442
Lemmy users lack nuace and it stops actual discussion.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
442 points (84.6% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
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Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
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Its not about the points, its about the weighted value.
Higher point posts go up higher snd are seen by more people. Lowering posts makes them less prominent.
You can go for a system of whoever posts first gets their comment to be first, leading to people rushing low quality crap to be at the top. Or most recent comment first, giving you a shit experience like browsing a discord for information. Or random post order, where high quality content gets buried under a sea of shit.
Ranked voting is the best option we've found that works online so far.
Personally I downvote shit all the time if i feel its not more worthy than other content. Everyone should be judging posts according to their own metric so we can average out content across a communities views.
The system was a lot more useful when it showed up votes and downvotes separately. I was stoked when Lemmy came out and that was the default display. Now they seem to have removed that even as a user config option, which is very disappointing. People perceive something with 20 downvotes very differently than they do something with 380 upvotes and 400 downvotes. Showing an average skews people's perception and helps create a hive mind response approach. People don't want to reply if their reply might be controversial, because it looks like they're just being shouted down. And then people who agree don't want to respond and say they agree, or they're just jumping into the fire with the first person.
I still see separate counts in the web UI. And I agree that separate counts are essential information. I think the level of discourse on Reddit dropped significantly when they hid the separate up/down counts.
I think the config option is set per instance. Some of them have it, some of them don't. And then a lot of the popular apps don't support it, even if your instance has it.
There is no option like this, it was probably changed in the app you are using.
I checked the website too, and it was combined. I checked again just now and it's not combined. Weird! I have instance hopped a few times, so it must have been whatever instance I was on at the time.
Ah I believe lemmy-ui only shows seperate counts if the post actually received any downvotes.
I 100% agree that this is how it should work, and it doe work in more objective communities, particularly tech-oriented ones such as troubleshooting. The issue lies in subjective conversations, where people are debating their opinions, especially politics.
If the vote counts were hidden, it likely wouldn't be an issue. But in practice, it turns conversations into an opinion popularity contest if the topic is of a more subjective nature (I'm right, you're wrong, yada yada).
The other important metric to this is that a significant number of people simply lurk with no interaction whatsoever. While participation is key to determine a proper weighting of content quality, it's not like there's a mechanism for forcing participation. And if there was, a good number of people probably wouldn't even bother if there were such a requirement. Ultimately with link aggregators and microblogging, people just want to consume content (including comments) while keeping to themselves.