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Do you think the Internet and websites with 'voting' systems encourage hivemind thinking and discourage any debate or discourse? Solutions? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I 'upvote' more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone's entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example).

Think about one person in your life who you first thought was a complete asshole and once you got to know them they were pretty cool, maybe you became best friends with them. The point is, judging a person based on a minute snippet in time is a fool's errand, and your own state of mind contributes a lot to your own judgement of people. Your next thought might be, well they have a history of x, y AND z, so they deserve every bit of judgement coming their way! I would ask you, why? Are you not simply fueling further hatred, vitriol and division? So instead of stopping for a moment and thinking about the world from someone else's perspective, you'd rather just spit out some more hatred and move on like that person doesn't exist?

I would love to see some solution to the shitty state of the Internet. I only say Internet because for the most part this doesn't happen in real life in my experience. I think it has to do with consequences and social sigma and so on. I reckon it would be pretty awesome if there was something like the following:

all upvotes are free range, people can give out upvotes like they were candy
downvotes come at a "cost", whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

In an ideal world, and setup, this would help raise positivity in the world and have people at the very least have a second thought before being negative.

Yes I understand there would be flaws, I've worked with and used computers for a long time, I know. I chose not to delve deep into those as I feel that would defeat the purpose of the message I'm trying to convey. And, you know, lead by example.

What do ya'll think? Any suggestions to boost positivity in the world, I'm all ears, smash them and any other thoughts in the comments.

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[–] alvvayson 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I recognize the problem you have described and I wish there was a solution.

I just don't know what the solution is.

Voting definitely helps filter out trolls and nonsensical comments. And more intelligent people actually learn from the down votes that they can rephrase their opinions to make them more palatable.

I, myself, regularly get down voted to oblivion when I express an opinion a bit too crudely. And that actually helps me finetune.

I also regularly just delete comments with lots of downvotes. If nobody is going to see it or appreciate it, I might as well clean it up.

The thing is, there are no visible down votes in real life, but people do form negative opinions.

It becomes more problematic when the hivemind votes down very valuable comments, because they don't fit the narrative. It's a bit like cancel culture.

For some reason, it works out much better on Lemmy than on reddit. I suspect reddit is filled with networks of bots and Lemmy isn't. Also, I think the Lemmy user base is still a bit more intelligent and mature. Kind of like early days of reddit, slashdot, usenet.

Once a platform gets overrun by the masses, the average intelligence and maturity reverts to the mean of the population. And we all know what that means.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

It's not an easy problem to solve. 'ppreciate ya.

[–] Candelestine 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Since you sound like you appreciate the principled approach, I'd like to encourage you to not delete downvoted comments. They can be used for other people's learning too, not just yours.

I've often spent a half hour staring at a particular downvoted comment, trying to brainstorm all the directions the downvotes could realistically be coming from. This can be helpful sometimes, and is much easier to do when they aren't routinely deleted.

It's not "messy" any more than people are, and much like writing down your work in math, it helps leave a better trail to see how online thought and discourse evolves over time.

What I'd encourage instead is to add a labeled edit that includes your revised thoughts and how they evolved through your process. That's what I usually do anyway, people don't seem to mind.

[–] alvvayson 1 points 8 months ago

There is an egoistic reason though.

Just in this thread, OP is being called out by others for another comment they made in their past.

It's just easier to keep a clean history by deleting unpopular content.

Most people have clients that filter negative comments out, so too few people will see it to make it worthwhile.