• haverholm@kbin.earth
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    10 months ago

    My guess is, they aren’t even visiting the forum. They just come across the posts in /all looking for an edgy topic to engage with, and to them people chilling to music is noise 🤷 You’ll notice there aren’t usually downvotes on comments because those people don’t bother clicking through.

    Having used Lemmy (well, Mbin really) for a while, I’m getting pretty tired of the visible votes. I understand they’re useful behind the scenes to gauge what’s “hot”, but I usually browse threads by “new” anyway.

    I’d much prefer not to have the metrics displayed up front, particularly on a fairly chill community like this. People insist downvoting “isn’t a disagree button”, but it very much is. And it’s often a lazy disagreement that bypasses actual engagement, as in writing an actual response.

      • haverholm@kbin.earth
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        10 months ago

        Agreed. I mean, on Mastodon I don’t even use likes myself, and I turn off post stats in the Tusky app. I’d rather reply or boost important things.

        Overall, I’m starting to think that likes and up-/downvotes are a mistake — certainly as visible points. On the one hand, they make you think that clicking a button equals engagement with others’ posts, while the metrics on your own posts can affect your own self worth.

        And for some people the voting system becomes first competition for rewards, then practically combat.

        Just the other day I had a minor disagreement with somebody on here who promptly went and downvoted everything I’d posted over the last week 🤷 So it’s not even a disagree button at that point, it’s a “fuck you” button. Like you said, throwing eggs at random people.

        The only sane reason to use votes and likes is so an algorithm-free system has some way to weight some replies over others (and yes, I know even sorting by votes is a very simple algorithm), but if people vote counter to the intended use of the system — that’s a failed experiment.