Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, as far as I understand it the way that fediverse communities work is that whoever makes and moderate them get to decide what they're for, what rules, etc. and then there's a level of emergent culture that arises depending on what users actually engage in the community, even if it doesn't live up to the name.
I can totally sympathise with frustration about what different communities end up being like, and being told "why don't you make your own c/globalnews?" isn't a simple solution. But as others have said, perhaps it's not as bad as it feels to you right now. If you've been the victim of online bullying (which is what someone going through your post history and blanket down voting everything is) of course that's going to feel awful, but the actual down votes are a very small part of the issue. Lemmy doesn't have that many posts, so I come across loads of low (and even negative) rated posts. If there's groupthink that leads to some of your posts being down voted to oblivion, it's not nice to see, but plenty of folks are still seeing your posts. And when I see something in negative votes I will often check it out just to see what's up, and sometimes it's something dumb and awful, and sometimes it's just a unpopular opinion. So while banning down votes might feel nicer, because it would mask all the people disliking your posts, it probably wouldn't find lots of people who suddenly agree with you.
its just a casual suggestion, i am more curious about what it would look like- what it would do to promote a different behavior.. while the stuff about being singled out and targeted is something i've experienced- if i were truly thrown off by that tactic, i'd leave, but i don't see why this conversation must be about that and not the suggestion itself- do you think a system like that would work in the way i picture it? can you see any reason it would not work in a small testable environment? not looking for counseling, not trying to change the world to my preference, not on a crusade to punish people-- but it seems i'm easily caricatured as 'caring too much' or being 'weak/soft' in so many words.
As a casual suggestion, it's fine by me. I like the broad idea of encouraging people to upvote and encourage stuff they want to see more of, rather than focus on down voting stuff they don't agree with. But I suspect most people already upvote much more than they downvote so the ratio of 2:1 wouldn't affect many people's behaviour (although be interesting to see some stats on that!). And my prejudice is the small number of chronic downvoters would work around any rule, just like the freekarma subs on reddit.
So putting aside the technical difficulties, it seems like a change that wouldn't substantial modify general behaviour, and wouldn't prevent bad actors (although it might make their lives a little more hassleful, which isn't a bad thing). I think that's why people have been suggesting psychological solutions, because developing a lemmy culture where people don't care about points is probably less effort and more effective than adding ratios that don't change much. But it's not an awful idea, and if it was introduced it wouldn't bother me. Tbh, I'd be fine with removing all up /down votes and we could go back to forum style of actually writing what you liked or didn't about a post.