Just wish there were more transparency around counts and content engagement.
I firmly believe most influencer these day were propped up with payed views and botted engagement. Not that lemmy is the same but it all feels so dirty.
In 2025, I think it’s overly simplistic to think of what people say strictly in terms of “like” and “dislike”, as opposed to different moods. It does make for a good polling system though.
It leads to low quality communities banning people who downvote their posts, artificially inflating their engagement metrics
Just wish there were more transparency around counts and content engagement.
Sure dude, I bet that’s the only reason.
Imagine raging against the dude who downvoted you. That reasoning sounds more believable than “transparency”. It was “that much” you had to ask a way to know WHO is downvoting you.
Imagine caring for who downvotes. How dare they.
I’d like to see named upvotes (if that’s already a thing, sorry I’m just a casual lurker couldn’t be bothered to find out)
You know what I’m really against? People asking leading questions in asklemmy.
I firmly believe most influencer these day were propped up with payed views and botted engagement.
How does any of that apply to Lemmy? There’s no commercial interests represented here. I’m not following anyone on Lemmy because of their amount of upvotes. I’ll occasionally look at the heavily downvoted to see if its a opposing view I should consider, but mostly I see those are just trolling/racism/misogyny.
I like the different here over reddit for Karma. There’s no “score” and therefor no incentive for farming Karma and all the negatives that creates. We’re all equal here.
just because you hold an opinion doesn’t make it valid.
Oh? The answer requested by the OP is purely subjective. There is no right answer. Each of our answers is right for us, which is why the OP asked “Why are you personally…”.
There is no objectively right answer here, therefore all personal opinions are valid.
your supposition that there’s no commercial interests here is incorrect. just because it hasn’t manifested yet doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking beneath the surface.
I think the most recent “polish canadian girl” campaign was quite effective and displayed exactly what it was supposed to do.
the NSFW lemmy instance is growing in numbers most recently due to the purge happening at Reddit. those posts are very much economic in nature.
also, there’s strong corporatist agendas on lemmy. sure, there is plenty of political theater and grandstanding made by bots and fools alike but in reality…those can easily sway a nation.
so yes, I’ll admit that your opinion is “valid”, but it’s also unwarranted, baseless, and circumstantial based entirely upon your own limited point of view. that’s not your fault though, it’s your opinion.
it’s funny, opinions, everyone has one about something or someone. but really, we never stop to think, “Does anybody really care about this?”
I sure don’t, I just wanted to extended a bit of “friendly” courtesy to point out the hypocrisy in your own words. In one breath you celebrate the freedom that comes from being unrestrained by vote count–and in the other your unabashedly chastise someone for daring to downvote your opinion and in turn sharing their opinion of your opinion.
Don’t worry, I swear I won’t form a complex opinion of you that’s too harsh. you certainly haven’t said anything that would warrant a strong opinion anyway.
your supposition that there’s no commercial interests here is incorrect. just because it hasn’t manifested yet doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking beneath the surface
Wait, are you agreeing with me that commercial interested doesn’t exist yet? I’m making no claims about the future of it.
I sure don’t, I just wanted to extended a bit of “friendly” courtesy to point out the hypocrisy in your own words. In one breath you celebrate the freedom that comes from being unrestrained by vote count–and in the other your unabashedly chastise someone for daring to downvote your opinion and in turn sharing their opinion of your opinion.
You’re framing what occurred incorrectly. The OP is calling for vote transparency, as in ownership of the upvote or downvote to the person casting it. I’m saying that the ownership of the upvote or downvote is irrelevant. I’m proving my point because I don’t care who cast the downvote on my post.
It would be hypocrisy if I was claiming that knowing the ownership of the upvote/downvote doesn’t matter, and if I then demanded to know who downvoted me. I’m doing not such thing. I celebrate the anonymity of the downvoter. I just don’t put any stock in their downvote, which is my entire point that upvote/downvote ownership knowledge isn’t required or desired by me. Even if you disagree with my opinion, which you’re welcome to, its consistent and without hypocrisy .
Don’t worry, I swear I won’t form a complex opinion of you that’s too harsh. you certainly haven’t said anything that would warrant a strong opinion anyway.
I’m a rando on the internet to you. I am very glad you don’t put enough stock in anything anyone says on a random message board that would cause you any strong feelings positive or negative.
