wording. We just sort of do it, and our goal is generally to “fit in“ or get some affirmation from the community we are participating in.
Yep. I remember someone asking on a hiking sub about a backpack. It was a very fashionable and heavy canvas pack. I hike a good bit and have never seen a pack like that being used by others in the trails, so I said that I wouldn’t recommend that pack. I think it had like 30-40 down votes.
I never gave my opinion on a pack again.
Genuine question, and I don’t mean any disrespect, if down votes are intended to mean people disagree with you, and you don’t know these people, why did you care so much that you won’t share your opinion on things again? I’ve never understood this way of thinking. Maybe I’m just weird but I for the life of me can’t imagine caring that much about what strangers think.
I think the karma system on reddit had a real effect on behaviour. What you often found it did was cause people to write comments for the audience of voters instead of for the person they’re responding to. This eliminates personal interaction between users and turns everything into soapboxing. You stop having real conversations with each other, instead it becomes about pandering to votes.
This then also causes people to vote based on this as well. “You’re not saying what the group wants to hear” downvote is the voting behaviour it creates.
Yeah it’s annoying. Things are far more pleasant when people are actually talking to one another, it creates a more human interaction and you don’t get the kind of bad-faith engagement associated with trying to pander to votes. People self-censor far less as a result as well, aside from instance rules.
The weirdest part is the interactions, I swear to God people is hell bent on their conversations being pre-tainted with assuming the worst possible take on the others side.
It’s like people can’t no longer have different thoughts on the matter without going full civil war in the comments
To be honest I’ve gotten used to that and have had that here with “you glorify Lenin blah blah blah 100gorillion deaths gommunism no food”. I think that’s a specific type of person issue.
The amount of deleted downvoted comments makes me think most people at least change their minds afterwards. Which to me is the real weird part, you hide your opinion so you don’t lose useless internet points…
Reddit just shows one score on the post, it doesn’t show the exact upvote/downvote number. It’s easy to just say “Well everyone else voted this up/down, so I guess I will to”, it encourages group think, by design it’s meant to be an echo chamber.
Imagine you have a divisive opinion, at the end of an hour you have 9 upvotes and 11 downvotes, so it’s at negative one. You’re gonna think you’re being ignored, and others will think you’re unpopular and just downvote you not reading it because it’s “What the group is doing”
I certainly never have changed what I said based on popular opinion. If someone convinces me I’m wrong, I’ll admit it, but just people downvoting me because they don’t like what I have to say? Fine. That’s their prerogative.
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Yes. It can also trick you into thinking a reactionary opinion is actually a popular one. For example in my country, ireland, there’s been a few incidents were people of different nationalities have done unsavoury things caught on camera. This usually results of the comment section of the ireland sub to have a debate about whether there’s too many immigrants in the country. Whichever side gets more upvotes is widely perceived to have “won” and bystanders will in turn adopt that position.
I don’t think I’ve ever changed an opinion of mine to go along with the hive mind but the karma system has definitely discouraged me from commenting things because I would been downvoted into oblivion. It’s not worth getting into arguments when you can clearly see people not siding with you.
How does this system solve that? Comments still have vote counts and reactionary comments still make it to the top of threads, there’s just no visible count of total aggregated votes.
You’re correct, the entire system is already in place. The only thing that is currently missing is adding up all of someone’s ‘karma’ from their their posts and having it shown on their profile. Some of the apps already have this implemented since it’s easy to incorporate.
That’s not the only thing that’s missing. A total upvote count on my profile page wouldn’t be the problematic element that Reddit has. I would welcome a total upvote count on my profile page.
I’m fine being downvoted to oblivion by some anti-good astrotufing campaign, but it’s getting honest, legitimate opinions slid down and out of discussion that feels risky
I’m definitely anti right wing, but that doesn’t automatically make the left right about everything.
What is true about both sides is that some people just wanna look for a fight/argument and dehumanize their political ‘other’. It’s easy dopamine and righteous rage that drives engagement in every human.
Any good faith comment that points this out in an argument and has credible examples is always worth its salt.
I actually like finding out I’m wrong or my information is incomplete/outdated. I don’t care for unfounded opinions in myself or others regardless of how they make me feel!
It did the opposite for me. I see those threads in r/canada or other posts and I’d comment trying to get downvoted because I hated the circle jerking and manipulation of threads with cliché comment chains intent on being dog whistles. I hated karma and somehow ended up with a stupid amount of it.
The big thing for me is that I’ve seen a lot of people say they’ve had their accounts stalked and harrassed for saying really mild things. With how many times I’ve read “I read your post history and…” over even the most mild disagreements, I absolutely believe this happens on a regular basis. Dropping an obviously unpopular opinion feels like an easy way to become a victim.
