I used multiple social media platforms and I can say in medium confidence that downvotes are almost useless to see for users.
They are made to influence the algorithm and that’s it, if you are really bothered by them it’s because you saw something you were never intended to see.
Reddit try to communicate this by showing you only one number for the total score and they are trying to not show you if your post score became in negative.
Matter of fact, I personally find downvotes pretty refreshing for me because I expect to hear something I don’t know or a passionate criticism on my opinions or posts.
I think what could discourage me from posting is the lack of comments, not the downvotes.
Note: If you are really bothered about downvotes, you can disable showing down votes on the web client and in the mobile clients by changing that option in the settings.
Downvote if you agree.
I understand getting upset if you made a good faith argument and it gets a ton of downvotes. I still think it’s valid, but I understand why others would disagree.
But people here (and on Reddit) are way too sensitive to them. I have seen too many comments here with “Edit: why am I getting downvoted? Explain yourselves” when it’s got 10 upvotes and 2 downvotes.
Some trolls downvote everything. Some people have bots that downvote everything. Some people have bad reading comprehension and will downvote things they would agree with. Once you assume a baseline level of negativity you’ll stop taking things personally and start enjoying interactions more.
I disagree but my instance has downvotes disabled so i can’t downvote you like you’ve requested :p
I got free Unlimited pure true downvotes on my instance.🫂
[FreeBSD approved virtual hug, No homo]
Or perhaps just let people disabled downvotes if they don’t like them :). I’m not hurting you, in fact, I can only upvote.
I don’t like the fact niche hobbyist communities on lemmy often have half their posts downvoted because people saw it on c/all and downvoted for no reason.
I think upvoting and downvoting should remain a feature for sorting posts, but the scores shouldn’t be visible to anyone. Making scores public encourages people to say what’s popular and discourages them from expressing unpopular opinions, even if they believe them to be true. Humans are social creatures, and we care too much about what others think. If you agree or disagree with someone and want them to know, you should tell them directly rather than anonymously ranking them.
PieFed also just shows one number.
Downvotes bother me because they impact the visibility of my content, especially on small communities
THIS is the reason.
Downvoting is literally a form of censorship. It’s the virtual equivalent of shouting someone down.
I sort by Top Daily.
That means that whatever downvotes you will get, I could still see your post.
I am sure that I am not the only one who does this as I first learned of this option on another social media website called Tildes by a user comment and since then it had become the default for me in all the social media websites I use.
If I only 1 upvote and 2 downvotes, my post would get buried for everyone and you would probably never see it
Downvoting is intolerance made cheap. It’s a button to say: “You’re wrong, I don’t care what you have to say, LA LA LA LA SHUT UP”. If you did the equivalent of downvoting in an in-person discussion, you would be an asshole.
But what really annoys me personally (someone else mentions it) is that downvoting reduces the visibility of the downvoted opinion. It’s literally soft censorship.
I regularly leave discussions after receiving cheap downvotes in return for my carefully considered contribution. It’s a statistical certainty that I’m not the only one.
Downvoters should consider the opportunity cost of their actions for the quality of the discussion they are taking part in.
I tend to downvote obnoxious comments, or ones that it’s clear the commenter is in love with the ‘sound’ of their own voice. I tend to leave the ‘carefully considered’ ones alone because they add to the conversation unless they stray too far into the above categories.
Interesting. Of course, “obnoxious” and “in love with their own voice” are highly personal judgements that are pretty vulnerable to motivated reasoning. In other words: if they were making a point that you happened to agree with, perhaps you wouldn’t think those things.
I definitely see where you’re coming from. At the same time I don’t tend to get involved in deep discussions where I have strong feelings, on the Internet. I save those for in-person with friends.
I guess I am just very sensitive to tone and (what comes across to me as) arrogant people, and I have downvoted obnoxious comments on all sides of an argument before. I try to be aware of my bias, but nobody’s perfect.
Of course YMMV, but I find blocking people like that (especially on Discord) make my Internet experience much more pleasant.
It’s human nature for people to feel upset by their message being undermined…but they should be able to get over it.
The bigger problem I have is that the downvoters don’t know how to USE downvotes. Instead of downvoting inaccurate content or engaging in any reasoning, people just downvote what they personally don’t like and disagree with. Which is bullshit.
You can also just stop careing about other peoples opinions in general, 99% of humans suck.
We’re as free to stop caring about what other people think as we are to stop enjoying the taste of sugar. It’s not impossible, but it’s incredibly difficult. For most of human history, being disliked or ostracized by those around you often meant death. You don’t just wake up one day and decide to override such a deeply ingrained instinct.
You are less free to not consume sugar as its pushed into everything, you can ignore other peoples opinions.
You just entirely ignored my argument.
Bonerman is out here asking for 99% of humans to suck him! What a day!
If you’re bothered by social media votes, you need to go outside more.
Social media isn’t real. It’s a poor simulacrum of human interaction. Find real human beings to interact with and whatever they think of you, tell you, or how they treat you in your face matters.
But whatever people become and how they behave once they hide behind a screen and cast simplistic one-bit click-clicks to express complex human feelings and opinions doesn’t.
Downvotes are disabled
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Create a browser extension like return YouTube dislike, but for Lemmy.
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Pay someone to downvote my post.
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Get outside your house at night and scream “I hate you Joker!”, hopefully the local news will cover it and then I would hear it and I would know that was you.
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Fourth option.
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I admit to posting shitty comments sometimes, just because I feel some adversity is nice. Lemmy seems pretty uniform, politically. That just annoys me. So I get a fair share of downvotes. In general, I don’t take online discussions in comment sections too seriously, though. I mean, you can’t expect people there to actually research and listen to arguments. It mostly seems like emotional venting/searching for confirmation of your bias to me.
