As the fediverse continues to grow, let’s reflect on some of the things that we disliked most about posting/lurking on reddit and what we can do differently now that we have a chance to build something new.
“This”
soooome people are always >:( >:( about people commenting this when you agree with something, but tbh, it literally hurts nobody, why so angry lol?
It adds nothing. It hurts, however trivial to you, the amount of valuable information on screen at once.
thisn’t
Because the vote button is literally right there. If all you have to say is “this” without contributing further points or examples, it’s better etiquette to just participate with your vote and leave the discussion for those that have things to say.
And while one person breaking etiquette isn’t the end of the world, masses breaking etiquette creates the cesspit of lazy memeified circlejerky comment sections we had on reddit. It’s a slow shift in culture, and it’s one that we’ll want to stave off as long as possible.
thisn’t
can we stop calling everything porn?
Using voting on a post or comment like a yes/no poll. I think we should rather upvote if the comment is interesting, or related to topic and actually reply if we disagree with comment.
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“funny” bots
Like haiku bot, “all words are in alphabetical order”, And character bots (think kenobi or vader bots in sw subs) that add nothing of value to the actual discussion. -
reddit sings / ask oija
Posting song lyrics line by line is kinda fun,
But it also doesn’t add anything of value. -
this is the way / catchphrase spam
Also void of any actual discussion.
Just blind repetition. -
negative subs
This one is probably controversial but, Stuff like gamingcirclejerk, nicegirls/guys, gamingcirclejerk, enoughmuskspam.
When you actually like the subject you just get the worst parts of it / its community rubbed in your face,
If you dislike it, its just the worsts part of a thing you hate hilghted daily pissing you off.
And imo if these subs lack an influx of “natural content”, it becomes zealous, seething and unfair.
Also the peak of irony always was, whenever enoughmuskspam was the only musk related post on r/all
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downvoting for disagreement. people on reddit treat upvotes/downvotes as agree/disagree, when they really should be used to promote thoughtful and good content, not necessarily what you agree with. If you think someone is participating in a thread properly, and promoting and inviting discussion and making the place better (even if you disagree with them) you should upvote instead.
reddit all too often let “lazy” comments float to the top because they were agreeable with the masses, but low effort.
It’s a good point, but very difficult (maybe even impossible) to achieve. Downvoting to disagree is a kneejerk reaction that is very easy to do, so it’s going to require a lot of self discipline to avoid - and I don’t think you can expect that from most people.
I don’t even really think that there should be downvotes. Just different categories of votes, kinda like how Fark does comments with ‘Smart’ and ‘Funny’ votes.
Generally, shifting away from a binary system could be beneficial. What would be the options? What’s enough but not too many options to cover the gamut? Maybe two types of positive (“I agree” and “This is quality”) and two types of critical options (“I don’t agree” and “This is poor quality”) ?
Granted, you could easily replace the two arrows with a four-part diamond (❖) with those two axes … but I have a strong suspicion that nearly everyone who’s going to vote “I don’t agree” will also vote “This is poor quality” except in extraordinary cases. It’s just human nature: one would be disinclined to explicitly acknowledge the quality of one’s antagonist.
I’m not sure I want to feel like I’m doing a psychological evaluation or political survey when I’m liking a post. Up and down is fine.
While a better system might be one where you can apply a range of reactions to a post, that would probably make things look cluttered and spammy (if a post has a dozen different reactions on it)
The upvote/downvote system seems like the most useful one, at least right now while people are migrating over and these sites are in the expansion phase
@AnonymousLlama I like forum software that offers a range of reactions (ala vBulletin / XenForo). The default reaction could be a simple “Like” with an additional click or two required to change the reaction to Informative, Agree, Funny, Sad etc. Two of these reactions (probably positioned last to add that extra little bit of friction) might be Disagree and Off-Topic.
But if this is too convoluted, maybe just cap the number of downvotes a post/thread can get. So if a post gets 5 (or whatever the cap number is) downvotes, additional downvotes do not change the downvote counter. This would discourage “piling on” but there’d still be an indicator that a post might be poor quality or contentious. On the other hand, upvotes should probably be unlimited (or have a higher cap number) to encourage positive feedback.
unfortunately true. it would be nice to avoid though
I avoid it on my instance by disabling downvotes
Of course downvotes can be ironic such as the one I’ve just added…
My instance just drops external downvotes, so it’s all the same thing to me :)
okay, but in a social environment like the fediverse it kinda doesn’t matter what your instance does: up and down votes are entirely to do with other people, and their instances still show all your down votes
disabling downvotes on your instance just means your local communities don’t have down votes: your posts on other instances still do!
