Does the reddit style format inherently make for a toxic environment? Or is it a culture of toxicity from the influx of reditors? For lack of a beter example, on stackoverflow, when someone down votes you, it comes with a comment saying how to improve. On mastodon, people can’t downvote you. These platforms are a joy to use, lemmy is depressing if you post. Its depressing because every post or comment, no mater the quality comes with downvotes, and usually no criticism to accompany it, you are left not knowing if youve made a mistake, or if its just trolls, bots, or idiots. At the end you feel insulted not improved. What do you think?
Personally core belief that people create and breed the toxicity. Use any system you want if people behave toxic it will become toxic.
a lot of it could be the no-face aspect, we where that a lot
People on Lemmy try to rationalize that they’ll use the downvote as intended (off topic content) but our ape brains eventually just make downvote = I don’t like said thing.
I wish we could do away with upvotes and downvotes altogether.
For me it always was about “Do I want to see posts/comments like this?” If yes, upvote, if not, downvote, if I don’t care, then nothing. Off-topic is for reporting to mods, not downvoting IMO.
I think having some form of “I agree with this” or similar helps to make you feel engaged with the content (for better or worse).
I think perhaps the actual person responsible for the post or comment shouldn’t be able to see the results, though, otherwise it just becomes another ego building thing, and you see people strategising explicitly to build karma like on reddit. instead, the author should see a rating, like “slight approval” “mixed feelings” “strong dissent”, etc.
I agree. Upvotes and downvotes are rubbish.
How dare you. As a former redditor now lemming I would wilt into a shriveled, frail, incontinent, barely conscious entity without the ego-fueling fire of my all-powerful downvote.
/s
I’m thinking you care too much about the thoughtless reactions of anonymous strangers.
Remember… In this game, the points don’t matter.its strange because its not the disapproval that gets me, its not knowing why. I guess the lesson is that if someone did not even say why, its not really something anyone actually cared about.
This is exactly it. They don’t care about your post or you or anyone really. For them, it just feels good to bring down others.
i hope/believe that the intent is rarely malicious, that its not really a significant thing at all on that side.
I think that the current downvote system is far from ideal, and ideally there should have some piece of “forced” feedback when you downvote someone, but keep in mind that a downvote is just “this should be less visible”. For example, people often downvote OK answers because an even better answer popped up, and they want the later to rise to the top. So a lot of times there’s no actual hostility in the downvotes.
And for other Reddit behaviours that people often call toxic (I call them SNOO - stupid, noisy, obnoxious, obtuse), I think that it’s cultural. The Reddit admins bred that behaviour into the users; and users are likely to carry it with them elsewhere, including Lemmy. I think that most of those individuals will get better over time here, and the ones who don’t will end leaving.
Thats pretty much what i was thinking. Also SNOO seems like a useful thing to have in the brain
I feel like the issue with forced feedback when you downvote is you’ll get a lot of comments where its just 1-2 words, doesn’t say much, just a “No” or “Bad”. And if you require a min characters like the bneg forums you’ll just get “No. 10chars”
Requiring comments will cause people to half ass it at best, I think. Which, sure then people can downvote them, but are people going to write a well thought out comment for every “No”?
Is having 40 “I disagree” comments really better for discussion than just 40 downvotes?
By “forced feedback” I was thinking more like having multiple types of downvote (“off-topic”, “rude”, “incorrect”, “I disagree”, “unfunny”…), so users need to pick one when downvoting something. It gives people a better clue on why a certain piece of content is being downvoted than just letting them assume, and it’s way less noise than 40 “I disagree” comments.
I could see that then, kinda like how you can react with different emoji on facebook.
Idk if I’d prefer it, but I think it could work
Someone praising Stack Overflow, that’s a new one. The most criticized thing about SO is the toxicity and elitism of the users. Downvoting almost always comes with no explanation there.
Well hold on there, im not tryna praise them. I think we need a free and federated alternative. I only mean to say that an answer always has some verbal feedback on it.
The incrediblely low quality of the feedback is legendary there, though.
“How do I X?”
“Do not X. - Fin”
That’s the wrong way to go about things. You show them a clearly incorrect example of a code you need help with but say that it’s a good code and don’t believe anyone can do better. People will jump over themselves to correct you and provide helpful solutions.
Ah yes, Murphy’s Law. Instead of asking a question, just post the wrong answer and someone will come along to correct you.
