this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Writing
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This is great. I honestly hadn't given the downvote thing much thought. The bit about promoting discussion really hits it home. Tell me why you don't like it!
It reminds me of restaurant reviews. I eat at Chili's pretty regularly, and if you pay on the little tablet kiosk thing (Ziosk?), it wants you to complete a survey. If things were great, I do the survey. But if they were bad, or even just fine, I skip. I've heard too many tales of disciplinary action being taken on non-five-star reviews, which just kills the whole point. Do you want my honest opinion, or do you want a yes-man?
Back to the piece, it's a great write-up. Though I do want to point out that you used "apart" instead of "a part" at least twice. π
But don't worry, the XMPP article linked at the bottom has way more errors.
This is fine while we're still small, and the number of intentional bad actors is limited. If our user sign-up vibe check filter ever fails, though, and we get inundated with a thousand alt-right trolls, the inability to downvote is going to majorly suck. Having to sit down and compose a well-worded, sourced comment every time they brain-dump a load of reality-distorting rubbish onto my feed is a huge time- and energy-sink, which is exactly what they're going for. It takes them 3 minutes to type some pile of complete nonsense, and it takes me half an hour or more to debunk it. By the time I'm finished with my "this is why you're wrong" comment, they've gone on to copy/paste their own fuckery 30 different times over 10 different comment threads and 6 different Lemmy posts.
Eventually, nobody will have the energy for these chuds any longer, and their screeds will stay up unopposed or only marginally opposed, which is their intended goal.
Downvotes make it simple, quick, and easy to fight this bullshit-shotgun tactic, because clicking one time is faster than the fastest-typing sealion. While they outpace my ability to sit and debunk their "arguments", each one of their posts can accumulate double-digit downvotes before they even finish posting it on the next thread, hiding them from everyone who's not sorting the comment section by "dumbfuckery".
We'll see how it goes, though. I tend to be cynical and doomy, and maybe the things I worry about will never happen, or will shape up differently than I predict. But the fact that none of the "Yay, no downvotes!" people ever address this concern is something that reduces my level of confidence in the scheme.
if they're spewing hate them we'd report them, not downvote
Ah! Thanks for pointing that out I'll be more cautious in that regard