Do you sometimes get upset about Reddit's petty downvoting?
They say downvotes don't mean anything. But I disagree. To me, it feels like a stranger coming up to you on the street, slapping you in the face and walking off. All the while you don't even know why and just stare in confusion.
Like, I'd get it if the person was being rude, or impolite, or aggressive, or insulting, or racist, or misogynistic... Hell, even a very bad joke. But simple, innocent comments just casually sharing an opinion or a personal experience just get so aggressively downvoted. Why?
The particular sub that inspired me to make this post is r/android. Very simple comments without presenting judgement or making claims... just sharing their personal experience on a smaller topic about a certain phone will get a downvote. Why? As if to tell this person that their experience is wrong? That this didn't happen? I don't get it.
And this extends to the whole community, or at least most of it. It's just so toxic, immature and petty. Like, if you hate what someone said so much, why not at least tell them, so maybe they won't do it again or at least so they know why they're getting spat on the face.
But the lack of explanation and the mere booing from a faceless crowd is just so hearbreaking. Like, this is how crowds behave. That's why lynchings and mass rapes in war times are a thing. And it's just such a shameful aspect of the human character.
On Tildes, if you don't agree with someone, you cannot just downvote them to shut them up and hide their comment for others to see. No, rather, you have to tell them how it is you think they're wrong. And, while this has the potential of leading to nasty arguments, it also has the potential of leading to productive discussions.
How many of those comments that you often see downvoted are just innocent remarks that were completely misinterpreted by a first person and then the Hivemind just took it from there?
I mean, even if someone is saying something that is downright not true, but their tone doesn't come off as aggressive or rude, why downvote them instead of telling them? A downvote won't send them a notification. So they're likely to move on with life without knowing that that thing they think is true isn't. If you tell them, however, you can help this person learn something and combat misinformation.
By replying to this person, you're giving them a chance to better explain themselves. It's a lot less hostile, while being more productive and positive.
Plus, if upsetting and trolling people is what they want (like those few “professional reddit trolls” who just try to amass downvotes instead of upvotes) then they're out of luck in here. If their comment is obvious trolling, they'll just get ignored. Or well, maybe they do upset someone and get a heated discussion, but without the fishing for downvotes.
People cannot just downvote you to prove you wrong and go about their day feeling all superior and righteous. They have to tell you how they think you're wrong (or how they think your comment is irrelevant or how they don't like it) and in doing so expose their views up for external judgement.
The lack is probably the main reason that attracted me to Tildes.
By the way, I'm mostly referring to discussions way down in the thread between two people. I mean, how petty and aggressive do you have to be to downvote someone on an inactive thread just two minutes after they added their comment and just before you reply to them? I mean that way you're making it clear that it was you who downvoted them. So you're intentionally setting up a hostile atmosphere before the discussion even starts. That's just so toxic and emotionally draining.
How do you feel about downvotes on Reddit and their lack on Tildes?
Took a while to get used to a lack of downvotes, and I think it's.... okay. Let's just say I'm looking forward to whatever other features Deimos and the devs are cooking up.
The only other thing I'd say is, so far from what I've seen, I don't think Tildes is that much less hostile or that much more productive for discussion than Reddit. We might not have downvote brigades here, but there's definitely some ugliness in the shadows when controversial topics appear.
I've noticed the discourse has become a lot nastier over the past week or so.
There were a couple recent rounds of new invites sent out and, unfortunately, it seems to have produced some more heated 'conversations' (to put it politely) of late.
Some of the back-and-forth has been appalling. A few people endorsing opinions I agree with have disappointed me with their willingness to resort to foul rhetoric and personal attacks to defend their beliefs.
It's deeply disheartening.
But as dismaying as some of these conversations have become, others have been entirely the opposite. There are some people who have demonstrated herculean patience and a willingness to engage politely and empathetically with posters who have no intention of showing them that courtesy.
I would encourage people to call out the nastiness when you see it, especially if it's from someone you agree with.
I don't want that sort of conduct on "my side," and I hope you (collectively, not personally!) don't either. Withhold your votes from posts which take a derogatory tone and demand substance from those you vote for.
Despite the ugliness of the past couple weeks, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of Tildes. Less so than I was a month ago, but I take heart from the resolve and kindness I have seen in the face of vitriol.
I just joined and am pretty disappointed with some of the conversation I've seen so far. I get an overall feeling that the user base is putting in more effort then on reddit which I like, but the aggression is also pretty strong. I remember reading in withe the mechanics page or announcement post or somewhere that instead of down votes there'd be tags, which I thought was a really cool idea but it seems it's not implemented yet? I really hope it gets added soon, because without it I don't think discussions can be better here than they are on Facebook
Tags were implemented, then removed due to misuse. As I understand it they're on the roadmap to enable again, but after a more robust trust/reputation system is in place.
