this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Technology
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It's amazing how much casually nicer lemmy and the greater fediverse is. You still see some bad habits leaking over from the rest of the web, but then people actually apologizing! and asking others to be nice! And it actually works!
Well outside of some thorny political issues, but that's just human nature.
it's more like the old internet or like old reddit.
As an old Reddit user, that’s why I came here. Just gotta get up the wherewithal to start/ recruit some of the niche subs I enjoyed most now.
I mostly agree but with the caveat that it really depends on the topic and the community. Some communities handle (at least what seems like good faith!) disagreement far worse than others.
Even if it’s not yelling at each other, downvotes are quickly becoming a “I disagree” button and not a “this comment provides no value” button. Not limited to politics either.
Upvotes and downvotes have always been agree and disagree buttons. Reddit trying to pretend they were ever anything else was folly.
Hell, even calling them upvote and downvotes is a misnomer if all you're trying to do is promote discussion. Even then, it's silly to think that most up or downvoted to oblivion comments aren't there for a reason. More often than not it just tells you what that community's and parent comments biases are lol.
Yeah, I've noticed any "capitalism vs communism" comment or post gets a TON of engagement, and it almost always goes down a negative slippery slope. I guess that's why a lot of people prefer to filter out politics related stuff.
That being said, even the worst arguments I've seen here are nothing like I've seen on other platforms, where you think it might spill into someone getting hurt in real life.
I'm useing liftoff and blocking sub lemmets still doesn't work
Don’t leave me hanging bud.
Fewer people, more tightly connected communities... In old Reddit there was a point over which the sub was getting mainstream and then you would get gallowboob and other assorted jerks ruining everything
The downvote button is still abused as a "I don't agree with your opinion" button though...
yeah I don't really know how we can improve on that
I think lesswrong has an "agree/disagree" vote as well as a "this comment is/is not high quality and relevant button"
A "I don't agree with that" button?
What would it do? If it didn't do anything, people would just use the downvote button
You should only get so many downvotes to use per day. Maybe 3.
This is a nice idea that I've seen before, but also one that sort of needs a centralized platform to work well
That's a good point.
That's similar to how slashdot modpoints worked, although both upvotes and downvotes were limited. IMO it was one of the better self moderation systems I've seen.
I do personally wish people were a bit more thoughtful before downvoting, and making them a limited resource could help with that. It could also encourage sock-puppeting if not implemented very carefully, though.
I was thinking about slashdot modpoints too - it did seem to result in better discussion, but maybe everything was better in those days/in my rose-tinted spectacles. (And at this point I cba going back to check...)
There were some oddnesses - I remember someone's signature was "The difference between 'Interesting' and 'Insightful' is whether you agree" which always rang very true to me. Separating upvotes for "funny", "I agree" and "I find this interesting" is already pretty handy though.
I think there's no way to prevent people from downvoting what they disagree with - but maybe if you provided downvotes for "this is wrong" and "this is trolling" people could have an option to ignore the "this is wrong" downvotes and get more diverse opinions.
There's a lot more bad content than 3 per day, though. Also, downvotes have essentially no effect, so the whole mechanism is a bit pointless. Better than nothing, still.
Lemmy already has a huge alt/brigade problem. That would just make it worse.
"I don't agree" -> "the content of this comment is false, because it doesn't agree with what I believe to be true" -> "this comment provides no value, because its content is lies". There's no way you can prevent that chain of reasoning, especially since it's largely unconscious for most people.
I suppose it'd probably be pretty hard to sell people on lies being good, on the basis of lies being good ground for refutation of those lies, huh?
But then I dunno, I'd take like 30 comments of people all disagreeing with some premise in some similar way, compared to like, a 10 comment long reference getting 30 gorillion upvotes, because everyone has to be god's gift to comedy.
That's not been my experience. I keep getting baited by ml power users and then banned for daring to question their orthodoxy. It seems intentional.
That reminds me, I once made my first political post on reddit and that got downvoted to oblivion. I would like to see how that exact same post would perform here on Lemmy.