This is a general proposal that concerns Lemmy specifically, but also other forum-alike software that uses ActivityPub, such as Piefed.
For me, the original sin of social media is downvoting (rant incoming). Specifically, its rampant misuse as a “Me no like!!” button. Apart from conveying totally uninteresting information (i.e. a subjective binary opinion), downvoting encourages schoolyard social dynamics and discourages heterodox views (and therefore debate). The nearest in-person equivalent (saying “shut up”) is universally considered rude. At scale, the effect of downvoting is to brutalize a community that might otherwise be pleasant and welcoming. I believe this practice is almost always toxic and poisonous. Those who defend it (in good faith, I do not doubt) need to consider the possibility that it has helped to homogenize their communities into people like them (to caricature: insensitive males). Most ordinary people do not participate actively in social media. There’s a reason for that.
No, this is not a popular position here (cf. selection bias) and so it will of course be… downvoted. But it’s how I see it. I like to think that I’ve added some value to the fediverse with my contributions, but if there’s one thing that regularly causes me to consider leaving, it’s this. Going to Beehiv or Blahaj-whatsit is not a solution, because the communities I’m interested in are not there. Hiding downvote scores does not work because… it does not hide the downvoters.
Which gave me an idea. Given that the identity of downvoters is technically public, I propose a new setting: “Auto-block downvoters”. That’s it. Automatically hide comments (or posts, or anything) by users who have downvoted your contributions. Logical, no? They don’t care for what I have to say, and I don’t care for their inane negativity. It’s win-win! Lots of possible variants:
- Hide [ subsequent | all ] comments by users who have downvoted [ a post | a comment | anything ] by you [ in this thread | on this post | in this community | everywhere]
- Hide [etc] by users with an upvote-downvote ratio lower than [ X ]% etc
Such a setting (especially #1) would immeasurably improve my experience of Lemmy. No exaggeration. I like to think it might also serve as a subtle incentive for users to be more generous and tolerant in their behavior towards others, but that is secondary.
I disagree with OP too, but I also think downvotes are not great for disagreement. I like them much more for marking something as wrong or off topic. Otherwise we just limit lemmy to a tool that finds the majority opinion, instead of being an actual discussion platform.
For example, OP starts a discussion and your comment that I disagree with is a legitimate opinion, so I won’t downvote either. But if someone tried to derail the discussion by commenting ramen recipes, I might downvote that.
it’s probably impossible to get downvotes to be anything other than agree/disagree buttons at this point, but I like to dream of a world where it’s for contributes-to-productive-conversation/mindless-nonsense-or-hate-speech.
Downvotes should only be for posts like
lol this ^I’ve never been able to imagine a system that could convince random users to use it like that, though.
So we agree in substance. Why then would you be against a feature that would allow you (entirely optionally) not to see the contributions of people who have marked your content as illegitimate? This is what I don’t get.
I don’t tend to believe in technical fixes, but this particular feature would really improve my experience here. Maybe yours, too.