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

  • emb
    5·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • Vogi@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      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.