this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
675 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
4202 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The "upvote good, downvote bad" mentality needs to die. As others have said, the arrows are to promote/reduce visibility of content. Whether you agree with the content of the post should be irrelevant.
People have been saying some variant of this at least as far back as Slashdot in the late 90s. Nobody has come up with a viable way to change peoples habits.
Instead of fighting it, what can we do knowing that this is how it works?
New idea I've just come up with, we make it so, before upvoting or downvoting something, you have to press a button, and then wait at least a minute, or, better yet, solve a captcha, and then you don't even have to have accounts anymore and that takes about a minute. The only people upvoting or downvoting will be those who are really reflecting on what it is that they're doing, or the people who are really really committed and pissed off about something. I'm sure the latter won't happen like, ever.
Obviously. I've just got two emotions about the content I want to show.
That's precisely how it's being used now though. People don't want things they don't like to be seen, so they downvote.
I think maybe that's exactly how people are using it, it's just that most people aren't thinking "oh, well, this post made me a little mad or uncomfy, but I like the content and discussion that it's spurned, so I'll toss it an upvote". I think most people are more inclined to go "THIS POST MADE ME MAD! GRUG DOWNVOTE!". It doesn't even really not make sense, it would be kind of insane to spend like, even just a minute, thinking consciously about every single upvote or downvote you make, it would take a million years for anyone to ever upvote or downvote anything, and a lot of people would just not engage unless they were really committed, which doesn't necessarily map to their level of discernment, but might just instead map to how mad people could get over a given thing. Plenty of people could get mad enough about a thing to sit through a minute long wait period to downvote something.