this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
814 points (98.0% liked)
Fediverse
28385 readers
1196 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Voting" and "discussion" are separate things. The old forums did not have voting but still had polarization, personal attacks, hellthreads, etc.
The problem is that Reddit/Facebook turned "voting" from a tool meant to measure "quality" (e.g, this post is relevant to the community, this comment does not add to the discussion) into a tool to measure "popularity" (I agree with this, so I vote up. I don't like this, so I downvote).
Either get rid of voting altogether, or let's bring back a culture where "votes" are meant to signal quality.
Redditors did that, rather than reddit I'd argue. Still the same result of becoming a far less useful heuristic though.
Not really sure how to "fix" a system like that, which depends on the masses to do something correctly. They... don't.
What alternatives to votes would you propose to handle this better? Because I have no doubt the same thing will happen here too...
It's just how people work, especially when things get heated. That said, perhaps that's a poor example as a heated discussion isn't necessary a helpful/constructive one...