People breed toxicity, especially if you disagree with them. The more people a site has, the shittier it is. People suck.
Your opinion makes me angry 😡
Fuck you. Imma tear down your fucking walls, Gorbachof.
I’m gonna fuck down your tearing walls gorbachof.
Got ‘em!
Screw you asshole. More people make a site better!
Go buy a vowel ya fuckin prick.
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I don’t think our points are mutually exclusive. Small sites can be shitty while the trend remains that sites get shittier as they get bigger.
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You think Lemmy is more toxic than reddit? I’ve seen the opposite so far. I wonder if this boils down to what communities we are a part of? It makes sense though, since most of lemmy is likely 30+ yrs old and have become jaded by reddit already.
Also, yes, voat was awful. It was mostly alt right assholes from what I remember.
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Just post what you want to post and ignore the votes. A few downvotes is to be expected. Try not to read into them so much.
Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?
That’s a great way to think about it.
“Toxicity” is just like “racism”, newspeak to censor and bully, if you need to mention it you are the one doing the harm
Lmao, yeah ok. Sure bud.
The karma/upvote/downvote system encourages engagement and gives users an idea of how others perceive their posts. It also encourages people to think about their posts and it helps keep garbage from clogging up the feed.
The problem is that posts are now “attention-centric” and that might lead to people posting stuff that’s more controversial or even “rage-bait” because it gets a reaction.
But honestly though, the toxicity was always there. It’s just that now people express it with an arrow click instead of a flame post calling out the OP’s mom.
I think anonymity or at least the perception of it on the internet breeds toxicity because it’s easier to hurt someone when neither party has to look each other in the eye.
It’s a distilled version of ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. With all the dog piling that comes with reactions to things that are pointed at the wrong audience. There’s generally some people with baggage in there somewhere who will take issue, and you get downvoted.
However, what’s always interesting about these platforms is where good ideas rise, where they come from, and how controversial they are, all of which you lose with the twitter/mastodon architecture.
It may be easier to find your crowd, but how useful is that to you depends on what you use your online presence for.
Good Take
IDK, I think most of the toxicity comes from when something gets popular. I never read much into the votes on reddit because it’s usually more influenced by when you post than what you post. If you combined all the karma of my accounts it’d probably be in the millions but mostly I was just trying to either help people or make them laugh, never cared much about the points.
Not necessarily toxicity, but echo chambers. Echo chambers could then be used to be toxic.
At least here in the free world we have to manually build echo chambers and “The Algorithm” does not build them around us without our consent.
Yearning for affirmations via fake internet points is the toxic part, not the format of a website.
Took the words right out of my mouth. Take my downvote.
Yes, although your comment seems to me to be correct, it misses the point of the question, and the actual question has been answered quite well already by others. Surely the format is not in and of itself toxic, and I personally find it a little strange to think of a format as toxic, though I suppose one could create such a format. Rather, the question is weather the format of the website encourages or indues so called “toxic” behavior or leads to the perception there of, among groups of humans using software in the format in question. Maybe because “yearning for affirmation” is a near universal human trait and the format of the site provides its human users access to a convenient but unreliable metric by which they may measure the approval of their peers. Some of us suppress this drive for approval with to strong self awareness or self esteem or lack it entirely due to mental illness, but it is in almost every human, and of course, our need for approval is of course a double edged blade. It makes society possible, and makes us hate to take part at times.
I barely posted on Reddit due to the thought of people hating what I said or posted 😊 I think here is more friendly since it’s not huge, I share what I like and if people don’t agree that’s cool! As long as it makes someone happy it’s worth it ✨
I’m not trying to be negative here with you - but anyone complaining about downvoted will often get another downvote from me. Say what you want to say, stand by your convictions, and don’t worry about what the internet thinks about that.
I don’t see the poster explicitly complaining about getting downvoted. How I read it is that they think that downvoting encourages people to be negative and weaponise their downvote. And, given what you’ve said, they’re spot on and you inadvertently proved their point.
I saw the post more as someone who is too worried about what the group will think of their comment to allow for dissent.
That being said, what I meant about people who complain about downvotes was the old Reddit trope of “edit: really? Downvote me for asking a question?” On a comment less than an hour old.
I upvote anyone who disagrees with me, as long as they’re not a complete brute about it.
I’m not upset of complaining, I’m observing and philosophizing, this has been an intellectual pursuit, thanks for the reply
