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Do you think the Internet and websites with 'voting' systems encourage hivemind thinking and discourage any debate or discourse? Solutions? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I 'upvote' more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone's entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example).

Think about one person in your life who you first thought was a complete asshole and once you got to know them they were pretty cool, maybe you became best friends with them. The point is, judging a person based on a minute snippet in time is a fool's errand, and your own state of mind contributes a lot to your own judgement of people. Your next thought might be, well they have a history of x, y AND z, so they deserve every bit of judgement coming their way! I would ask you, why? Are you not simply fueling further hatred, vitriol and division? So instead of stopping for a moment and thinking about the world from someone else's perspective, you'd rather just spit out some more hatred and move on like that person doesn't exist?

I would love to see some solution to the shitty state of the Internet. I only say Internet because for the most part this doesn't happen in real life in my experience. I think it has to do with consequences and social sigma and so on. I reckon it would be pretty awesome if there was something like the following:

all upvotes are free range, people can give out upvotes like they were candy
downvotes come at a "cost", whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

In an ideal world, and setup, this would help raise positivity in the world and have people at the very least have a second thought before being negative.

Yes I understand there would be flaws, I've worked with and used computers for a long time, I know. I chose not to delve deep into those as I feel that would defeat the purpose of the message I'm trying to convey. And, you know, lead by example.

What do ya'll think? Any suggestions to boost positivity in the world, I'm all ears, smash them and any other thoughts in the comments.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Having experienced platforms with just upvotes, and platforms with up/downvotes, I really think downvotes are bad - for me at least.

I think it encourages laziness - much easier to just downvote someone than actually critique them. It also makes me hesitate to post something mildly controversial or against the grain through fear of being penalised. I'm speaking for myself here - I'm guilty of both of those things.

That's one of the reasons I'm on Beehaw, because Beehaw doesn't federate downvotes I can neither see them nor give them - and it just feels like a much nicer Lemmy experience - and I feel like it makes me automatically nicer to people as well.

(n.b. You can hide downvotes in settings on any instance, but you can still see them by hovering over the score and it still affects comment ranking - unless you're on Beehaw or something else that does similar)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Never heard of Beehaw, I'll check it out. And yes, the chilling effect is a real thing, unfortunately. Sorry to hear you've felt that way about posting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm surprised, it's one of the larger instances. Just be aware that Beehaw doesn't federate as widely as most instances - in my opinion you get a better signal-to-noise ratio like that but not everyone wants it.