I think upvoting and downvoting should be removed in its current form. There should be a way to report content that doesn’t contribute to conversations or is hateful and if you want to know how popular a post is go off of alternate engagement metrics like views/comment count.
I genuinely see no benefit to upvoting or downvoting if the above mechanisms are in place. Upvotes are something many folks get obsessed with and downvotes are too easy to spam, especially on a social network that consists of mostly anonymous users. This post is a good example - it’s adding to the conversation and trying to spur engagement with the community but at the time of me commenting it has -1 upvotes (via Voyager since it aggregates downvotes/upvotes). What is the point of these mechanisms - they should be left to Reddit and the fediverse should innovate in this area and make something better than what we already had.
Appreciate the comment. I agree voting in theory is a good idea but I think a majority of people use it as not intended and it’s creating a net negative experience for the social media that utilizes it. Too many people use downvoting to show dissatisfaction with an opinion instead of the intended this doesn’t add to the conversation. Dog piling is a major issue IMO, psychologically many see negative votes (or many downvotes) and are inclined to treat those comments or posts with more derogatory comments or oppose the commenter before even reading the full post or comment. That’s a very real general example of functionality that’s shutting down engagement and being contradictory to the intent of the social media system being used. For a specific example, browse all with the new filter on lemmy and look at how many posts get downvoted right out of the gate that are perfectly legitimate posts for the communities they’re posting in. The moving good content to the top of your feed intention of upvotes doesn’t really work well in the fediverse without algo based feeds and the top filter could easily switch to views and comments to get the desired results without all the downside of how it is now.
If this were a minor issue I wouldn’t be commenting and would support the standard just ignore votes spiel but it seems to be that most people cannot handle the current voting system so I still see no benefit to them in their current form. The fediverse is the perfect environment to iterate and innovate on a system that doesn’t work as intended.