I think it’s a boon that we’re a tiny fraction of Reddit’s size. Reddit is something like 30+ million MAUs and Lemmy dropped recently from 62k to ~50k. We’re a grain of sand compared to Reddit, and I think the community is better for it.
Lemmy isn’t really a Reddit alternative. We’re too small to have niche thriving communities, and depend 100% on sorting your feed by “all” or “local” to get new content. What’s nice is it feels like one close knit community vs closed off micro communities inside of subreddits.
I get exposed to more things this way oddly enough- viewing content I normally wouldn’t in favor of my smaller selection of subreddits. People are more polite, more informative, and far more original with their comments.
Keep on doing your thing, everyone! We’re building something different here.
Completely agree.
Both a perfect term and an accurate capture of the behaviour. As I’ve seen more of the behaviour you speak of creep in, I’ve gone not thinking much about downvotes to thinking they should probably go, at least as a counter or offset to any upvotes … and I’m thinking how much of the aggressive behaviours kinda start with the fact that you can just downvote, the idea that disagreeing matters more than anything else? Not suggesting that removing them will necessarily fix things, just kinda thinking out loud here.
Beehaw’s stance on downvotes is incredibly refreshing and freeing. There are no downvotes on Beehaw, and downvotes from other instances are invisible to members. You can’t just use downvotes to slash a post you don’t like, you have to reply and state your objection and start a conversation. And if a post is pointlessly nasty you can’t downvote it to oblivion, you have to articulate your reasoning for it being removed and submit it to a mod.
The lack of downvotes means you have to think and participate. You can’t just stab a button and rapidly move on to the next post like a trained monkey pressing buttons for a hit of cocaine.
As a person who only used downvotes for incorrect information, spam, or rudeness, I mostly agree because apparently most people would use the downvote button as a disagree button.
But I do miss having the “fucking [insert slur here]” “kill yourself” “only a basement-dwelling loser would have this opinion” comments auto-hid because the average passing user disapproved of it and decided to express their disapproval via downvote, instead of coming across it myself semi-frequently and reporting it. Also meant that I could contribute to hiding the bad stuff, without fear of getting lashed out on. Sometimes I don’t reply to comments that have good points but seem unnecessarily mean because in my experience, there seems to be a 50/50 chance between getting decent discussion and getting some rude snarky reply with a lot of unflattering personal assumptions made about me no matter how civil I was and how I deliberately avoided addressing the mean tone to avoid getting called out for tone policing (I know that tone policing is a problem I personally have. I don’t want to cause problems and I don’t want to face backlash for tone policing). And there is something to be said for if people only used downvotes on incorrect information, spam, or rudeness, the Beehaw admins would probably find themselves less overloaded with work.
Too bad people try to use downvotes for ”I disagree with your civil, well-thought out opinion” instead of “spam and cruelty not welcome, misinformation not useful and sometimes actively harmful, hide this.”
I think that while this is true, it would also invite for more deresponsabilization about the spaces we make and who we allow in these spaces. I generally think it’s best for those things to be reported because in most cases - we don’t actually want people like that in our communities and simply hiding it means that they silently remain.
This is why I think downvotes are an important element of the UI and ranking algorithms. No matter how many members there are, or how many comments or votes there are, there are still going to be 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. So naturally, smaller communities actually tend to have larger gaps in mod coverage in length of time between an item going onto the mod queue and being resolved by a human mod.
So I’m in favor of mechanisms being built in for removing content from easy view, without mods. Downvotes seems like the easiest way to implement that kind of mechanism.
If Lemmy does introduce a sort of “instance-level global moderator” role separate from admin role, I can definitely imagine smaller, tighter knit instances (think your average gay catgirl Masto/Akkoma instance, not Beehaw or the instance I’m on for that matter) giving mod rights to a significant chunk of their members just so these kinds of situations happen less. Anyone who sees anything of that sort and has the mental energy could just remove it for the rest of their community.
Of course there is a potential for abuse in this style of moderation especially as an instance gets larger, but then one of the good parts about federation is that you don’t need a large instance to have access to the content. And unlike Mastodon you actually get access to the entire conversation including all the replies here even with a single user instance due to how communities are implemented.
Same exact page as you