Since a lot of folks sort by “all” on Lemmy, popular posts get overwhelmed by people who don’t daily drive operating systems like iOS or MacOS.
I like outside perspectives and all, but when the majority of the “community” discussion is coming from people who aren’t even using these products, it is pretty hard to have informed conversations.
Moreover, I feel like this type of engagement creates a lot of threads that get pretty combative and catty. They’re often started by people who are trying to argue and convince iOS / MacOS users that they’ve picked the wrong side of the fence.
Anyone else feel me on this? I imagine this is a problem for other communities on Lemmy as well.
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I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I feel strongly that downvoting itself is a problem.
Social media is powered by little bits of endorphins that come from clicking the response buttons, and a certain type of person seems to get a thrill out of the downvote in particular. That personality type does not seem to be conducive to building a strong community, but we give them quite a bit of engagement anyways to keep them coming back.
I don’t think anything of value would be lost by dropping that action all together.
I slightly disagree because it can be a good way to track people who only traffic in bad faith. If there were some other way to flag them, I’d be all for it but it’s almost completely bad options for ways to flag that sort of anti social behavior.
I would argue that the signal to noise ratio here makes this metric effectively worthless. Being unpopular doesn’t necessarily indicate bad faith, and downvotes come for many reasons that are not similar enough to group.
Downvotes also bring a unique kind of bad actor: the troll. I have many times seen accounts that go out of their way to farm for downvotes, and that kind of content brings everyone down with it.