this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
787 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
81208 readers
6221 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Stuff like this makes me very sympathetic to lemmy instances that disable downvotes
I read the comment, then judge the comment and use that judgement and voting scores to judge the community.
Downvotes are just samethink fuel.
Yeah. In my experience upvotes/downvotes often have very little to do with the actual quality of a comment and more to do with how much it conforms with the current political zeitgeist of whatever community you're participating in. The converse of this is that low quality comments telling people who disagree to go F themselves may also get upvotes.
Yeah, the "platonic ideal downvote" is only supposed to be used for content that "doesn't contribute to the conversation" or whatever, but that is very often just not the case. There's even research on how downvotes easily lead to a bandwagon effect: here's a blog post on this, based on a research article.
Hmm, I should probably create a Beehaw account and move over there. It's a shame that account migration really isn't a thing on Lemmy
Interesting I didn't realize there was research on this stuff. Yeah maybe I should go to beehaw too. Blahaj is another one that disables downvotes. It’s true theres no full account migration but theres ways to export your settings and subscription etc to a new community (see this or this). Apparently theres also ways to link two accounts for a persistent identity, by putting the other accounts username in your bio or something, but I don’t know a lot about that.