Ask Lemmy
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Things Lemmy does well
I personally find Lemmy a great deal more pleasant to interact on, with strong pre 2010 forum vibes and I feel that's a good thing. YMMV
TL;DR: There's a lot less "look at me, look at me!" on Lemmy and it's all the better for it.
Still not exactly sure what "yeeted" means, but I like how upvotes & downvotes tend to bring quality content to the fore, and I even like them as a permanent record. They're not very useful of course, but having the motivation to permanently increasing my totals is useful for sharing good content and communicating in good faith. At least for me.
Right - that's me trying to hip and cool ("how do, fellow kids").
Yeet - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yeet
I completely disagree about the upvotes / down votes thing btw. I think, platonically, that's what they were supposed to do.
Pragmatically, they've end up being more a social proof / opinion suppression / brigading tool.
That - and infinite scroll - are among the worst sins introduced by social media. ICBW and YMMV.
Okay, thanks. I can never seem to remember it, maybe because it feels so unnatural. Maybe it would help if I knew where it came from, though. *shrug*
That seems exceptionally pessimistic to me, but maybe you have more insight in to all that than I do. Personally I think multiple things can be true about upvotes / downvotes, some useful, some harmful perhaps.
In any case, there is no debate that upvotes are useful and valuable to me when it comes to posting and commenting.
Well, I remember ye olden days of Usenet - we mostly got along without them, and without some of the issues they seem to cause.
If they're helpful to you, thumbs up (ha). I do wish they were an optional extra instead of proxy dopamine button (based on the way some seem to use them). There's actually a good read on why they (and reddit in general) skew toxic -
https://jacobdesforges.com/you-should-quit-reddit-distribution-wide/
Things change, though. Upvote/downvote was one of the many things Reddit and other places trialed over the years, and based on the success, stuck with it. Me, I barely spent any time on Usenet, but it occurs to me that the userbase was probably smaller. A much, much larger userbase probably fits better with upvote/downvote, so the comparison there is likely skewed, methinks.
'Dopamine rush' is exactly right, and I think it's useful and informational, similar to the way that people react to your statements and ideas in real life. I do think they can have an 'echo chamber' effect and help promote the problem that a popular thing or opinion can be completely wrong, but to me that just means that upvotes/downvotes aren't perfect, not that they should be completely discarded.
Not sure what you want me to do with a link to a book, but I don't even agree with the premise of the title sentence. Reddit is still very useful to me, and I know of no other place that replicates the variety of content, there.
Ok, but I think you're conflating two separate things; the usefulness of Reddit as a content index (which I agree is still unmatched) with whether the upvote/downvote mechanic is net positive. One doesn't need to quit Reddit to acknowledge that the voting system consistently produces pathological outcomes at scale. "Brigading" is a literal Reddit phenomena
The Usenet comparison wasn't really about scale. It was about the incentive structure. Upvotes/downvotes don't just surface good content, they gamify participation in a way that systematically advantages emotionally resonant, tribally safe content over nuanced or contrarian takes. That's not a flaw in implementation , it's a feature of the design.
And "people react to your statements in real life" isn't really analogous. In real life, social feedback is contextual, bidirectional, and has friction. A downvote is anonymous, effortless, and carries zero accountability. The asymmetry matters.
The link is to a book (available via Libby if you don't want to pay for it) in case you wanted a primary source. In summary: Desforges' core argument is that Reddit exploits operant conditioning to keep users chasing high-value posts through a flood of mediocre ones and that even people who claim not to care about karma are still shaped by it. It's worth a read.
Justin Rosenstein - one of the engineers who actually built Facebook's Like button - has publicly said it produces what he called "bright dings of pseudo-pleasure," and has since restricted his own use of it. Leah Pearlman, who co-created it with him, has said the same. These aren't outside critics; these are the people who built the thing.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/years-on-creators-of-facebook-like-button-give-idea-thumbs-down/
End of the day: if you find it personally useful, I believe you. I think the problem is in aggregate behaviour. Apes together...dumb.
I feel like they're distinctly separate things, and I thought I'd communicated as much. Oh, well.
That seems like... a little much. I do agree that upvotes/downvotes indeed gamify the system, but on the whole would say that the end-effect on Reddit results in a big bunch of hoomons acting in typical hoomon ways, which is with deep undercurrents of fickle, ignorant, selfish, feel-good behavior.
Yeah, I get that, but I do observe that there are advantages to upvote/downvote that indeed work better on a larger scale. I'm not sure they're really needed on a smaller scale.
I'd say I agree with most of the things you wrote, but remain unconvinced that upvote/downvote is so absolutely toxic as to merit tossing. And of course, I don't think it's going to happen, anyway.
Aggregate behaviour amongst naked apes? Yeah, I would tend to agree. Now what?
I'd argue that's a restatement of my position with better adjectives :)
Well, 2 options:
Kill all the apes (or just wait 15 more minutes)
Enjoy Lemmy
I'm trending towards 2 myself
Many, especially political and news communities ban opinions that are mainstream in the Democratic Party because they aren’t left enough. If they are powermods, they will happily ban you from dozens of communities and instances.
I have seen no people rail against nuclear on here or reddit.
They rail against my right to own personal nuclear weapons
Bastards!