Casual Conversation

No dice, looking at the scores on recent comments I've made is how I microdose dopamine.

I’ve had downvotes disabled for over a year now. If someone takes issue with something I said, they can come and tell me directly - a downvote on its own carries next to no value, so I don’t even want to see it.

I suppose you could make the same argument for upvotes too, and I wouldn’t be opposed to hiding those from everyone either. But in my case personally, I don’t see any downside to them. It’s good to know that there are at least a handful of people who agree with my views. The main issue with visible upvotes on social media in my view is that it encourages saying stuff just for the applause. There's a ton of people here whose entire comment history is just snarky one-liners.

I never looked at or considered uovotes and downvotes, so, who cares if they are enabled or disabled.

You don't need confirmation from strangers online to feel confident...

It sounds like Mastodon is more the experience you're looking for. The votes are integral to a service like Lemmy and it's a weird sentiment

Not sure if other UIs have similar granularity, but in Tesseract you can also:

• Disable downvotes (won't show downvote count OR the downvote button; upvote arrow turns into a heart/like button)
  • Basically, if you don't want to see downvotes, you also can't give them out.
• Disable scores (it just indicates your vote)
• Both

Scores Disabled

Downvotes Disabled

Both Scores and Downvotes Disabled

I'll have to figure out where to do that, it sounds like what I'm looking for. (Edit: Well, that was easy. Found it in the settings. Love that it's so simple.) I finally decided to let my reddit account drift off into the void a couple weeks ago, it was really hurting my mental health. I'd had the account for over 10 years and have high 6-figure post and comment karma, but like... I recognize that doesn't really mean anything, but the way it's gamified, whenever I'd make a controversial post or say something stupid or wrong and get even -1 karma, it'd ruin my day in a serious way. I felt tied to the platform, like I constantly had to "perform".

I was getting kinda lonely after leaving, since I also don't really have any social media outside an instagram that I just post my photos on, which is when I stumbled across Lemmy. I am feeling really nostalgic for the old days of forums, but sadly it seems outside super niche communities, forums are dead.

Anyway, very long story short, I'm a reddit castaway looking to just chill and talk with a smaller community of strangers for a bit. This casual conversation community seems nice.

It's quite nice and refreshing indeed. I did it for a while, but then reactivated them to check how the posts I was making were doing in terms of visibility.

Definitely something that less active posters can do!

I did that a while back too. It's remarkably liberating.

nooo you're gonna make the downvote bullies feel all powerless, how could you!

Anyway, since this topic is back on let me get back on my soapbox:

comment score should be hidden by default, while the algorithm still works behind the scenes. This prevents dogpiling and karmafarming (even though karma doesn't do shit on Lemmy, but this could change in the future I guess) and would make for a more comment-centric experience instead of vote-centric.