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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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A small handful of people are working to change that, you find them here and there. Easy to identify as they downvote based on "I don't like that.", they're not really capable of greater complexity usually. Or that's how it seems anyway.
We should expect it to get worse though, as our population grows. It's inevitable, the internet is the internet. Our initially strong culture is an excellent sign though, if our growth continues at a measured pace, we should be able to maintain it for some time.
Especially the upvote/downvote system drives bandwagon behavior. If a post gets like 3 downvotes and the next gets 2, people just look at the votes and assume who's right and follow that. They will literally think votes decides what's right. Though when you're on the other side of that, it's also important to know that votes don't matter and it doesn't mean you're wrong. It's also important to know when to leave a conversation when it stops being a discussion and turns into an argument. Arguments are literally useless and just aggravating, which people won't admit that they love.
The reddit behavior certainly still comes out. But an upside about decentralization is you can block the instance they're from since that annoying behavior tends to follow the same company and you probably block a lot more annoying people as a result.
I've looked at comments I didn't feel like reading, looked at the score then voted based on that. This is a bias we're all subject to, knowingly or not.
You see a comment had -20 downvotes your interpretation of the contents is immediately swayed to side with the majority. Removing downvotes ~~looking at you beehaw~~ also doesn't solve this problem. Less likes than the person who responded to you? You must be wrong.
So I'm glad Lemmy, at least the browser version, shows both up and downvotes by default and the total score is hidden away in the top right. Helps remove a little bit of bias.
I don't think hiding the vote count is a bad idea though. Keep the upvote/downvote system and let it sort which comment is on the top and whatnot, but who does seeing the score really benefit? There is no winner or loser, and the score doesn't matter, so why is it kept anyways? The goal in the end should conversation.
Yes, it absolutely does. But I think it's still worth it to have a downvote system.
I'm glad we can even see the exact ratio, too. The more transparency, the better.
At the same time, it would be cool if users could just sort by means other than votes. If you'd like, it'd be nice if you could hide the votes altogether so you don't see them. I wouldn't do this, but I support having the option to for those who would.
We have the momentum now, and that makes a world of difference. Lemmy isn't beholden to any "engagement" metrics, so all the dark patterns that infect other social media have no incentive here. The internet wasn't always toxic (as a general statement). People engage more in conflict than in an interaction with no winners and losers, we're just hardwired that way. The "Web 2.0" crowd hijacked that to keep us in front of more ads for longer, "Hur-dur, number go up." Without those institutional incentives I'm very hopeful that the strong foundation of the Lemmy community can "hug it out" with the few rage baiters that are bringing their bad habits here.
Bad, nasty people are not few in number, you're describing a very significant percentage of the Earth's population. Billions of them, probably. My irl sample has a great many, at least.
But we can certainly do our best. If we want to see a certain type of world, we are ultimately responsible for fighting for it, or we'll never even deserve it in the first place.
edit billions, not trillions
I don't believe that's the case, we have a tendency to put bad people in a spotlight so they end up being a part of our life more than they should, but not because they are so common.
I think it doesn't help that a lot of our understanding of how people act is based in debunked psychology studies from an era where cocaine was part of a healthy and complete breakfast.
This is a worthy debate. But I think to really get anywhere you will need new population studies like that.
I'm going off my strength in the subject of history, mainly. Norms were once quite different from today. Humans did not naturally acknowledge rights, they acknowledged tribes of various sorts.