this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
448 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
74130 readers
4503 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
After 20 years of living with it, I've decided I don't like the downvote. The upvote is fine.
Reddit's founders, early on tried to encourage people to treat the downvote as moderation. It was meant to mean that a thing doesn't belong on reddit and people shouldn't see it. Of course that quickly became mere dislike or disagreement.
I'd prefer an approach that requires some input about what's wrong with a post in order to reduce its prominence; a restricted list of options as in Slashdot's moderation would be sufficient, I think. I'm not sure whether this should necessarily require also making a report to a more powerful admin/moderator, but I lean toward making that optional in most communities.
A lot of the time, I downvote troll content that should not be engaged with. Like, not technically against the rules, but definitely someone who is not posting in good faith. If I responded to the post, I'd be contributing to the problem.
I don't mean replying, but selecting from a menu of possible reasons to downrank a post. Slashdot's moderation system that I mentioned earlier has (or had - haven't looked there in a while) "troll" as one of the categories.