• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I agree that it would be better if people used votes as a marker of quality, but strongly disagree on moderation action based on voting.

    Personally, there’s three scenarios when I use downvotes w/o commenting:

    • Someone has already voiced the reason

    • I don’t have time/energy to comment

    • The target is a censored echo-chamber that will ban anyone who disagrees (can’t vote/show disapproval if you’re banned) - example would be .ml communities having moments about how stalinist USSR did nothing wrong.

    Anyway, once a post from a community rises sufficiently to pop up on all, it becomes a part of the larger discussion, and voting will shift towards the opinions of the larger fediverse. This is also usually when communities get discovered by more people. If a community doesn’t want the engagement of the wider user-base, a closed blog may be more suitable as a forum, or alternatively have an instance w/o downvoting.

    When browsing all or new I do so both to break out of my bubble and to vote on content (usually stuff I find interesting).





  • That’s because it’s supposed to be. I was on Reddit for a decade until their management shit the bed, and these kinds of problems weren’t a thing there despite the much larger userbase.

    For the record, to me it’s less about privacy and more about setting expectations. I’m not anonymous online, I’m pseudonymous, I’ve had this handle for a long time. I am my online identity, and when I post and vote I don’t feel anonymous, even if I’m relatively protected from someone knocking on my door or messaging my boss about a statement.

    If voting “ledgers” aren’t presented in the discussion, that’s because they aren’t intended to be part of the discussion. This reduces the value of influential individuals votes (ooh Bill Gates liked X, Kamala Harris disliked Y etc.) and shifts focus to how the community values of the content. It’s the same reason that we follow communities rather than individuals. We get an internet “hive mind” of sorts without cult of personality.






  • If we look at any of the big social media platforms with public votes, that has not prevented voting abuse through bots and the like. Rather it has served to fuel online harrassment campaigns and value of influential individuals votes (ooh Bill Gates liked X, Kamala Harris disliked Y etc.)

    Aggregating votes rather than having individually visible votes serves the purpose of shifting focus to how the community values of the content. It’s the same reason that we follow communities rather than people.