My experience
A few hours ago, I commented on a post about a nuclear power plant in Georgia on lemmy.ml:
Why expensive nuclear reactors instead of cheaper renewables?
What happened? 8 likes, 11 dislikes
I am totally honest with you now: This makes me sad, because it’s the same behavior that I experienced on Reddit and why I deleted my account there. Different oppinion => Downvote!!! Now my comment has a “-3” score and I could think about deleting it. I won’t do it, but others would maybe do it. IMO, that’s how we create echo chambers.
I want to post what I like to (not what the 60-vs-40-majority of the platform likes me to post)…
So let me ask you these question:
- When do you upvote 👍?
- When do you downvote 👎?
- When do you do neither 👍👎?
My answers:
When do you upvote? 👍
- same opinion as mine
- a post that I think should get more attention
When do you downvote? 👎
- discrimination
- trolls
- irrationality, ignoring facts
When do you do neither? 👍👎
- different opinion => I write a comment instead
- posts I classify as “not interesting”
I vote on every post I see. That combined with the “hide read posts” setting means I always see new stuff on the front page.
I upvote any post that I want to see more of in the community it was posted to. Posted game news in a gaming community? You get an upvote, whether or not I actually like or care about that game. I also upvote anything I don’t have any particular reason to downvote. It’s my default vote.
I downvote any post I want to see less of. Clickbait titles or misspellings are an automatic downvote. Off topic posts are always a downvote. And any post that comes off as salty gets downvoted, especially if the post is salty about being downvoted. I just don’t want to see any of that, so I use my vote to discourage it.
Lemmy itself is different than Reddit. Lemmy itself is pretty much “What if we’d build Reddit, but better?” So, why not taking that as the opportunity to question things instead of copying the Reddit behavior?
I does not matter who you are. There will always be a situation when your have the 33% opinion and others have the 66% opinion. And that’s fine. We are indiviuals and not clones of each other or robots. Imagine, there are 100 people. On Reddit, you’d get 33 likes and 66 dislikes. Now, your comment or post has a score of -33. Some people would delete that post/comment now. New people arrive, see -33 and ignore the comment. The poster of the comment/post will not post his opinion again. But why all that? You don’t need to always agree with the majority… Are we really interested in building echo chambers? Is it really your interest to hide different opinions and hear only what you like to hear?
Sometimes, I ask myself the question “What, if everyone would do XYZ?”… What, if everyone would dislike every other opinion? Be honest: This platform would be toxic AF. I gave probably 1k likes and under 10 dislikes on lemmy so far and I keep going the way of positivity, because I think, in the end, it’s better for Lemmy.