I think I’ve settled on the latter. Disagreement is maybe best communicated by the absence of an upvote? And downvotes work best when they signal something that is just off base, and while not reportable, is not appreciated at a broad cultural level.
100% you should feel bad. I hope everyone i downvote cries themselves to sleep
Sooo … if this is sarcasm I’m not sure I quite get it? People shouldn’t be so sensitive about downvotes and the like?
Does the thought of the person, that you plan to downvote, crying themselves to sleep make you happy? Then you should downvote them. I think that’s what they wanted to say.
I stick to the original “Reddiquette” which I wish more people stuck to or even fucking READ for a start.
Downvotes were meant for off-topic and spam nonsense. They were NEVER meant for disagreement. If you disagreed with someone you were encouraged to comment in response. It fostered a much better and interesting community with people of differeing views not afraid to voice their dissent.
You would literally get right and left-wingers having heated but civil debates with each other and neither would be getting heavily downvoted. Can you imagine that happening on Reddit nowadays?
When Diggers and the general populace jumped on Reddit downvotes just turned into a spiteful and underhanded way of saying “Fuck your opinion and I don’t feel like justifying it”.
This resulted in echo chambers where people were too afraid to voice their true opinions cos they’d get downvoted and at worst banned from the subreddit by over-zealous mods who’d forgotten what downvotes were for.
I have a personal theory that this accelerated the polarisation of politics across the English-speaking world. Maybe if Republicans* didn’t get so heavily downvoted they wouldn’t have turned to places like The_Donald and 8chan to vent in like-minded echo chambers. They could discuss things without getting villified and have their views challenged in a civil manner.
*NB. Shouldn’t matter but to be clear I’m a left wing Brit. I’m just using Donald Trump/Democrats as a will known divisive issue.
I LOVE Lemmy because it has the oldschool Reddit vibe where people will disagree and neither person is downvoting the other. They just have civil discussion. Much better!!
Personally I NEVER downvote unless it’s utterly meaningless, pointless or just downright spam. I recently added one more trigger for me to downvote though: Low effort bullshit like “This” or puns that add ntohing to the conversation except to garner upvotes for their ‘comedic’ value.
There’s difference in disagreeing in opionion and thinking someone is just wrong. In the latter case, I find it reasonable to suppress their comment using downvotes.
Originally up- and down votes were intended to crowd source filtering and rating content in a community. So voting up for things you want to see more of and vote down spam or content that is unfit for the community. But people will tend to upvote things they agree with and downvote those they deem wrong - I also find myself doing something like that. I now try to follow these rules:
- Upvote things I like (or agree with)
- Don’t vote on things I don’t agree with or think are dumb
- Downvote things that I feel really don’t belong here.
It helps that lemmy currently shows the number of up and down votes instead of just the score, it gives a bit more inhibition before downvoting stuff.
I think wrong information and rudeness should get downvoted, nothing more.