I’ve had my account stalked! Right in the middle of it I switched from Kbin to Lemmy (so I could try out the apps) and had to inform my stalker about the new account.
Frustrated and annoyed at having to look for my posts in many different places, they seem to have given up 🤷
This is a clear win for the Fediverse! I was able to switch instances and get subscribed to all my previous communities in no time at all while this doubled up stalking efforts 👍
Whenever someone said they checked my post history I immediately considered it a victory and moved on.
Yea there’s some psycho’s out there. I picked a few up. Nothing really crazy from them and surprisingly most of them had poor infosec so I was never too concerned that they were anything to worry about. Really emotionally invested people who don’t like when they read things they disagreed with
That’s how I lost my three accounts and I have completely given up
100%. I’d even be ok with getting rid voting mechanisms all together. The comment and responses to it should be indicative of it’s quality instead of some vague numerical value which somehow makes it better than the other because more people voted for it based on their own understanding on how a vote works.
Discussions shouldn’t be about what’s popular. Social media has corrupted our ability to have intelligent discussions because non popular viewpoints aren’t entertained anymore and people with non popular viewpoints don’t want to contribute due to the retaliatory nature of likes/votes.
It’s eroding our ability to reason and we need to stop it.
That and the “hivemind” mentality Reddit encoruages often means you get power-tripping mods banning people, not for doing anything wrong, but for “Dissenting with the group”
The average user is probably banned from a quarter of the site over shit like this.
Interesting. How do you know this? That the bystanders looked at the upvotes and decided their opinion on immigration based on this? Were there polls or something?
I agree
Ah, c’mon downvoters…gotta keep some sarcasm alive at the same time!
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I mean, it kind of does mean something small, which is credibility. Karma wasn’t ever a flawless way to determine credibility, but it was a decent first pass, like an online ocular patdown.
Uh, no. Lol
It maybe showed popularity. But it was frequently manipulated.
Example: replace this entire comment with a portion of a highly upvoted comment below from this same thread, combine that with an official experience that only shows one or two top level comments and those copies can also get lots of upvotes. Reddit was rife with these kinds of bots.
In ideal situation downvote should not be used for disagreeing but topic relevant and quality. In ideal situation…
Bro I’ve never for a second thought that gallowboob had any credibility whatsoever and the motherfucker had like, all the KARMA
You’re completely missing my point. I’m not saying you should worship the guy, but he has more credibility than a troll with negative karma or a 3 month old tshirt bot with a few hundred karma from plagiarized comments.
Both those cases have 0 credibility from any sensible person as they are functionally equivalent
Hi I’m necrocommenting this old comment, sorry.
You’re conflating post karma and comment karma. Post karma is shit and almost everyone on reddit with super high post karma is awful. Comment karma however is often a decent measure of credibility. The problem is people conflate the two, or worse, inappropriately value post karma over comment karma.
The biggest issue in some places was, even if your opinion is valid, if it didn’t fit the group speak, it would be downvoted regardless.
It wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.
… That’s called popular opinion lol.
Of course it matters where you say something. It’s literally no different than IRL.
If I’m on Reddit it’s to Reddit, it’s not to change my vocabulary and content to fit each individual subreddits niche.
Imagine being in a country bar and a table only wants to talk about and listen to rap music. The rest of the place shouldn’t have to bend to their will or create some safe place for them.
There’s an old saying to “read the room”. It’s the same online and offline. The reaction you get depends entirely on the audience present.
Reading the room is about the tone you set, not the words you say.
People just don’t like hearing that they’re wrong, or that popular opinion is wrong. Questioning themselves makes people uncomfortable.
The tone you set is dictated by the words you say.
And the words you say are dictated by others potential opinions on what you said and the tone you said it
Yes, and Reddit as a whole should be the audience, not the Emos in the corner…
Yes, people definitely did. Maybe not a majority but a lot
That and also many subs wouldn’t allow people to participate if they didn’t have a high enough karma
That was used as a crude spam filter against bots and new accounts
Karma did limit where and how frequently you could post
And that makes sense to some degree. I used to mod a large community on re**it and usually rage bait/flaming/troll accounts got filtered out by our automod which was set to 50 karma iirc. Most communities that use a karma filter have it set really low so farming a lot of karma is really unnecessary
Y’all act like that can’t happen on Lemmy. The total score is already visible via API. Nothing’s stopping a community from running a bot that auto removes anyone below a threshold. It’s entirely possible right now to write that code.
