this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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This is one thing I’ve been trying to figure out, I keep hearing this a lot. What exactly is different with the upvotes and downvotes? Do they not bury comments and posts or something? Serious question just trying to be informed
At least in the app I’m using there is no cumulative score for your upvotes/downvotes, so people don’t care about it.
Also comments don’t seem to get hidden due to downvotes thankfully. That was always a stupid system.
Tbh I wish that the comment voting system didn’t exist, or that to downvote you had to write a legit reason why, and everyone could see the votes and reasons. Shit reasons would take away your ability to downvote temporarily, extending further the more you do it. Too many people just use it as a disagree button.
i hate this so much about reddit. a lot of users abuse this system so much to hide your comments so nobody sees them anymore.. they just vanish because usually users don't click unhide.
even if you are nice in the comment and are in the right.. if someone dislikes your comment they can pull out their twink accounts and downvote it. and if a comment is at around -3 to -4 or similiar, most users just click downvote without actually reading it.. because "others have downvoted that comment so it has to be right. downvote click"
its just so toxic on reddit..
Doesn't even have to be downvoted heavily. If you bash the admins/powermods, your comment gets magically collapsed, even if it's near the top. I don't know how that happens.
admins and mods working for reddit (the paid ones) have "tools" to do such things. thats also how /u/spez manipulated user comments who said fuck spez etc. - also how they manipulate /r/place currently. they just paint a huge black square or checkerboard over images they dislike.
Some mods basically thought their job amounted to having a power downvote… they’d banish comments they just didn’t agree with, not abusive, but just something they didn’t like and control the conversation that way. That’s one thing if it’s really their sub, but pretty lame if it’s something like /r/Portland and you’re not allowed to disagree with whatever the mods think on a topic, or even discuss other viewpoints.
Yeh I had this happen to my comment once, but it wasn’t even abusing the mods or anything, it was just not the circle jerk reply the mod wanted. It was one of the most upvoted comments on a post, and all of a sudden it was gone from the top. Lo and behold it was now collapsed down the bottom with a huge positive score. Absolute joke.
Yep, reddit works with upvote and downvote bandwagons. Often (though not always) the first votes on a comment or post determine how the whole thing will go, especially with the self-reinforcing sorting. I noticed what you said about downvotes too, that if someone has an slightly hard to interpret, ambiguous or sarcastic post, once a few people downvoted it, other people will assume it’s a “bad” post and be more likely to down it themselves. Also you can post the same comment on similar threads in the same sub 2 days apart and the results might be wildly different depending on timing, placement, or just who saw it first.
i'm around 12 years on reddit, and votes & how good a post or comments gets welcomed by the communitys on reddit feels kinda random to me.
you can post like you said the same thing at random times, and it will be either welcomed or punished to hell. i had times where i tried to find out if time & timezones have something to do with, but even when trying to post on specific times this didn't changed much.
after all this years, i decided for myself posting on reddit is like a dice. you roll and either win or fail.
edit: sorry for the horrible english by the way. my motherlanguage isn't english so i often have still issues with finding the right words for things :/
Ah, very Reddit of you to type a comment eloquently and then apologize for your English!
(I say this in jest! First-language English speakers would use apologies to pad out their fake AITA stories. Also your writing is totally fine!)
See, I don't see a problem with using it as a disagree button, especially since the count is useless on Lemmy. My client (Jerboa) does give a cumulative score, but again, in the absence of The Algorithm™️ it's just notational. Sometimes a shit take is just a shit take, and it's not worth fighting with trolls. Downvote and move on.
I will say I 100% agree that I like that the up/down ratio doesn't auto-hide a comment. It was too easy to manipulate the system on Reddit, and sometimes a (genuinely) unpopular opinion was insightful.
Though. I really would like to know who that one user is that seems to just downvote everything. I think almost everything I've seen lately on Lemmy seems to have exactly one downvote. I like to imagine there's just one super angry dude like NO on everything.
There was a time when Reddit showed not just the sum of upvotes and downvotes, but the counts of both. The best comments were always the ones with hundreds of both up and down.
Then they hid that, and you needed to use RES to resurrect the downvotes. Then they removed the separate downvote count entirely, replacing it with the controversial tag. Problem is that the flag didn't differentiate between 5/3 (+2) and 5000/4998 (+2).
That was the end of Reddiquette, and the beginning of Reddit's decline into mediocrity.
Do we know their reasoning behind replacing it with the tag?
They started inflating upvotes for sponsored content, about six years ago? It’s around when /popular/ became a thing. Posts with +1000 suddenly had +7000 or more.