This thread is a good clearinghouse for info you may find useful as a new user.
First of all, welcome to Tildes! What a way to be introduced to the forum (lol).
Sorry your experience hasn't been great, it's been a weird couple weeks. Hopefully things will calm down as everyone finds their niche and the etiquette will improve.
spit-evil-olive-tips covered the tag situation (I joined well after they were disabled). The feature I'm most optimistic about with regard to maintaining high quality discussion is reputation. If people see their reputation degrade due to bad behaviour, low-effort content, votes for low-quality submissions, etc. I could see that being an effective deterrent to poor participation.
Anyway, I hope the site becomes a better experience going forward for you!
Thanks! I'm going to stick around regardless because I know full well we're only just getting this experiment started. But I agree, the rep system will hopefully help a lot. And hopefully they can fix whatever caused them to remove the tag system.
I tend to agree.
A couple days ago the topic of tulpas (basically a entity created by the mind) came up on ~ and there was one user who had expertise in this area, I think it was @catt, offering his perspective on the topic with a long-winded response. The amount of people who not only didnt take that perspective seriously but also looked down on them was saddening and not something I expected from this community.
I believe you're thinking of @cocoa.
I also agree they should have been treated with a lot more respect in that thread. I learned something and really appreciate that someone was willing to spend their time and energy to share.
I also want to throw in that I appreciate your presence here and that that thread was a bit disappointing.
I've come to hate the downvotes on reddit so much that they are entering trigger warning territory for me. It's not the idea of the downvote that's the problem - in a perfect world, people would only downvote that which doesn't belong, or is offtopic, or offensive, or otherwise deserved the punishing power of distributed moderation. That's not the world we live in. Where we live, it's used as a simple 'fuck your opinion' button.
The music communities on reddit have been crippled to the point of barely functioning by downvotes on submissions. Metal fans downvote everything that isn't metal. Country fans downvote everything that isn't country. Hiphop fans downvote everything that isn't hiphop. This means every music submission may as well start at -25 votes for all the chance it has at real visibility. Only band name recognition and clickbait titles can overcome this negative vote penalty, which is why all anyone subscribed to the the larger music communities ever sees are the same old music tracks and crappy submission titles.
When listentothis was young, I had an army of 25 different alts I used just to hold this at bay, voting everything back up to 1 point if it went below that number. That worked for a while, until the place got so popular that another 25 votes didn't matter anymore.
The genre-specific music subs don't have this problem since everyone there is on the same page as far as taste goes. They tend to function much better. I have to imagine this taste-based vote fuckery affects any community where there's subjectivity involved in the appreciation of the art shared there.
Without the downvote, Tildes simply doesn't have that problem.
The other issue is that downvotes have multiple negative cumulative effects on the community over time. Essentially, they create toxicity as a side effect. There's a mountain of research out there if anyone wants to dig into it. All of the studies show the same trends for the same reasons.
A new user submits content, and it's instantly downvoted by bots and others also submitting, so they can get a competitive advantage in the rankings. This dis-incentivizes that user from further participation, and also pisses the user off making them more likely to downvote in retaliation. Something valuable (a content submitter) is turned into something toxic (an angry lurker). Let this play out for ten years in every part of your website and you get reddit as it is now.
It's a basic negative feedback loop. The only good news here is that positive feedback loops can cause the opposite to happen. If we find a few of those and build them into the platform we'll have the ability to reform over time just as reddit corrupts over time.
I think we're seeing this already in the comments here. Without the ability to downvote, people will upvote the comments that share their views, or make one of their own if there isn't one already. This is incentivizing both commenting and voting, and also allocating votes in a much more intelligent manner than we tend to see on reddit. I think it's also causing the discussions to naturally split off into more viewpoints that are explored more thoroughly. The votes here are much better at showing the general level of support/agreement for any comment than I've seen on other sites. All it took for that to happen was turning off the downvote.
The downvotes happen in genre specific subs too. Even in a tiny sub like r/acidtechno where 5 upvotes is a good result, I see certain sub genres get slammed. The big labels like Stay Up Forever or System Rejects get upvotes, things like Acid Core or Tekno get downvoted. Mostly, reddit is garbage for music, unless you have a tiny sub of friends just sharing for each other. And interest dies off pretty quick in those.
I can't wait to see how it plays out here. If you've spent any time in the music subs on reddit and ignored the votes - just listened instead - you know what kind of potential lies buried there.
