Better than disabling it:
- Understand it - low score boils down to “people don’t want to see it”. Everything else is assumption, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
- Deal with it - you won’t be able to please everyone all the time.
- Vote - if you see some post/comment that you feel like undeservedly downvoted, by all means, upvote it.
I still wish that downvoting was multidimensional though. Negative feedback is important.
Negative feedback is important.
Exactly. Without it, we’ll have the same problem that YouTube has without dislikes, where a video with a hundred likes and a thousand dislikes appears as a generally liked video…
Could you elaborate on multidimensional up-/downvoting?
Imagine a system that works like this:
- upvotes - a simple click, as it is now
- downvotes - you click the downvote button, and then specify a reason from a list (disagreeable, unfunny, inaccurate, off-topic, rude, disingenuous, etc.)
So it’s a bit like Slashdot, but only for negative reactions.
Each “reason” would be a dimension, as now you can measure content by funniness, accuracy, etc. And one of the effects of this system is that, if you are being downvoted, you’ll have a better grasp on why. It’s considerably more useful as feedback, for users in good faith.
(It has a few additional advantages too; for example custom sorting filters, and the very fact that a downvote takes a tiiiny bit more effort than an upvote should encourage positive feedback over negative one.)
Don’t worry about it. Many heavily downvoted posts are also clearly in violation of either the community or instance rules; e.g. non-news posts in a news forum, or bigoted posts on instances that don’t permit that.
If it’s in violation of the rules, report it. Don’t just downvote.
Well, in my personal experience people become emotional and downvote you about trivial comment that don’t break any rule. For instance, I was recently donwoted to hell for saying that I despise Mozilla and prefer to use Brave instead of Firefox. 🤷♂️
To be fair, that does kind of, sort of, pretty much sound like heresy.
But why? Why can’t I use a browser that work better for me and that I find more visually pleasant? It is this sort of hivemind thatg ruins communities. Also, for me heresy is not a negative word.
It was a joke. I was joking.
Cool ;-)
Mozilla followers are like a cult members. Mozilla has done a lot of good, but it’s far from perfect, but some people just refuse to accept any negative comments about it.
It’s partly why I joined lemmy.one as they disable downvotes.
Oh good, downvotes still work here.
Yes they’re meaningless internet points, but downvotes serve a real purpose.
Also beehaw
Just engage, if you disagree with people. Engagement is much more useful than just donwoting and exposes different point of views.