As an instance admin, you can see who voted what. Moderators are also able to view votes in their community. See discussion regarding vote privacy here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
Upvotes are public if you use mbin, not sure why downvotes are hidden
This may be overthinking things a bit but…
I mod a desert of a sub for my alma mater, and I’m pretty sure the same person downvotes everything I post there. No comments, just a single downvote. As a mod I would love to be able to confirm my suspicions, but as a user, I like my votes to be anonymous.
As a middle ground, perhaps the software itself could auto-mod a bit. If a single user only ever downvotes content from a community, and crosses a certain threshold, they might be soft-banned for some number of days with a note in the mod log to the effect of “negative contribution.” After some amount of time, the ban is automatically lifted. If a community mod notices that the same user keeps getting soft-banned every 30-something days (the soft-ban limit plus some amount of time for it to kick back in), they can decide if they want to ban the user.
Because the reason for a vote is personal and different to everyone.
If I see a post with a title containing 20 emojis, I downvote it. Doesn’t matter the content of the post.
Now, assume that post was about fighting for lgbt rights or fighting against anti-abortion legislation. Some moral crusader sees my downvote and immediately calls me a bigot. When, from my perspective, all I did was downvote a bunch of emojis.
Take that idea and expand it.
This. One thing I couldn’t stand about Reddit was seeing people who have so little going on in their lives that they thought it worthwhile to “background check” other posters.
This was a big thing with Twitter too. “Oh, they follow such-and-such in their list of 10,000 follows, who turned out to be bad in recent news, so this person’s views are worthless and they must also be bad!”
Like, being able to have a quick glance and be like "Ah this is clearly a bot / hate-troll / what-haves, can be handy for some sense of accountability, but purity-testing and association-mobs are the stuff of cautionary science fiction, and should be avoided.
I’ve seen it too often on Lemmy too.
Most are of what you describe, but not all of them. I have seen valuable background checks before (back on Reddit). I specifically remember an elaborate post about bots/botnet.
I don’t like your dismissive qualification of “have so little going on in their lives”. Some background checks are good and important. Dismissing people who are willing to invest into that in general, but also dismissing people who “have nothing better to do” for their situation, feels like an awful, uncalled-for, inappropriate insult.
/edit: Rewording to better get my point across.
100% agreed.
I wish people would respond to the comment, not the commenter.
Would be cool to have this feature. More transparency=better.
I prefer votes being semi-anonymous. The vote counts are technically public, you just have to use software that displays them, but that added barrier is enough for most people to never check and that is how I prefer it. I feel like seeing voter names just encourages getting into pissing contests about “why did you downvote me” which I don’t want to happen because: A, votes don’t matter and B, if someone downvoted without commenting they probably don’t want to spend half an hour arguing in comments.
if someone downvoted without commenting they probably don’t want to spend half an hour arguing in comments.
Bingo.
This is precisely my reason for why they should be public.
In my view downvotes should be used sparingly, only to suppress spam and trolling comments that don’t add to the conversation.
By keeping votes private people just downvote anything they disagree with
Back when I first started using Reddit well over a decade ago, voting was explained as “upvote things you want to see more of and downvote the things you want to see less of”. That’s how I still treat it for the most part. I downvote loads of things not because they’re inherently bad or I disagree with the content but purely because it’s not what I want to see.
It’s fake internet points, the amount you have doesn’t matter in the slightest. There’s no reason not to downvote what you disagree with.
This is how you end up with echo chambers.
It’s fake internet points, the amount you have doesn’t matter in the slightest. There’s no reason not to downvote what you disagree with.
The amount on each individual comment does matter, as it affects how the algorithms order comments when showing them to other people.
I think the idea is that what we want to see more of is genuine discussions in good faith using sound arguments, even if we don’t personally agree with the viewpoint.
If I’m just tired of seeing certain types of posts I can block them without downvoting their posts.
Wouldn’t that give trolls a juicy target to harass, thus leading into people not bothering to downvote to avoid the harassment?
That’s what the report and block tools are for.
If it occurs harassment is an issue for moderators and admins to deal with.
So what are you going to do with the knowledge that I downvoted your comment?
You have no reason to so I presume you haven’t.
If we were actually in a discussion and you started downvoting all my comments I’d see it as a sign of pettiness and disengage.
I’d probably also tag you as a reminder to myself not to engage with you again.
You have no reason to so I presume you haven’t.
I’m telling you I downvoted your comment.
You got your answer, I guess.
I guess. I don’t get it. If I refused to talk to anyone if they ever downvoted me, I would run out of people to talk pretty quickly.
Im not but actually I really wish the stuff done with trust cafe was integrated into the fediverse. Up votes and down votes are fine for general recomendations but me being able to rank users is pretty huge.