Raddit ran a pretty in-depth analysis a couple years ago. There were upwards of 12,000 music tracks submitted to the music subs every single day at that time, and it's probably gone up since then. The 'popular' music communities only accounted for about 3k of that total. Something like 8,000 submissions land in music communities with less than 50k subscribers. It's an untapped ocean of excellence. All it needs is the downvoting off of its back, and some automated systems to classify and playlistify all of it.
Wow, that was fast. From downvotes without explanation to war crimes and rapes.
But yes, I agree with you on this. Some subs try to encourage discussion by having popup telling people to leave explanation or are hiding downvote button, but it is clearly not enough. I think this is the thing that brought me to Tilded as well. Quality discussion instead of meaningless downvoting.
I honestly believe that a crowd behaves just as badly as its worst member. Something about a crowd, possibly the anonimity of it and the reinforcement of those around them, make people go absolutely insane. It makes rationality leave out the window. And while the inconsequential downvote might be many, many orders of magnitude away from being as bad as mass killings and rapes in war time, I believe they're a result of the same fault in the human character. One that saddens me and frustrates me deeply.
I like that there's no downvotes however it means that there's no way to counter the first few comments becoming the most visible simply due to length of exposure, rather than merit.
Oh, absolutely. The most infuriating example I can think of is /r/AskTrumpSupporters. Redditors ask for opinions of Trump supporters, and then downvote when they share it? I get that quite a few answers show lack of understanding of a subject, but it deters users from sharing their honest opinions when they think they are well informed and results in few active users. I enjoy seeing what everyone thinks about certain issues to get an understanding of their logic. Even though I disagree with their views, I still enjoy understanding why they feel the way they do, and also simultaneously challenging my own views.
I can't tell if you're arguing in bad faith, or just misinformed, but that is not what that subreddit is. That's what it claims to be, sure. But the reality is far from that.
The truth is it's just another bad-faith spin zone to "redpill" the "normies". The mods there are the same heavy-handed pro-censorship mods from other alt-right subreddits.
Are you sure you're not thinking of r/AskThe_Donald/ ?
Edit:
Only one of the mods on r/AskTrumpSupporters mods any other subreddits (He doesn't mod any alt right subs). You must be thinking of the other sub.
Oh, wow that sub. I didn't know that was a thing. That sub doesn't even make sense, there aren't any questions.
They also ban people who don't even break the rules and enforcement of the rules is rather inconsistent.
Color me surprised. I bet they are upset about Alex Jones' content being pulled from social platforms because of censorship.
EDIT: So predictable
Not arguing in bad faith, it's just where I have reliably found the most civil discussion on Reddit (minus the mass downvotes.) I know that at least several of the mods are supporters, but I never picked up on anything you mentioned. That said, I didn't frequent the sub very much. Mainly because of the mass downvoting, lack of participation, and deleted comments as a result of the downvoting.
It's sad watching good answers get downvoted on that sub for no reason. That sub would be much better without the downvoting.
Agreed. I really had higher hopes for that sub. I believe that subreddit moderators are capable of removing the downvote function. I don't see why they wouldn't for that sub to encourage more participation.
Nope they can only remove downvotes on css which they already have. And that doesn't stop mobile users from downvoting.
Ah, makes sense. That's a shame, though. I am assuming that if you don't use the subreddit style that gets around their CSS as well, because I can see the downvote button on my browser and I never use subreddit styles.
I hate downvotes. I posted on r/legaladvice about an issue I have regarding medical malpractice regarding a personal experience of finding my doctor was openly paid off by a pharmaceutical company...and not only did I recieve a huge amount of downvotes, but also two solid days of inbox harrassment from invested drug company representatives.
After that experience, I knew Reddit was not the healthiest environment. I ditched fb months ago, and I hope this will grow to be a new refuge.
THAT is fucking infuriating. I wonder how they can sleep with themselves (the ones doing the harassing)
I'm not a strong downvoter. I've trained myself not to downvote for disagreement, and to downvote only posts and comments which are actively detracting from good discussion.
However, I have occasionally found myself frustrated at the lack of a downvote button here on Tildes. Not often. But sometimes. It happened just yesterday. I read a comment which was so obviously just someone being stupid that I felt it deserved some active response, rather than simply not voting on it - but there wasn't anything in the comment to disagree with or argue against. It was just a shallow silly waste of space. I want those comment tags to come back!
I understand where you're coming from, especially in posts with a lot of comments it'll be hard to get all of them to have the same exposure.
