I’ve seen a good bit of debate on Kbin surrounding downvotes, so what are your thoughts? Should they exist? Should they be shown separately? Should you be able to see who downvoted?
I personally like downvotes and especially like that they’re shown separately. You’re able to get a much better idea of how people feel about something, and you can more easily express a minority opinion. Of course, there are downsides (e.g., brigades), but I think the pros outweigh the cons.
Downvotes are necessary. Only allowing positive feedback is a disservice to everyone involved.
Agreed. Yeah they get abused sometimes but so does everything online.
They should absolutely exist. Negative feedback is feedback, and expression of only one side of the emotional spectrum is a strange and unrealistic facsimile of actual life.
I was completely opposed when e.g. Youtube essentially removed downvotes. They’re a pretty important indicator of when someone is full of shit, even though there’s an obvious abuse potential as well. As a kbin user, I understand there’s a limited federation of downvotes. I actually think it’s nice, whether or not it’s representative of the rest of the fediverse.
I try to limit my downvotes to irrelevance, spam, intentional douchiness and bad faith participation - as far as I can figure out what’s what. At least while the community seems worth it. Unlike, for example, Reddit, where the proportion of bad faith participation was huge, and the general tone was quite hostile. I like the fediverse better.
Unlike, for example, Reddit, where the proportion of bad faith participation was huge, and the general tone was quite hostile.
Also, sometimes they downvote comments they apparently don’t understand, or can’t be bothered to read closely.
Or for fun randomly, spamming downvote functionality on every recent post (back at some subreddits on Reddit), and that sucks.
I fail to understand why people dislike them and why sites remove them.
Imagine giving a fuck about strangers on the internet disliking you…
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 they only work if people care about it, so double edged sword.
Not from kbin, arrived from all, but I wanted to point out there’s a distinction between
- I care on a personal level that I was downvoted
- I care about seeing the relative measure of this post from the community as a whole
The removal of downvotes on different platforms is often done to address the former concern, i.e. I don’t content creators to get discouraged so I will take away the bad number.
I like the existence of downvotes. They help separate content the community has no feeling about from content the community actively dislikes.
I love that they’re shown separately. This helps separate controversial opinions from ones the community doesn’t care one way or the other about.
I like that you can see who downvoted. Looking at their profile can give some insight as to why they didn’t like the content.
They should exist.
Let me give you an example from a different site: youtube.
Rockstar recently released a video advertising Red Dead Redemption for the Switch, and I have to admit, it does look neat at first glance. The video even has 40k “Likes” and to someone who is used to much smaller numbers, this seems like a LOT of positive feedback. Cool game, eh?
The same video also has 304k Dislikes, more than seven times the amount of Likes, and that’s the sole reason why I took a double take and tried to find out what the heck was wrong with this game that people hated it so much.
Now, on the Fediverse, the entire upvote/downvote thing is a whole lot smaller - no multimillion dollar companies trying to sell stuff, but private people discussing opinions and sharing memes and the like … but the core concept is the same. If someone is behaving like an asshole and gets 20 upvotes every comment, then they might feel vindicated with their shitty opinion because it looks like a lot of positive feedback.
If the same comments also get 150 downvotes at the same time, the statement from the community is suddenly completely different. But this can only happen IF there is the ability to downvote stuff.
Is is a perfect system? Far from it. But I’d still rather keep the ability to downvote for situations like these.
I like having downvotes and I like being able to see who downvoted. It makes it feel more like a community.
This is community-evaluated content, and downvotes are a tool used for evaluation. So I think they make sense.
That being said, I don’t believe they should be public by default. People are nuts these days, especially online, and I don’t want to catch an online stalker or some nazi sliding aggro into my DMs because I downvoted their post.
I don’t love the idea of seeing everything anyone downvotes. It seems ripe for abuse if someone gets a little too salty.
I think there are benefits to being able to see downvotes. By looking at the posts & comments of someone who downvoted something, you can come up with an idea of why. Additionally, it can make people think more before handing out a downvote — if you know that people can check that it was you who downvoted, you’re more likely to consider whether you can actually justify your downvote.
But of course, someone could go harassing people who downvote them (e.g., in DMs), and that possibility can make people less likely to downvote at all. I think that with a good block feature, harassment from downvotes won’t be that big an issue, but there’s definitely good reason to hide who downvoted something. I don’t strongly lean either way.
(And as a side note, I really like being able to see who upvoted something as well. It’s just neat info to know tbh, especially in smaller communities.)
I agree. And I have already seen it. People going to inspect the vote history on all their own comments, then complaining that another person is going around downvoting them. Because I am exceptionally nosy, on 2 occasions I actually went to check to see if it was true. In both cases it did seem to be the case although neither downvoter was really vigorous. Like half the commenter’s recent posts were downvoted by the same person.
OTOH my understanding is that it is required in order for votes/boosts to propagate in federation. If there was a technical workaround that people felt confident in, I think it would be better hidden. For that % of people where it really just makes them crazy and they can’t resist checking.
I’m going to go against the grain and say I don’t like them - I think they can reduce quality of discussion (i.e., encouraging laziness, much easier to hit the down button than explain to someone why they’re wrong and risk getting downvoted yourself).
If we have them though I think you should be able to see who gave them out, the facelessness of it is the biggest problem.
We should have downvotes, but we also should be able to see who up- and downvoted.
If you’re on kbin you can. On whatever comment you just hit more -> activity. Although for whatever reasons the ‘upvotes’ are labeled as ‘favorites’.
Oh, I didn’t know that, thanks for the heads up.
I imagine the “favorite” name is to match with Mastodon’s favorites. Still not a huge fan of the name tho.
Taking away the anonymity of downvoting could make the people think twice before they do, I think.
I want a community that values feedback. Downvotes are a form of feedback (low response effort too!) that anyone who is a part of that can choose to engage with, even people who don’t want a comment history at all. I have used them in the past to reflect on myself, and the community I was a part of as well.
I’d like them to exist but require and extra step to get to.
A slightly different opinion: I think you should have them but not show totals anywhere, that way they can still be used to sort popular posts and comments and to filter out terrible ones, but people don’t judge the quality by the number next to it or obsess over their imaginary internet points.
