what if you are only granted 1 downvote per 2 upvotes you assign-- this would have a triple effect of promoting a more positive site-wide image and make downvotes twice as meaningful while also preventing abusive brigading of users-- just a thought- is the idea even feasibly applicable?
except that it affects sorting and thus visibility-- it does matter, after all. it doesn’t even have to be 2:1 you could go 1:1 and see folks who do nothing but downvote suddenly have to engage and support growth
Then sort by New. That way you see everything regardless of the score.
oh i do… when anyone is allowed to target someone with a hundred downvotes, literally clicking through their post history to do so, just dilutes and damages the data / meaningfulness of those actions. believe that each instance has an interest in that data, whether you do or don’t.
I think if someone is sad and obsessive enough to go through a user’s post history to give a hundred down downvotes… Then they’d probably also be fine with scrolling through All and up voting two hundred posts first.
I would imagine my ratio is at least 20 upvotes per downvote, but I still wouldn’t want it throttled. A lot of my down votes are when I think something doesn’t belong in a community, and I feel like I’m contributing positively to lemmy by downvoting inappropriate or dreadful things. If they were rationed I’d be tempted to just avoid contributing to 'save them".
If there was going to be a weird rule about downvotes, I’d be more tempted to limit them to members of the communities. That way people on All don’t downvote some niche post that isn’t to their tastes but is perfect for the little community it was posted to.
so if i were to post something in ‘world news’ but there is a very clear and decisive groupthink that doesn’t allow different positions air to breathe, what then? again, that’s ‘WORLD’ news
Yeah, as far as I understand it the way that fediverse communities work is that whoever makes and moderate them get to decide what they’re for, what rules, etc. and then there’s a level of emergent culture that arises depending on what users actually engage in the community, even if it doesn’t live up to the name.
I can totally sympathise with frustration about what different communities end up being like, and being told “why don’t you make your own c/globalnews?” isn’t a simple solution. But as others have said, perhaps it’s not as bad as it feels to you right now. If you’ve been the victim of online bullying (which is what someone going through your post history and blanket down voting everything is) of course that’s going to feel awful, but the actual down votes are a very small part of the issue. Lemmy doesn’t have that many posts, so I come across loads of low (and even negative) rated posts. If there’s groupthink that leads to some of your posts being down voted to oblivion, it’s not nice to see, but plenty of folks are still seeing your posts. And when I see something in negative votes I will often check it out just to see what’s up, and sometimes it’s something dumb and awful, and sometimes it’s just a unpopular opinion. So while banning down votes might feel nicer, because it would mask all the people disliking your posts, it probably wouldn’t find lots of people who suddenly agree with you.
its just a casual suggestion, i am more curious about what it would look like- what it would do to promote a different behavior… while the stuff about being singled out and targeted is something i’ve experienced- if i were truly thrown off by that tactic, i’d leave, but i don’t see why this conversation must be about that and not the suggestion itself- do you think a system like that would work in the way i picture it? can you see any reason it would not work in a small testable environment? not looking for counseling, not trying to change the world to my preference, not on a crusade to punish people-- but it seems i’m easily caricatured as ‘caring too much’ or being ‘weak/soft’ in so many words.
As a casual suggestion, it’s fine by me. I like the broad idea of encouraging people to upvote and encourage stuff they want to see more of, rather than focus on down voting stuff they don’t agree with. But I suspect most people already upvote much more than they downvote so the ratio of 2:1 wouldn’t affect many people’s behaviour (although be interesting to see some stats on that!). And my prejudice is the small number of chronic downvoters would work around any rule, just like the freekarma subs on reddit.
So putting aside the technical difficulties, it seems like a change that wouldn’t substantial modify general behaviour, and wouldn’t prevent bad actors (although it might make their lives a little more hassleful, which isn’t a bad thing). I think that’s why people have been suggesting psychological solutions, because developing a lemmy culture where people don’t care about points is probably less effort and more effective than adding ratios that don’t change much. But it’s not an awful idea, and if it was introduced it wouldn’t bother me. Tbh, I’d be fine with removing all up /down votes and we could go back to forum style of actually writing what you liked or didn’t about a post.