Complaing about downvotes? Straight to jail.

People even downvote legit news from fairly non-biased sources on Lemmy just because they don't like what is being reported. It's actually kinda wild.

My favorite take on this.

Yes, it's typical.

Votes don't mean much, but communities that deviate from the main spirit have to live with them. (And yes, that's mostly bad, even though in a few cases it's good.)

I try my best to only downvote explicitly hateful or unhelpful comments

But I can get it because I have blocked every single news source I possibly can, and like every three to eight days a new one pops up.

Like, I don't give a fuck about news. I don't want to know how miserable the world is or how much more miserable it is than yesterday. I want to look at kitties and titties and maybe some funny stuff in between and that's about it.

Does it stay in the Apple and Nintendo communities or does it get cross-posted everywhere? I don't downvote for dislike, but I don't want to block a general community because some asshat is crossposting just under spam levels.

I downvote for verifiably false.

for some reason i literally can't downvote anything

A good chunk of active Lemmy users are interested in open source and digital freedom. Apple and Nintendo are the opposite, very big on vendor lockin and anti consumer practices.

I think people often use /all to browse, which makes sense for a fairly small site like Lemmy. But the downside is that people then upvote or downvote based on their preferences, not the community's.

(Eg, the fellow below who has decided Apple and Nintendo are like Nazis and must always be downvoted.)

The downvote is used to express negative sentiments

Upvotes/downvotes are unfortunately a fundamentally flawed concept. They originally served as an superior alternative to forums' previous sorting method of most-recently commented, but they are far from flawless themselves.

My ideal alternative would be some kind of customisable sort order chosen by the user that uses some kind of sentiment analysis of the text to find the kind of posts the user is interested in. For example, you could sort by whether post look serious or joking, how long they are, ratio of words to hyperlinks, etc. Could also filter out ragebait and similar rubbish.

Of course I can see downsides - performance considerations, and it would only work for text posts and comments, but it's just an idea off the top of my head.

Yes. It takes real restraint for me not to reflexively downvote news I don't like, or posts that makes me cringe but they're legitimate for the topic at hand. Also sometimes I downvote by accident without realizing.

Asking why things are downvoted or complaining about them are the two most surefire ways to receive plenty of them on the Threadiverse.

Upvotes or downvotes aren't worth anything, don't take it personally if you get downvoted. I've said unpopular stuff too and received downvotes. Once I wrote a raunchy joke and the votes on it went (1 -> 0-> 3 -> -5 -> 6 -> 20)

I still think downvotes (and upvotes!) should count for more when they come from subscribers. At least for sorting within the community

I worked at a site with a karma system years before reddit and the like ever came into being. There will always be people who just downvote anything they don't like. Unless you start finding and removing those users, nothing is going to change with them. And if you start removing chunks of your community, you have fewer posters, less interaction, etc.

Can't they just block the communities?

Already 2 steps ahead, 3 steps backwards, and 2 forwards. If one shows up on the "all" feed, I block it. Ain't much left AFAIK.

It's best for me to block them rather than just downvote a random post purely based on the community it's in.

Why care? There is no karma system. Just move on

Avoid „default” communities and instances, they tend to bring the worst of Reddit to Threadiverse. It’s slightly less of an issue if you stick to places that try to be different. You won’t avoid drive-by downvotes from /all but I don’t think it’s that much of an issue (there’s just too much crap there for anyone to browse it by time of posting).

Not just fediverse, I think any site that allows "downvotes" has this issue.

Personally, I don't see why the ability to downvote needs to exist. If someone is trolling, ignore it or report it. A troll post with a score of 1 and no comments is better than one with a score of -100 and no comments. The downvotes probably encourages the troll. They know they've upset a bunch of people. All their posts getting no interaction will bore them.

On the other hand, downvotes existing leads to things being hated on for no reason. Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines. Now sardines isn't looking so bad even though the number of people who like it hasn't changed. What does the downvoting add? It just makes the people who like sardines feel bad. They might end up not contributing in the future and then every answer to asklemmy ends up being identical.

Sadly... yes.

Some people feel like (I would say "think" but that seems not entirely accurate:-P) their preferences are the only ones that should matter, and that their right to "speak" should triumph over ("trump"?) your right to not have to listen. Entirely without the slightest hint of awareness as to the irony that they are supporting the very right-wing fascist ideologies that they claim to be against!! (I have taken to calling these the "Alt-Left", since they act identically to the USA "Alt-Right" that uses "alternative facts" in lieu of real ones as the basis for their belief structures). e.g. if they do not like a certain book then it is not sufficient for them to simply never read it - instead, everyone else must be denied the opportunity to access it as well, regardless of the circumstances you may find yourself in (being required to read it as part of a college course, seeking a well-balanced viewpoint by examining all sides of an issue, even highly negative ones?).

See also the phenomenon of "Eternal September". When people who act like children - of whatever physical age - flood the room, it becomes impossible for adults to have any kind of rational conversation. Put another way: respect is not something to be expected on the internet. When they go low... well, you have no choice but to take it and like it! Or you can leave.

No seriously: if you can move to a PieFed community, that would provide the only realistic solution I can think of to that problem that you are describing. Lemmy provides none (well, there is one but it is enormously extreme: it would involve making a community visible only to people on the same instance as wherever it is located, blocking out the entire rest of the Fediverse by default and forcing people to have accounts on every instance that chose to do this, thereby invalidating the entire concept of federation itself; although note the concept itself has merit for narrowly discussing certain instance-specific matters where outside opinions are neither appropriate nor welcomed, at the behest of the instance owner + admins) - and I doubt that it ever will, given how far behind Lemmy is in terms of features and how slowly those are added (it uses the very difficult to learn Rust coding language), plus the authoritarian biases present in the current set of its developers (who seem to prefer an admin dealing with such at the instance level rather than granting that power to anyone below the admin level). However, PieFed allows communities to receive votes only from people who have actually subscribed to that exact community - others can view the content, but only if they click the subscribe button can they interact with it to sway its visibility in that manner.

Yes, I am saying that PieFed might very well legitimately "save" the very concept of threaded social media, preventing it from being abandoned entirely by those of us who cannot stand the screaming cries of toddlers fucking literally fucking every fucking single fucking place that we fucking go. I would rather go read a book that I checked out from a library and never visit the Threadiverse again if I could not find such hope that no, somebody else's preferences do not get to dictate literally every tiny aspect of life that we all are allowed to live, which does not sound the tiniest bit like "freedom" to me.

Though I admit that I may be too overly sensitive right now to the absolute tidal wave of emotional vomiting that goes on across the Threadiverse (I live in America where the "will of the people" is leading to ah... uh... "big changes" as of late, so sadly I am losing hope that the masses always know what is "best" at all times - especially when not articulated in a well-reasoned rebuttal but merely delivered as a drive-by downvoting spree).

Not made by me, but excellent oc by another lemmite https://startrek.website/post/27897300

I'm on Beehaw. I don't see down votes. Blissful ignorance.

If you're modding a small community trying to get off the ground and you're suffering from downvoters who aren't participants in your comm, ban the downvoters.

Edit: Hilarious that I got downvoted by an account with 0 comments

Yes 🤤

That's typical reddit behavior, many of them brought their childish habits over to the fediverse.