Yes they are. No matter the intent that is what they are.
Spot on. Upvotes/downvotes are for voting on the quality of comment only in theory. In practice, they are agree/disagree buttons.
No they aren’t.
It would be interesting to see how people would behave if you had both a “Disagree” and a “Low Quality” button. Would it make any difference, or would people who dislike it also hit the low quality button out of spite?
It’s a bit of an unwinnable battle. People will always use it as disagree button
Earnest question- what is it supposed to be used for? I don’t downvote people very often, but I think I’ve only ever seen it used express approval or disapproval so that the score reflects community sentiment
How is it supposed to be used?
However you want to use it.
In addition to what others said, in comments the down vote is meant to be used on comments that don’t further discussion in good faith.
I used to subscribe to that idea, but I’ve since changed my mind. If the far majority use upvotes to mean agreement, then me upvoting a controversial, but well structured, opinion will likely be viewed as agreement as well.
It’s a nice idea to think the voting system is meant to promote discussion, instead of homogenise opinions in a community.
Yeah, that’s kind of the nature of communication I think, and ultimately votes are a form of communication :/
If people understand them to mean agreement or disagreement, that’s the message they’ll recieve regardless of whether it was the message that you were trying to send.
I guess if I wanna convey I appreciate someone’s contribution even though I don’t share their perspective I can always leave a comment; that seems like something I’d appreciate seeing in my inbox so maybe it’s worthwhile for me to make that a habit
Yeah that’s something I do sometimes as well. I usually just don’t vote on a comment as a third option for when I disagree with them, but don’t want to punish having a different viewpoint ^^
Ok but even if its for something else everyone else is still using it for that. And on another note, why shouldnt i use it to show disapproval?
when a post doesn’t fit the community purpose or is generally inappropriate
Isn’t that where you use the report functionality?
I guess that’s usually also the basis on which I disagree with someone 😅 most of the time if I’m downvoting someone it’s because I think they’re being unkind, which I consider being inappropriate
Thanks for sharing your perspective with me :)
I always thought a downvote was just a silent “Booooooooooo!”
That’s what it should be, a “booo!” for lazy and willfully ignorant comments.
In practice most people downvote any take they disagree with, no matter if it was expressed well, written respectfully, and contributes to the conversation.
I’ll stop using the downvotes as a disagree button when everyone else stops using upvotes as an agree button.
I actually think up- and downvotes are inherently asymmetrical in this respect.
Upvoting things you agree with is fine and a main use of the function. Why then is downvoting things you disagree with wrong? Because the purpose of voting is visibility, you upvote things you want people to see, like arguments you agree with, and downvote those you don’t think people should see.
Now if you believe in having an open discussion you don’t want to suppress posts just because you disagree with them. Disagreeing is fine, so downvoting is reserved for posts that detract from the conversation.
Two wrongs do not make a right
no, but three rights make a left.
Only if they are far rights!
Yes they do.
I think this kind of voting system intentionally places the content people want to see (i.e. agree with), at the top which increases active users.
But it doesn’t stimulate healthy debate and definitely doesn’t encourage going against the mainstream.
Slashdot had a more interesting system that let only a select number of people rank quality and set a post category (like funny, informative, etc).
I think it’s a nice sentiment, but you can’t change emergent behavior just by saying “this is wrong”
This is wrong.
As a rule of thumb I downvote any post that mentions being downvoted or complains about the reaction to a post or comment.
I will give this whole thread a pass, though 🙂
Apparently it’s the button you press to get banned from a community.
ASK ME HOW I KNOW
Fine, I’ll do it, how ya know?
Got banned for downvoting.
Wow. Truly never saw that coming.
How I know?
So stuupid 😆
Well, just add a ‘disagree’ button so there’s no confusion.
That’s just the Uber disagree button now.
A lot of those are joke downvotes, well mine was.
I downvote anyone complaining about downvote out of principle.
I first upvote it, so more people see it and it gets more downvotes, then i revisit later and downvote, which then decreases by 2.
Found Satan.
I’ll also down vote anyone using up votes as some kind of metric for their post/comment being inherently right/good
I’m the same! If the comment contains the word downvote in it, it’s a DV. I even downvote my own haha! It’s a silly little reminder to myself how little they matter
I even downvote my own haha!
You’ve upvoted this one though. 🤔
No, i’m one of the 6 (current) downvotes 8 people upped it. Not that it matters but aren’t upvote histories available? If you really want to see can’t you actually check on lemmy? I’ve heard about this but never tried
You haven’t on this post.
Is that link to this thread? It keeps taking me back here.
I don’t know what to tell ya, but you’re wrong fella.
Are you the type who apologizes when they are proven wrong or disappears?
Oh I’ll disappear! Although it’s usually from.my attention wandering. 🤪
The weird thing is, my “view votes” on that post is showing an upvote.
Most be some kind of federation issue - if I had to guess, you get an automatic upvote when you post (which federates) but if you then change it, this may not.
Mine wasn’t.
Communities trying to have alternate meanings for upvotes/downvotes must keep in mind that people scrolling posts across communities won’t generally notice the community and if they do they won’t read the rules and will vote however they want. Trying to force them to follow some silly community specific process is tilting at windmills and bitching about it is embarrassing.
Fr like if you don’t like the way people are using the downvote feature why make a post whinging about it and not just make your account on an instance that has it disabled???
aren’t they the instance admin themselves?
Even funnier tbh
Indeed, and this is a pinned post on Ye Power Trippin’ Bastards. Posters ask if their bans were justified. Downvotes bury the post, preventing an audience from making their opinion about it.
Sadly one can’t disable downvotes per community
Because it has a legit use. It’s just also used to create an echo chamber.
If you believe that people can be just a little responsible, it’s better to have it around.
I disagree
I couldn’t even post an album there because the instance apparently sees external imgur albums as image spam or something stupid.
That’s not true. What kind of error are you getting?
It is true, you can literally check for yourself. And there is no error. I didn’t even see it as removed from my side on mbin, like with a mod removal, and thought it wasn’t federating as there was neither upvotes, nor downvotes, nor comments, until I checked the modlog on your instance.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog/961853?page=1&actionType=All&userId=7088902
This is because you linked multiple images in the same post and you got marked as spam. Just link one album link
I linked 1 album with IIRC 5 images as the thread submission, and a link to a screencap of the modlog, along with some links to the relevant posts and stuff in the body. What exactly was the spam part about this that deserved to be flagged?
The post links are badly formatted. Can you try reposting it but make each link be a proper hyperlink on the text? I want to see if it happen again. I think it’s because of too many @ signs, whbich was what the spam bot was doing to ping mastodon users
What do you mean by making it a proper hyperlink? I just posted the URL without any special formatting to make the URL itself visible, since they get automatically converted into hyperlinks. At least from my end on mbin. I’ve learned that Lemmy does not properly format line breaks / paragraphs so maybe that doesn’t even work either. But if I’d have to format them as hyperlinks I’d effectively double the @ signs in those URLs too, since I’d add them once as text and once as a link.
Though, I only had one user name with the @ signs in the title, but afaik titles do not ping users. The rest were the @ signs to the various community / instance links.
I can repost it as it was originally since I saved it before removing it myself. Although I also did a quick ninja edit in the title to include “(Album)” at the end, to make it clear that it is more than one image. Not sure if that triggered something too.
By just using markdown. like this
There was a persistent spam wave where they followed similar behaviour of posting too many image links. I can’t see the exact rule now but I’ll try to review later to see why you were caught as a false positive
