Downvotes = “I disagree” or “this is bad and you should feel bad”?
I think I’ve settled on the latter. Disagreement is maybe best communicated by the absence of an upvote? And downvotes work best when they signal something that is just off base, and while not reportable, is not appreciated at a broad cultural level.
There’s some part of my brain that applies display:none to the upvote/downvote function on every platform.
So if I don’t vote on your content it’s not because I hate it. My brain is just wired to automatically edit out anything that’s not content. Mostly this means ads, but voting features seem to have been caught in the net too.
The nice thing about the fediverse is all my votes are displayed. I generally only down vote a post if it’s way off topic or it’s rife with hate. This also applies to comments.
I generally upvote most things as long as it fits the topic, even if I generally disagree with it.
Originally up- and down votes were intended to crowd source filtering and rating content in a community. So voting up for things you want to see more of and vote down spam or content that is unfit for the community. But people will tend to upvote things they agree with and downvote those they deem wrong - I also find myself doing something like that. I now try to follow these rules:
Upvote things I like (or agree with)
Don’t vote on things I don’t agree with or think are dumb
Downvote things that I feel really don’t belong here.
It helps that lemmy currently shows the number of up and down votes instead of just the score, it gives a bit more inhibition before downvoting stuff.
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