Post Karma Does Matter on Lemmy, use your votes accordingly.
TLDR: 3 people working together can gatekeep content on the "active" and "hot" feeds on smaller servers/communities.
After some playing around, I noticed posts disappear after reaching a threshold. A quick search later and I'm in the Lemmy docs reading about how this all works.
In plain English, any three people working together (or one person with three accounts) can stop posts from appearing on the default feed. Once a post reaches -2 it will only appear to people who browse "new." Edit: Of course, it reappears after it climbs above -2, but it's a race against the clock.
As a smaller server, we're vulnerable to this. But we also have some extra mitigations - namely, @seahorse@midwest.social has to approve everyone who joins, and that might weed out bad actors.
So what can you do? Upvote content liberally, downvote sparingly.
I think getting rid of downvotes can also make social media more negative, since people feel the need to reply to things they don't like instead of down voting and moving on. Of course, I now can't find a source to back that claim, so take it with a grain of salt.
Source: personal experience. Usenet was a wretched hive of trolls and flame wars. I will gladly sacrifice a few unpopular takes if that's what it takes to do away with that nonsense. And I can tell you, from experience, works. For every unpopular take at a score of -2 or so, there are probably ten more at -9000 that we can totally do without.
Yes, it means that people expressing an unpopular opinion have to be very careful with tone and phrasing. But they ought to be doing that anyway. Nobody ought to think they can just waltz into a community, say something that completely contradicts their raison d'etre without any attempt at respectful framing, and expect to be welcomed with open arms.
I feel like this could go either way, depending on moderation. A good response to something you don't like can make an interesting and nuanced convo for third parties to read. A bad one can just lead to arguments.
I think in a large anonymous place like reddit you end up with arguments because there's no built-in good will and not enough moderation. Lemmy communities might be able to mitigate some of that to encourage substantive disagreement.
Both. Downvotes aren't taken into account for all beehaw posts and comments. Even if someone downvotes a beehaw post from another instance, it just won't send.
The reason reddit worked so well for so long was primarily due to downvoting. There's drawbacks and it could certainly be improvedb, ut having a system where those who contribute rise to the top, while those who don't get filtered out makes it worth it.
Yeah, I was against it at first, because I don't like options being taken from me, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.
The whole idea is based on the false equivalency that upvotes and downvotes are equal, when in fact people feel negatives much more strongly, and they also tend to have an oversized impact, like mentioned by OP.
That's the beauty of this kind of system though. beehaw can setup their server however they want,
if you don't like how they have things set up don't use their local, you can either choose to interact with it through other federated instances or not.
They can hit the button, but Beehaw won't register the downvote. In fact, as best I can tell it changes them into upvotes. I use Jeroba, so when I'm looking at Beehaw I still see the downvote button, but when I try to use it, I get error messages.
I think it’s important to remember not to downvote someone because they have a differing opinion on a subject. I reserve my downvotes for when I am pretty sure the commenter is purposely and consciously spreading misinformation, or is being otherwise hateful.
I've been trying to upvote nearly everything to try and help with engagement. As others have mentioned, at this point I mainly downvote hateful content or misinformation.
I disagree. post karma only matters if you're limited to viewing in the feed only. if the community doesnt care about posts showing the the federated feed then post karma is a meaningless metric.
a worrisome issue is that brigading smaller communities effectively mutes them (from a federated standpoint)... however, there are innumerable ways to search for communities. you do have to take the initiative.
Could you possible expound on these innumerable ways? I am new to Lemmy, and have been trying to subscribe to some federated communities, but can't seem to find them without clicking on something that takes me away from my home server. I know we're federated with them, because I am subscribed to other groups on that same server. But the Search function doesn't seem to work at all, and entering the address manually (as best I understand it) returns a nonexistent group error.
I wonder if long term it would be feasible to push more of the "algorithm" onto the client side where it could be tweaked by the user (or more likely, by extensions or built-in options).
I didn't consider federation. I'm not sure what prevents me from creating an instance with three users that vote on other servers. I can't run this test tonight. Hopefully someone gave that some thought.