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.
dfyx
joined 2 years ago
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.
Some national governments in Europe run their own instances. For example Germany runs https://social.bund.de/ and the Netherlands run https://social.overheid.nl. The EU itself has https://social.network.europa.eu/.
All of them have accounts for government organizations and elected officials.
This sounds a lot like what Stack Overflow does. And you know what people think about that community. It’s elitist and hostile towards newcomers and anyone who doesn’t know the convoluted rules for how to build their reputation.
If I want to interact with a community to ask a question or comment on something I found interesting but can’t because of rules that were made explicitly to keep newcomers from posting, I won’t stay and gain reputation. I leave.
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.