• 2 Posts
  • 40 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
Cake day: March 20th, 2025
  • TerranFenrir@lemmy.catoLemmy@lemmy.ml•Should Lemmy hide downvotes on your own posts by default?English
    241·
    2 days ago

    I think disabling downvotes totally for the user’s content by default would be a bad idea, because it is important for a user to know if what they are saying is unpopular.

    Here’s an approach I have taken for my app (for all posts and comments).

    • If downvotes are <= 5, downvotes show as 0.
    • If downvotes <= 5%, downvotes show as 0.

    Remember, the reasoning for this is a mere hypothesis and not results obtained from an experiment.

    The 5 percent rule aims to prevent fringe opinions from downvoting. This solves issues like, “why do I have 3 downvotes on a picture of my cute puppy?”.

    The 5 downvotes rule prevents downvoting bias. I have observed this happening on Reddit a lot. If a comment has 3 upvotes and 2 downvotes, people tend to downvote more (just because of the downvote counts and not the content itself). 2 downvotes in a 5 total votes sample size is too small to make any decision about the quality of content.

    In my opinion, cases like these are where the downvotes serve more as a mental health destroyer rather than decentralised content moderation.

    So to answer your question, I think having the current as default would be better, I.e., option “Show”. However, if you’re open to refine this even further, I would suggest the 5-5% idea.

  • TerranFenrir@lemmy.catoLemmy@lemmy.ml•Should Lemmy hide downvotes on your own posts by default?English
    131·
    2 days ago

    I agree a little with the post tbh. So I generally hold pro AI views (where I admire the tech, believe it can make the future a lot better, while being against it being owned by oligarchs and for profit corpos).

    When I started using Lemmy in 2023, everybody here was ABSOLUTELY AGAINST AI. Any post/comment mentioning AI in a slightly positive tone was downvoted to oblivion.

    It was really depressing to see stuff like this, because the concept of downvoting on Lemmy and irl works very differently I suppose. No one irl just randomly shows up, shows you a thumbs down and leaves, right? Most conversations like these offline tend to be a lot more developed than a “thumbs down”. In my experience, people offline are also a lot less meaner compared to online, as they are talking to a real human being rather than a profile picture.

    I suppose this platform makes you a little thick skinned too. Sometimes you have to say, “I am right, even if this large group of people thinks I am wrong” and accept that sometimes the majority does not share your opinion, no matter how correct you think it is.

    Now about disabling downvotes for your own post- I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. Doing so prevents getting feedback from others. There are times where I have been a dick (mostly unintentionally). The amount of downvotes told me that what I said was wrong, and I needed to do better. If downvotes were disabled, then I wouldn’t have access to this feedback.