I am currently in the middle of a lengthy political argument with someone on c/politics, and we fundamentally disagree on things, but both of us are being cordial about it and I appreciate that.
I just came from politics and basically it has devolved into name calling and piss poor hypocrisy, salted with thinly veiled death threats. Feels like home
Reddit just became blocking, banning and censorship. I don't care if somebody disagrees with me, the muting of dissent or debate or discourse or whatever was really sinister to me. People have different opinions, we shouldn't be so quick to deny them freedom of speech.
It's how old-Reddit used to be. People didn't over-use the downvote button to disagree. They went to the effort of commenting back to give counterpoints. Redditors became lazy and instead moved to posting unfunny puns and getting trigger happy with votes.
With it discussion died or it became an echo-chamber.
Even in subs where my politics aligned it became dull-as-ditchwater discussing anything because you'd just get people more extreme in an ideology considering themselves 'right' because they had more upvotes.
I can't quite figure out the purpose of the votes here and I think I just prefer to comment instead of giving an up/down.
I think the up/down thing also promotes shorter comments, at least it did for me, since I know it can be hard to totally agree with someone who is making several points so I tried to keep it short and to the point. Which is dumb, because difficult topics are complex and deserve more words thrown at them not less.
Maybe the utility of the votes for me is when I don't know what I want to say in a reply, but I want to express something. Then I vote.
I got a bit heated there about something yesterday because I had irl stresses going on, and when I calmed down I went and edited my comment to make nicer and apologize for rudeness.
To my surprise, the comment is clearly still upvoted, and the guy I was talking with told me not to sweat it. A few times now I've posted a controversial opinion and observed it, and always, it's at mildly upvoted.
Honestly this makes me wonder how much of the downvotes were from bots or paid shills.