what if you are only granted 1 downvote per 2 upvotes you assign-- this would have a triple effect of promoting a more positive site-wide image and make downvotes twice as meaningful while also preventing abusive brigading of users-- just a thought- is the idea even feasibly applicable?
My opinion is still that Lemmy needs reactions in addition to, or instead of, voting. Voting should be reserved for “this is something that should be seen / is not interesting,” but it doubles as “I dis/agree with this”. It’s ambiguous. Lemmy needs reactions – Github is a good model.
The real problem with having only voting and not reactions is that ambiguity. When someone makes a comment that I think is interesting and well thought-out, but I don’t agree with… do I upvote it? I think it is worth reading, but I don’t want to imply I agree with it. Same with posts: “Donald Trump orders the execution of all homeless people.” On the one hand, I want to upvote the fuck out of that because it needs to be seen and bubbled-up by the algorithm; on the other hand, I don’t want to imply that I agree with it.
Reddit used to always preach this: upvote content that needs to be seen, not based on agreement – although it never worked out that way, because people want a way to express their opinion about a post or comment. If voting is the only mechanism for expressing dis/agreement, that’s what it’ll be used for. If Lemmy had reactions, then it’d allow people a fast way to express their opinions about comment without having to resort to voting, or in banal responses that don’t contribute anything to the conversation.
If I could make one change to Lemmy, I’d get rid of voting altogether, and just have reactions. You can still sort: there are obviously positive and negative reactions (thumbs-up/down), and most reactions can probably be grouped into one of three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. You don’t need to support all emojis; again, Github is a good model. You have a half-dozen or a dozen choices, each of which falls into one of the three categories. The current sorting by vote could be done by subtracting negatives from positives; maybe you add the neutrals to the positives, because if someone bothered to react, it probably counts as being worth sorting up. That’s a debatable detail, though, not a blocker. But so often I see a comment where I just want to say, “I agree with this” without implying that it’s worthy of sorting up; or I want to say “you need to see this” without implying that I agree with the content. My current choices are: upvote or downvote with an ambiguous implication, or a reply saying “This!” that only muddies the thread.
Voting is ambiguous, and limited, and easily abused. It should be tossed out and replaced with reactions – or at the very least added to supplement voting. Then I could at least upvote important news to get it to the front page, but add a thumbs-down to show I don’t like it.
well there’s the implementation angle-- i would think one is a lot more complicated to put together than another- naturally i prefer my idea and you prefer yours, but there is elegance in simplicity and it could be a place to start- no reason both ideas can’t be explored.