For example, people on Reddit asking redundant questions and give equally redundant or unhelpful answers.
Whenever every ‘What’s the worst show you’ve seen?’ is asked, you’ll get 10,000 “Kardashians” answers, which is just easy karma farming.
If someone posts in a community that’s geared for something like opinions, but someone elects to just go on a full scale rant instead.
I reserve downvotes solely for comments that don’t contribute to the discussion. For example, if my comment said “I like ginger tea with lemons” as a reply to your comment about downvotes, I would downvote it.
Hey I too like ginger tea with lemons!
If everyone would do it this way, downvotes could filter out noise. But even I found myself klicking at the downvote button for disagreeing with somebody. Maybe call it a noise button instead and give it a different icon?
I think that downvotes became so heavily used as a disagree button because they were linked to visibility and, especially in political forums, it was a way of burying your opponent’s good arguments and then you could promote the weaker arguments. I sincerely believe that it’s some poor fucker’s job to go through and do this, although the whole chatGPT stuff means they’re going to find themselves out of work soon.
If it’s innocently irrelevant I either ignore it or reply “I don’t get it”. Either the commenter realised they replied in the wrong place or you get a fascinating insight into the thought processes that made it seem worth their time typing out.