this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Anything that doesn't devolve into "us vs. them", doesn't matter who "us" and "them" is.
The fediverse was designed to let every instance or even every user decide for themselves who they want to interact with. There is no need to persuade others to use the fediverse the same way you do. A few months ago I wrote a blog post about why my personal single-user instance wouldn't defederate from corporate-run instances as long as they play by the rules, with the clear intent to defederate if they do things that harm the way I interact with the fediverse. People got outright vile, called me names and tried to convince me that any tiny interaction with anyone they don't like would inevitably lead to the death of the free fediverse.
Personally I would rather have federated social media based on an open protocol where every user can decide what's the best way to interact with content than being forced into proprietary platforms just to get updates from my favorite video game studio, streamer or artist. It may well be that there are people on the fediverse who exclusively want to interact with vegan FOSS communist hippies and that's fine. But I'm not one of those people and I don't see why they should decide how I run my instance or get mad at me about something that doesn't affect them at all.
Let's all be as tolerant as we claim we are and treat people (and instances) based on their deeds and not based on how similar they are to ourselves.
On second thought, maybe I do want an "us vs. them" with "them" being people who use downvotes as an "I disagree" button.
Disclaimer: this was meant as a joke.
I did not realize there were downvote rules. How am I supposed to use my downvote?
There aren't, but it's worth thinking about what a vote does. In Lemmy and similar systems, comments with higher scores are listed first and seen by more people. A downvote means "fewer people should see this".
Now perhaps you just believe fewer people should see things you disagree with. That's not my position, but I won't try to talk you out of it here. If that's not your position, however and you instead believe civil, well-reasoned discussion between people who have different viewpoints is valuable, then using votes to simply express agreement or disagreement will not serve to promote such discussion.
How about a second vote system for agree/disagree, because I agree with you in principle and try to use it this way, but in practice the votes are definitely used for that. Now that I write it out though I realize people will just double smash both buttons when they disagree anyway.
I wonder whether up/down, like/dislike, etc... is the right concept for discussions. Slashdot's concept of attaching a label like "insightful" or "off-topic" when rating a comment seems like a good idea to me; the UI nudges people toward the admin's preferred reasons for voting.
Definitely not a strict rule and I wouldn't want to force anyone to do it the way I do (maybe I should have marked my comment as a joke) but as far as I understand, downvotes were originally meant for spam or low-quality/low-effort comments. Stuff that just doesn't add anything to the duscussion and isn't worth reading. Fortunately, that doesn't happen very often on Lemmy.
Downvoting comments that you disagree with just to bury them, especially without even leaving a comment that explains why you disagree, just feels petty.
Overall, I'd rather upvote a well-written comment even if I disagree with its contents and downvote ten "yeah, same" comments that agree with me but add nothing to the discussion.
I think you misunderstood my point. That’s on me though, I could have phrased it better. Props to @Zak@lemmy.world, their comment did a better job at explaining what I meant.
It's more like "etiquette." The downvote button serves to bury a comment or post, so it's arguably best to use it as a "this isn't relevant or is hateful/unproductive" button.