This seems like a you thing. I mean, with no big algorithmic promotion engine and no immediate reward for upvotes I just don’t see the point either way.There’s like a dozen of us around here and no prize for being popular. Who gives a crap? It’s a little button thingy that helps you feel like you did a thing to the thing wihtout having to write a post and clutteirng the feed. It does its job.
It’d probably lead to lots of small drama and every disagreement getting to a personal level. It’s speculation at this point. I also think a decent chunk of people here aren’t able to behave nicely. I’m not sure if we should grant them additional capabilities.
But it’s not like voting here on Lemmy were the pinnacle of technical advances… It’s an echo chamber for popular opinions and common and often uninspiring interests. I think we could change how it works, as it’s not super great in the first place.
Agreed. What’s your pet solution?
Uh, it’d need to be either a complicated algorithm. I mean I’m often not interested in meme pictures and political news. I’d like the one niche hobby electronics project to float to the top for me. And they’re just not so popular. So I don’t see how voting would work for me in the first place. The other thing that works very well is having separate communities for topics. I can just subscribe to the electronics, disregard the world politics. I think that already helps me half the way. Also multireddits(?) or seperate feeds help. And I don’t really have a good solution for the rest of it, yet. For the comments, i really don’t know. Lots of good answers here don’t even have any votes cast on them.
Well you didn’t ask but I’ll tell my solution anyway! No downvote button. That’s it! In my experience downvoting is almost always about opinion and almost never about the quality of the comment. It’s toxic. It’s the equivalent of shouting “Shut up!” and so obviously discourages more sensitive contributors from expressing themselves. It’s even technically a form of censorship because it makes the comment less visible. It’s useless and pernicious and I don’t get why we need it. End of rant.
I agree with you about meme pictures. Personally I’d love a setting to block all images completely.
Fair enough. There is one big upside with downvotes… And that is people can just click downvote and be done with it and move on with their day. I think that avoids some unhealthy conversations. And people really like to engage when they disagree. And it’s far easier to disagree with someone than to write a nuanced and positive comment. I think a simple downvote allows people to just vent instead of spamming, for some mild cases.
Other than that I also don’t see a good point in downvoting. Sometimes it helps with spam, slop, misinformation and just stupid stuff. But we already have a “report” button for that. And I frequently get singular random downvotes on my comments. And that’s just annoying. I think regarding the voting mechanics, we’d be perfectly fine without downvotes.
people can just click downvote and be done with it and move on with their day. I think that avoids some unhealthy conversations.
I’d heard this argument before but you must put it better because I now understand it. An off-ramp for sterile conflict, basically. Yep that’s fair and I never even thought of it.
Still, fact remains that I personally have never (literally never) downvoted a comment. Which inevitably makes the downvotes I receive feel even more unjust. Can’t win!
Slashdot’s system was a good compromise: no upvoting or downvoting, just labels like “insightful”, “informative”, “funny”, (uh) “troll” etc. At least that forces people to be honest about what they’re really trying to say.
Hmmh, there are some ideas out there. Maybe we’d be better off with these more nuanced slashdot labels, or emoji reactions. I mean they’re not quite the same thing, but we have these emoji reactions on Github where you can give like 6 specific ones like thumbsup/down, a rocket, eyes … And I think some of the Fediverse microblogging platforms have them. It’s a step in that direction. The common argument against them is, we can’t calculate a ranking with nuanced choices and it becomes unclear how to sort the posts.
And i still use some platforms entirely without voting. Like more old-school internet forums. I think they’re fine and fun to use. Sometimes they offer the ability to give stars or medals for outstanding comments. But other than that voting is pretty much absent. I think it immediately makes them loose the social media vibes. But it often changes the atmosphere for the better. But it’s probably really the result of several factors.
I don’t know how to tie this up. Seems we agree, the current mechanics of Lemmy isn’t the pinnacle of evolution. Maybe one day someone implements a better concept. It might take some effort to make fundamental changes, since this is baked into the underlying Fediverse. But there’s lots of room for improvement left, in my opinion 😉
(And it’d probably help lots of users if the ranking and sorting wasn’t just a blunt popularity contest.)They’re usual for non-participants, IMO. When you’re a passive consumer looking for actual information or insight, the sortable comment score is what makes all the difference.
emoji reactions on Github where you can give like 6 specific ones
Forgot about that. Yes exactly, would definitely be progress.
I don’t know how to tie this up
Upvote and move on. :) But still, emojis would be better.