I didn’t. If anything I enjoyed the downvotes sometimes. Your downvotes mean nothing
I always thought it was amusing if I got into an argument with someone and they downvoted each of my comments before replying as if that meant something. Dude, I already get that you don’t agree with me. Why are you bothering?
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That Rick quote is like the wojak where he’s got the smirking mask but is crying behind it. It always cracked me up when I saw people use it. If the downvotes mean nothing, why mention them at all?
Good to remember I guess
Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes?
I’d argue anyone who did that probably had nothing interesting to say and/or didn’t actually care about what they were saying. Same with the people who complained about downvotes.
/me watches some dude post hateful contrarian bullshit on a light hearted comic.
"It’s not even funny and this shit comic comic has been done before. Quit self promoting on reddit bitch!
Edit: Why am I being down voted!? Fuck you know it’s true! Mods temp banned me apparently. I don’t care I’m never going to block her so I can always down vote!"
Somehow everyone who commented on his parent comment has every comment in their profile down voted for the last 50 comments…
Oh I remember those, wasn’t that the brigading train?
I think you are envisioning something a little more intentional/thought out than it is. We do this socially all the time. You gauge the audience and you adjust what you’re going to say to better fit it. Or to upset them if you’re trolling but that tends to be more deliberate.
I bet if you took your comments from a hobby sub/forum/group/etc. you frequent, and then one from a meme community, you will find your tone and rhetoric are very different. And again this is not a bad thing! You are doing and saying what is appropriate for the context. It is very natural to do. But the point is you probably don’t sit down and calculate your exact wording. We just sort of do it, and our goal is generally to “fit in“ or get some affirmation from the community we are participating in.
Yep. I remember someone asking on a hiking sub about a backpack. It was a very fashionable and heavy canvas pack. I hike a good bit and have never seen a pack like that being used by others in the trails, so I said that I wouldn’t recommend that pack. I think it had like 30-40 down votes. I never gave my opinion on a pack again.
Bro you are welcome to elaborate here I mean what can be so controversial about a fucking backpack
Yeah right. I learned my lesson the first time. No more opinions from me.
:)
Genuine question, and I don’t mean any disrespect, if down votes are intended to mean people disagree with you, and you don’t know these people, why did you care so much that you won’t share your opinion on things again? I’ve never understood this way of thinking. Maybe I’m just weird but I for the life of me can’t imagine caring that much about what strangers think.
: C
I think the karma system on reddit had a real effect on behaviour. What you often found it did was cause people to write comments for the audience of voters instead of for the person they’re responding to. This eliminates personal interaction between users and turns everything into soapboxing. You stop having real conversations with each other, instead it becomes about pandering to votes.
This then also causes people to vote based on this as well. “You’re not saying what the group wants to hear” downvote is the voting behaviour it creates.
This so frigging much. People are not having conversations, they are posturing.
It’s like going into a debate prepared for discussing ideas, and the other debater is going for discussing emotions.
Truly fucked up and patently divisive
Yeah it’s annoying. Things are far more pleasant when people are actually talking to one another, it creates a more human interaction and you don’t get the kind of bad-faith engagement associated with trying to pander to votes. People self-censor far less as a result as well, aside from instance rules.
The weirdest part is the interactions, I swear to God people is hell bent on their conversations being pre-tainted with assuming the worst possible take on the others side.
It’s like people can’t no longer have different thoughts on the matter without going full civil war in the comments
To be honest I’ve gotten used to that and have had that here with “you glorify Lenin blah blah blah 100gorillion deaths gommunism no food”. I think that’s a specific type of person issue.
:/
Guess it’s gonna take a while. I think it’ll never get used to it haha
The amount of deleted downvoted comments makes me think most people at least change their minds afterwards. Which to me is the real weird part, you hide your opinion so you don’t lose useless internet points…
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Yes, and there’s a bit of psychology at play
Reddit just shows one score on the post, it doesn’t show the exact upvote/downvote number. It’s easy to just say “Well everyone else voted this up/down, so I guess I will to”, it encourages group think, by design it’s meant to be an echo chamber.
Imagine you have a divisive opinion, at the end of an hour you have 9 upvotes and 11 downvotes, so it’s at negative one. You’re gonna think you’re being ignored, and others will think you’re unpopular and just downvote you not reading it because it’s “What the group is doing”
Reddit is fucking nightmare
I agree but when a sincerly comment does not strive how I expected i delete it and take the thought about it to myself.
Obviously I am wrong, then.
You are right.
I certainly never have changed what I said based on popular opinion. If someone convinces me I’m wrong, I’ll admit it, but just people downvoting me because they don’t like what I have to say? Fine. That’s their prerogative.