IMO, there have been a few unfortunate unintended side-effects of removing downvotes.
One of them is that controversial posts that would have otherwise gotten a lot of downvotes end up at the top of Active for longer. This is because the Active algorithm sees a post with positive "karma" getting a lot of comments, and puts it higher on Active.
The other effect is that without downvotes, people must reply to posts and comments in order to give any feedback at all. This effect was originally praised as a good thing when the change to get rid of downvotes was first implemented, but I don't think it's been entirely constructive. To a certain extent, it's fostered a culture of dunking and dogpiling, and relies on mods to sort through bad takes instead of letting them get downvoted to oblivion. This effect also creates a sort of feeback loop with the first effect, as controversial posts and comments promoted by the Active sort algorithm tend to get more engagement than they did before, leading to more dunking and dogpiling.
Obviously all of this will need to be weighed with the original issues that caused downvotes to be removed in the first place, but I do like the idea of bringing them back for confirmed non-chuds.
I mean i sort by active, maybe it's just me who doesn't mind about shit takes, though i hold out that as someone with a lot of controversial anarchist takes i can attest that dogpiling was already a thing when downvotes were here, it just manifested in downvotes. Though there was an idea i liked suggested in the same c/userunion thread that downvotes should be tied to comments, so you actually have to express why the take is bad. I don't know what it would take to develop it, i'm just throwing things around.
I like seeing the number only because it lets you know if a thread is popular because a ton of people upvoted it, or because of some algorithmic reason (maybe other threads just aren't active at the moment).
IMO, there have been a few unfortunate unintended side-effects of removing downvotes.
One of them is that controversial posts that would have otherwise gotten a lot of downvotes end up at the top of Active for longer. This is because the Active algorithm sees a post with positive "karma" getting a lot of comments, and puts it higher on Active.
The other effect is that without downvotes, people must reply to posts and comments in order to give any feedback at all. This effect was originally praised as a good thing when the change to get rid of downvotes was first implemented, but I don't think it's been entirely constructive. To a certain extent, it's fostered a culture of dunking and dogpiling, and relies on mods to sort through bad takes instead of letting them get downvoted to oblivion. This effect also creates a sort of feeback loop with the first effect, as controversial posts and comments promoted by the Active sort algorithm tend to get more engagement than they did before, leading to more dunking and dogpiling.
Obviously all of this will need to be weighed with the original issues that caused downvotes to be removed in the first place, but I do like the idea of bringing them back for confirmed non-chuds.
I mean i sort by active, maybe it's just me who doesn't mind about shit takes, though i hold out that as someone with a lot of
controversialanarchist takes i can attest that dogpiling was already a thing when downvotes were here, it just manifested in downvotes. Though there was an idea i liked suggested in the same c/userunion thread that downvotes should be tied to comments, so you actually have to express why the take is bad. I don't know what it would take to develop it, i'm just throwing things around.deleted by creator
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We should have downvotes, but you only get five each month and you can only downvote posts.
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I like seeing the number only because it lets you know if a thread is popular because a ton of people upvoted it, or because of some algorithmic reason (maybe other threads just aren't active at the moment).
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