I've seen a good bit of debate on Kbin surrounding downvotes, so what are your thoughts? Should they exist? Should they be shown separately? Should you be able to see who downvoted?
I personally like downvotes and especially like that they're shown separately. You're able to get a much better idea of how people feel about something, and you can more easily express a minority opinion. Of course, there are downsides (e.g., brigades), but I think the pros outweigh the cons.
They should absolutely exist. Negative feedback is feedback, and expression of only one side of the emotional spectrum is a strange and unrealistic facsimile of actual life.
I was completely opposed when e.g. Youtube essentially removed downvotes. They're a pretty important indicator of when someone is full of shit, even though there's an obvious abuse potential as well. As a kbin user, I understand there's a limited federation of downvotes. I actually think it's nice, whether or not it's representative of the rest of the fediverse.
I try to limit my downvotes to irrelevance, spam, intentional douchiness and bad faith participation - as far as I can figure out what's what. At least while the community seems worth it. Unlike, for example, Reddit, where the proportion of bad faith participation was huge, and the general tone was quite hostile. I like the fediverse better.
Not from kbin, arrived from all, but I wanted to point out there's a distinction between
I care on a personal level that I was downvoted
I care about seeing the relative measure of this post from the community as a whole
The removal of downvotes on different platforms is often done to address the former concern, i.e. I don't content creators to get discouraged so I will take away the bad number.
Let me give you an example from a different site: youtube.
Rockstar recently released a video advertising Red Dead Redemption for the Switch, and I have to admit, it does look neat at first glance. The video even has 40k "Likes" and to someone who is used to much smaller numbers, this seems like a LOT of positive feedback. Cool game, eh?
The same video also has 304k Dislikes, more than seven times the amount of Likes, and that's the sole reason why I took a double take and tried to find out what the heck was wrong with this game that people hated it so much.
Now, on the Fediverse, the entire upvote/downvote thing is a whole lot smaller - no multimillion dollar companies trying to sell stuff, but private people discussing opinions and sharing memes and the like ... but the core concept is the same. If someone is behaving like an asshole and gets 20 upvotes every comment, then they might feel vindicated with their shitty opinion because it looks like a lot of positive feedback.
If the same comments also get 150 downvotes at the same time, the statement from the community is suddenly completely different. But this can only happen IF there is the ability to downvote stuff.
Is is a perfect system? Far from it. But I'd still rather keep the ability to downvote for situations like these.
This is community-evaluated content, and downvotes are a tool used for evaluation. So I think they make sense.
That being said, I don't believe they should be public by default. People are nuts these days, especially online, and I don't want to catch an online stalker or some nazi sliding aggro into my DMs because I downvoted their post.
I think there are benefits to being able to see downvotes. By looking at the posts & comments of someone who downvoted something, you can come up with an idea of why. Additionally, it can make people think more before handing out a downvote — if you know that people can check that it was you who downvoted, you're more likely to consider whether you can actually justify your downvote.
But of course, someone could go harassing people who downvote them (e.g., in DMs), and that possibility can make people less likely to downvote at all. I think that with a good block feature, harassment from downvotes won't be that big an issue, but there's definitely good reason to hide who downvoted something. I don't strongly lean either way.
(And as a side note, I really like being able to see who upvoted something as well. It's just neat info to know tbh, especially in smaller communities.)
I agree. And I have already seen it. People going to inspect the vote history on all their own comments, then complaining that another person is going around downvoting them. Because I am exceptionally nosy, on 2 occasions I actually went to check to see if it was true. In both cases it did seem to be the case although neither downvoter was really vigorous. Like half the commenter's recent posts were downvoted by the same person.
OTOH my understanding is that it is required in order for votes/boosts to propagate in federation. If there was a technical workaround that people felt confident in, I think it would be better hidden. For that % of people where it really just makes them crazy and they can't resist checking.
I'm going to go against the grain and say I don't like them - I think they can reduce quality of discussion (i.e., encouraging laziness, much easier to hit the down button than explain to someone why they're wrong and risk getting downvoted yourself).
If we have them though I think you should be able to see who gave them out, the facelessness of it is the biggest problem.
I want a community that values feedback. Downvotes are a form of feedback (low response effort too!) that anyone who is a part of that can choose to engage with, even people who don’t want a comment history at all. I have used them in the past to reflect on myself, and the community I was a part of as well.
A slightly different opinion: I think you should have them but not show totals anywhere, that way they can still be used to sort popular posts and comments and to filter out terrible ones, but people don't judge the quality by the number next to it or obsess over their imaginary internet points.
To copy and paste my comment from another thread regarding down votes:
I never really saw the point of downvotes/reduces on Lemmy and Kbin. There isn't an equivalent of those actions on other Fediverse projects (except if you count reactions on Pleroma) and it causes problems like what you have described [in the thread the OP was describing being downvote bombed through no fault of their own].
I use the kbin enhancement script's option to hide the reduce button because I have no reason to touch it.
Reddit has downvotes as a means of rating down content that doesn't contribute to the discussion or is spammy, but it tends to be used as a lazy "I disagree" button that attracts bandwaggoning. Why put in the effort to explain why you disagree with something when you can just hit the down arrow and be done?
I do not know what the intended purpose of downvotes/reduces is here on Kbin. Is it a lazy disagree button or is it like what Reddit intends where comments and posts that don't contribute should be downvoted?
Some of the best viewing of posts/discussions come from sorting controversially, which is coming. Downvotes are required for this. I like downvotes. I even think it’s pretty funny when people get so mad about being downvoted. I do not agree with the kbin way of making them all visible though.