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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] 7 points 1 year ago

Most posts I come across on lemmy/reddit, I do not vote on at all. I upvote when it is the same thing I was going to say, or when it is extraordinarily insightful or otherwise something more people need to see. I downvote when it is plainly objectively wrong or doesn't add to the discussion at all. The vast majority of posts and comments are neither of those. For example, I haven't voted on anything in this thread.

I liked the old structure of phpBB-style message boards where posts were just sorted chronologically and if there was a voting system, it didn't affect sorting. I found those a lot more engaging and they facilitate actual back-and-forth debate rather than naturally turning into one-sided circlejerks. I am not sure they can scale to current numbers of Internet users though; we would have to test in practice how to make that structure work nowadays.

Stack Exchange already has a system where if you downvote, you lose one reputation point, a small deterrent against downvoting.