Asklemmy

43399 readers

1053 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Should downvotes require a summary textfield? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by ganymede@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

across a variety of modern up/down vote based platforms, some make it a personal mission to avoid downvoting (the only real exceptions when someone is being utterly objectionable, ie. ridiculously racist/sexist etc or blatant spamming ^(1)^

in general, it is almost always better to have a respectful discussion than mindlessly downvoting and moving on. if two parties can meet for respectful discussion the outcome is almost always superior to the text-book divisiveness of a downvote war etc ^(2)^.

in a great many cases people usually find they don't disagree as much as previously thought, have their mind opened to a valuable new perspective, or at worst accept to disagree respectfully. definitely a better outcome.

yes it is time consuming, but don't we all generally want quality over quantity?

^(2)^ the original idea of a self-moderating community through up/down votes is a good idea, yet appears to have been hijacked by the modern social-media-type weaponised web, which is being turned against humanity to divide and polarize us against eachother. and is particularly suspectible to bot manipulation.

^(1)^ which can have eg. their own flags

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

For example its illogical to downvote a topic or eg. song from a music genre you personally dislike

Why is that wrong to do? Votes are preference, and completely up to the person voting how they want to use it. Other people don't have to follow anyones rules for how they vote.

[–] ganymede@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Votes are preference, and completely up to the person voting how they want to use it.

That's fair, I was going to add a note about this at the end, but thought my comment was already getting a bit long.

You're absolutely right its ultimately entirely up to whatever method is preferred.

My statement about logical vs illogical was within the context of the 'method' I was proposing in the OP. (Specifcally as an effort to counter what I perceive as the hijacking of vote systems for polarization and manipulation on many larger platforms. )

There's always tradeoffs and no doubt my proposed method has several overheads, which might even prove unmanageable at scale anyway.