Maybe Tildes needs an option to sort comments by "controversy" (also known as The Ratio). This is a measure that can be obtained from the ration between votes and replies to a given comment, and is used on some analysis of twitter posts. See this link for some explanation about this.
I think adding this feature could improve the discussion by allowing users to see the most discussed/controversial comments first, and commenting on them without voting would both weight them down AND provide justification/discussion
I’ve had downvote boys that downvotes every post or comment I made, I've had people on me to let me know they took the time to open every comment and post and downvote them, and I’ve had people that upvoted me almost always. Votes are pointless and petty whichever way you look at it. Don’t put a second thought on them unless it’s preventing you to comment or post.
That doesn't really work on reddit. The votes are fuzzed, and a bunch of downvotes from one person on another person's comments and submissions won't affect the displayed vote count much, if at all.
It always made me laugh when I knew people took the time out of their day to do it. Plus, its not like votes mattered on subs like r/spam where 90% of my submissions were.
Hm, I don't doubt the community disadvantages that others have mentioned, but I never had any problem with downvotes being a thing. I like the instant feedback on something I comment. If a community is hostile to what I want to bring to it, I'm fine with learning that right away.
That said, I don't miss the ability much, the site works fine without it and I'm glad that most of you seem to be happier with how it is here.
Yes, I do. Sometimes I understand that I fucked up, but other times it's totally unfair. Like, for example, when I post a personal opinion, well within the rules of the sub, in a polite and non-radical manner, while making clear that I am aware I might be wrong, and I'm downvoted to hell just because they disagree. Downvotes should be a sign that you're not contributing to the discussion or that you're going against the rules, not that you disagree with the point made. But, in the end, it's impossible to regulate downvotes, so it's better to remove them altogether. I held this opinion before I knew about Tildes, and was happy to learn they implemented it.
I either call it out, ignore it, or ignore them. Most of the time I just ignore the downvotes and move on. I don't know the person behind the screen and they don't know me.
For years I treated everyone on the internet as if they were someone within my own bubble or sphere of rationale but it's become more clear to me over the last two years that I am more than likely communicating with someone who is different than me in almost every way, so my time can be wasted trying to have a conversation through little comments on a very public site. If someone wanted to hop on discord and have a conversation with me there, I would be more than happy to dedicate the time and effort to come together and get a better sense of the individual. Other than that, I don't afford someone the effort and time if they aren't going to value it themselves and I think that having that mindset is okay and can lead to spending time more efficiently that betters me and the people around me.
Edit: I will just add after re-reading my comment that I am not looking for an echo chamber discussion or that people who think differently than me are somehow less in some way. It's just that there is so little information on discussion boards that mis-communications or imprecise discussion can happen so easily that it can be hard to catch and contain. Sometimes it's just better to ask yourself, 'What am I trying to get at with this comment?' and if I have already made my point or if the time investment for one user is too much, just leave what you have and move on.
Because people, in general, don't change their minds on the internet. When people comment they are sharing a part of themselves, and so a "corrective" comment is usually going to be taken as a personal attack. It's fruitless to explain an error to someone on the internet if they have not asked to be corrected or have not posted with the explicit purpose of being corrected. They have to do the research independently and then fill in the gaps in their knowledge.
Anyway, I don't take downvotes seriously. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if a parade of people disagree with you, or find you distasteful, or just didn't like what you said.
I don't miss downvotes here, though I wish comment tags would come back.
It's become the equivalent of a disagree button. This is only natural given human tendency for voting. Now, is this a bad thing?
Reframing my thought process around this definition, I find it a useful hint on subreddit culture at best, censorship of opposing perspectives at the worst. But don't take it too seriously, I downvote posts too.
In legaladviceuk there's a small number of people who can offer informed advice, and a very large number of people who can vote based on what they think justice is.
Disturbingly often completely incorrect, even harmful, advice is upvoted because feels, and correct advice gets downvoted.
You know sometimes I post on reddit and I get the feeling like it's not going to go down well. I kind of get filled with glee as I look at a flurry of downvotes like shouting at a moving crowd, some communities are just too sensitive it's funny. Or maybe I'm just a troll, idk - no one should be so sensitive that a comments gets them so out of sorts.
Make one comment doubting spaceXs plans for the future and boom off they go.
It's really just a reflection on that community not you. It's a reasonable post that's on them if they get so riled up.
Not really. But I'm really glad that this feature doesn't exist here. I personally think that downvotes don't scale well; they require people that are OK with reading different opinions and that is quite rare and requires some degree of charity within the community; this doesn't happen when a website has 1000000+ users.
I honestly couldn't care less about downvotes. someone didn't like my comment, so what? you can't please everyone.