Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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This might be a real unpopular opinion but I think the down vote is a broken feature. We do need some kind of vote to help the best stuff rise to the top, thus the up vote. Down vote basically says "I disagree with your opinion but I don't have a strong enough rebuttal to engage in the discussion to explain why". A basic agreement doesn't usually add a lot to the conversation unless the comment itself comes with additional context, a disagreement requires some level of dialog as to explain why. It encourages this bubble hivemind instead of open discussion. Really makes me miss how popular forums were in the mid 2000s.
It doesn't really stop spam, we have stronger mechanics for that like reporting, moderation and spambot tools. Plus posts without any engagement usually just fall off pretty quickly without reaching a wider audience.
Then you have your trolls who collect down votes. Having a vote score of 1 is way less compelling for a troll than -15.
Edit
4 down votes without discussion, we've just proved the point.
Eh, up votes are just as likely to be an "I agree/like" rather than a topicality, importance, or quality indicator. And it's just as likely to be done without any engagement worth seeing.
This is also a way to form bubbles/echo chambers since sorting by anything but new will surface just the stuff most agreed with.
If down votes are broken, then all votes are broken. The only way for voting to be not broken is to have them not change what all users see. You'd have to use some other metric for sorting that isn't time based, and specifically exclude any vote based sorting at all.
Which is entirely possible, and I think that's the way it should be. Keep votes because they work to filter out useless comments to some degree, but don't let them matter.
Downvote do have a role... It sort of reading the room.
Sometimes the hot take is too hot, sometimes person literally spouting wrong information with confidence of ChatGPT. You don't always have to engage.
All of this is true in "natural" social media tho once it becomes big enough too many bad faith actors get involved and no consensus can be built
I agree that it's a broken feature, but I disagree with the idea of simply removing it and calling it a day. It is useful; the content that surfaces up might not be always the best, but the content near the rock bottom is typically shitty.
In my opinion the best approach would be to force some feedback from the user while they're downvoting the content. It doesn't need to be fancy, nor to go against the pseudo-anonymous of downvotes; just something like a pop-up asking "why are you downvoting this?", followed by 5~6 options (for example: "disagreeable", "rude", "factually incorrect", "unfunny", "off-topic" etc.). In that situation, even if people downvote you based on opinion, it's damn easy to detect and say "nah, they just disagree with it".
Love this idea. Down vote is severely lacking a why and ultimately doesn't change anything but good reasoning can go a long way.
I am not proposing that you'd need to write down why you're downvoting the content, but that you'd pick an option. As such, the ability to say "ew" or hurl an insult would be zero.
And the goal here is not just "to protect sensibilities", but to force the downvoter to provide at least some feedback. Because a lot of what makes the current system feel awful is that downvotes are interpreted as "this is bad", but nobody can be arsed to tell you "why" it's bad, in a way that you could fix.
People who mass downvote, with or without scripts, are better dealt separately - it's vote manipulation, those people shouldn't be voting up or down on first place.
You're still doing two clicks to downvote someone, instead of just one. And in the meantime there's always some room to think "why am I downvoting this again?"
And perhaps I'm judging other users too much based on my own usage of the downvote button, but often I'd rather have a way to say why I'm downvoting it - because someone were rude, or because they're babbling bullshit, etc. I tend to believe that other people are like this too, but perhaps I'm wrong, dunno.
For reference, Slashdot uses a similar-ish system; except that it does it towards people voting up. I see "types of upvotes" problematic because often good content checks multiple boxes, but the rough idea works.
The problem with this approach is that chronological sorting leads to a lot of trash, as people know that their shitpost will be still highly visible for the others. Kind of like 4chan.