• Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    These are competing social media services that people use primarily for fun. People want to enjoy their time in these spaces and if they don't enjoy it they go somewhere else.

    Anyway the downvotes don't help people to "improve yourself". They encourage worse behaviour. Recipients of downvotes do not adjust their behaviour positively they go into a spiral of behaving in even more ways that produce even more downvotes.

    Look here:

    “We find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioural changes that are detrimental to the community,” say Cheng and co.

    “Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such,” they say. And it gets worse: “These authors are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community.”

    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1429