Could an instance on Lemmy go commercial and try to do something similar? Let’s say .world continues to outgrow the others and in a year or two it’s time for them to capitalize on their size.
I guess at some point some instances will go “rogue” in one or more ways and it will be interesting challenges to the fediverse to deal with it.
Honestly I have no idea! Can instances fake numbers like Reddit did? I mean, they could use a bunch of bit accounts to fake upvoting and downvoting I suppose, but it’s all public info here instead of all being hidden.
I agree with the dislike button thing. I’m using wefwef so it’s basically an Apollo clone so I can see my cumulative stats so I guess to me they mean something. I guess everywhere has its own system so it’s a side effect of decentralized community.
Edit: removed a word
but.. do most people actually care? i stopped caring about my cumulative amount after a specific amount (currently i'm at 319.056 Post-Karma, 91.827 comment karma). its just too much too care anymore for me. if it goes down or up.. i don't really feel it anymore or even care. i think the whole cumulative score of votes isn't really fullfilling anything purposefull.
how do you feel about such a cumulative score? does it triggers dopamine for you? for me it is "meh", so i'm interested in how other people experience this.
Doesn’t matter much to me as far as high score type fulfillment fluff but as someone who likes stats and something to reference information about where I’m at is interesting at least and appreciated for the sake of being knowing. I always love video games that had a full stat page on the options like gta
It’s a tale as old as time:
you do something and number go up? Dopamine
you do something and number go down? nopeamine
I wish the system existed as is but was 100% hidden except for the OP.
It's cool to know that a topic got a hundred thousand upvotes and was the highlight of the day.
But there's literally no reason to know if someone is currently being brigaded or boosted, it just preempts and primes what judgement they receive. Remove that, and ragedownvotes are gone as people who do it will exercise no power and no influence.
Lemmy already has another improvement: We can see who's downvoting you. Every downvote is public and comes with names. So if you personally brigaded, you can go to the admin with evidence and those people will get their vote rights removed, or will get outright banned. But I still think that's not enough. The "this person has a bad score, I'll downvote then" is bad and should really not be a thing, I wish we just removed it.
Comments weren't originally hidden due to downvotes on Reddit either... That's a relatively recent change and it sucks.
I don't really take issue with downvotes being used as a disagree button as a general rule but I can also see room to improve the system someho, too.
As long as they never add any “punishment” for being downvotes then I guess it doesn’t matter. On Reddit downvotes we’re used to reinforce the echo chamber and to essentially silence differing opinions.
Ooh ooh I like that a lot to downvote you must reply.
I think it would almost instantly solve a lot of the issue with the system tbh. Making people not only have to justify their downvotes, but have those justifications be visible means that their bullshit and brigading would be seen and called out/dealt with.
That's actually another thing I've seen here, if you do get brigated there's a pretty good chance people will come by and balance you back out . And read it once you had a couple people shove you on a box nobody ever saw you to come take you back out.
It would be nice to not have drive by downvotes, though I don’t always have the energy to explain or reply to someone. About the shit reasons though… how is that determined? Do we have to uh, vote on the reasons too?
While third party apps do track total up votes there is no "karma". So unlike Reddit having 60bajilliondie points means nothing to anyone but you. Don't even think I can see someone else's points.
You could with certain apps... Someone shared someone else's tally in comments on a post yesterday... Can't remember which app it was though.
Voyager is one I assume, because I can see your scores on your user page.
Sorta yeah. Comments seem to mostly be sorted by new to old. Upvotes do matter... But not as much as 'Boosting' does to push content to your frontpage.
Why everyone just doesn't hit boost is beyond me but eh. It feels like boost is meant for those especially relevant and nice posts you definitely want others to see vs casually clicking.
I believe Boost is a Kbin thing.
New is definitely the default comment sort that I've seen at least using Jerboa with lemmy.world...
I've never seen this boost option you're talking about though...
I see now that you're on kbin so I wonder if that option only exists there.
From my new user experience it seems like active comments get placed higher regardless of upvoted. i.e. comments that are still being commented on or new ones.
What if I told you they didn't mean shit over there either?
I get what you're saying - that we don't have a "karma" score associated with our username - but the votes do drive what people see first when they view a particular community or the "front page" so they do matter.
They didn't really mean shit on Reddit either except to the high score obsessed and people who intended to sell their account to be used by bots and scammers.
And downvotes especially don't mean anything since they aren't even enabled on blahaj.zone :)
I don't really feel like they meant shit on reddit either. As far as I know high karma doesn't give you any additional benefits but perhaps bragging rights if it's something one is proud of.