IMO, one of the things that made Reddit deteriorate in quality was the cultural change in how to use votes. Early on, voting was meant as "this is interesting/not interesting for the community". It was only later (maybe around the time that Facebook got heavy into the algorithm recommendations based on reactions ) that voting on a post/comment started to mean "I like/dislike this" and "I want/do not want more of this".

What ended up happening is that contributed to the "filter bubble" effect. People started relying on voting as a way to customize their feeds.

None of this works with Lemmy, because we don't have (yet?) a good recommendation system or a client that can filter/sort the posts based on the user's voting history. So we are stuck with the worst of both worlds: people are downvoting things that do not help them to manage the content, and people from other "niche" communities are being met with downvotes just because their content is not appealing to the majority. Ask people from non-english speaking communities, and they will tell you that any post is immediately voted down by people who are not related at all with the community.

I still think there is value in the downvotes. When the person voting has already established some authority at the community where the post/comment is being made, a downvote is a good signal about the relevance of that post/comment to the rest of the community. For this reason, I don't think I'd remove down votes from my instances.

However, can we start working on a set of guidelines to help users understand when it is appropriate to vote in a post/comment?

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[–] Moghul@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ask people from non-english speaking communities, and they will tell you that any post is immediately voted down by people who are not related at all with the community.

The problem there is the language filter is garbage. I shouldn't be seeing languages I don't speak anyway. I don't downvote those posts but I've blocked so many communities at this point... It doesn't seem like it's even a very hard issue to solve. Remove the undefined language option. Each community has to set a default or mandatory language for their posts. Make the language filter in the profile work.

As for downvoting and upvoting, it's impossible to police how people vote. There's no way I'm going to upvote something I disagree with because it's on topic. I'll report any post that's offtopic.

[–] weeahnn@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah at this point I have quite a few communities blocked just because I cant speak that language. So no downvotes from me.

[–] KISSmyOS@feddit.de 4 points 8 months ago

Sort by new comments, hide the votes and go on with your life.

[–] INeedMana@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

I'm not a moderator, I don't have an answer and don't really have a horse in this race (personally I care about number of comments more) but I think there is one thing this discussion would be a good place to include.

If downvotes are supposed to mean "this post is not useful in this community", then what should be the dividing line between downvote and report?
But then if downvotes are "I don't like this", then news communities might have a lot of negative values

[–] promitheas@iusearchlinux.fyi 3 points 8 months ago

This is how I try to approach voting on here. Even if I post a comment disagreeing with the OPs take ill still give them an upvote because it made me have a conversation

[–] Zeus@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

honestly this is a part of why i basically stopped using lemmy a few months back

(i think it's partly what put martineski off too, although i don't want to speak for him)

not my own comments, but i noticed more and more comments being downvoted for daring to say something controversial. i remember back before we had to have the "this is not a disagree button" hover text on reddit, now we don't even have that

[–] UsernameHere@lemmings.world 3 points 8 months ago

Why do people pretend they know the reasons or intentions behind their downvotes?