Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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I was thinking just now how there seems to be people who downvotes threads for no apparent reason, even seemingly innocuous and neutral ones.. for example "Kingdom Come has sold 2 million units" 3 downvotes; "This New Algorithm for Sorting Books Is Close to Perfection" 5 downvotes; you get the idea. Now everyone is entitled to their opinion, but It makes me wonder if someone(s) is spam downvoting for some motive.
Might just be people who are used to having an algorithm so they dislike stuff they don't want to see more of.
Which is a problem
Every thread will get downvoted by someone for some reason. You would go insane trying to make sense of it.
That's true, but since witnessing the waves of spam that flooded Kbin before its disappearance, I try to keep an eye open for this kind of shit.
My guess is accidentally hitting the button while scrolling, and too lazy to change it.
The first isn't really interesting, and the second is clickbait. I wouldn't say there is no reason for downvoting them.
You are NOT supposed to downvote things that "aren't really interesting", you are actively ruining other people's user experience on here by doing that as downvoted posts get less visibility.
Some people might think it's not interesting because it's not appropriate content for that community, and that by downvoting they are improving the quality for everyone. I don't think every instance/community has a unified consensus on how exactly to use voting, and some people are always going to do their own thing regardless.
This is one of the reasons why I'd love to see a more expanded method of reacting to content rather than simply upvoting or dowvoting; something like, say, user-side thread or post tagging, with things like "verified", "clickbait", and mood reacts like "happy" vs "sad", and usefulness reacts like "solved, thanks" vs "closed as duplicate", etc. We need more and better axes.
(Axises? Axeses? ~~Asses?~~)
Interesting idea, but how do you decide on what the universally-agreed on reactions are? Have too many and they may as well just be comments!
A fair point that I admittedly don't know how to solve. The closest I've got to a "functional" idea is to focus on splitting the two (I think? maybe three) things that an "upvote" is interpreted as, and supplementing with also the opposite / counter message:
Pretty much everything else can be a comment, as you say, but the purpose and reception of a message should also be as streamlined to communicate as possible.
Some people only browse global feeds and downvote stuff as if they're trying to train the Netflix recommendation algorithm, completely ignoring the rules of the community it originates from
I remember that being a problem back on Reddit (though I always found people upvoting low-effort stuff that wasn't community/sub-appropriate to be more of a problem). It's kind of a site-wide UX issue though really, if a new casual user is just presented with a list of posts then they might genuinely be unaware of (or perhaps just uninterested in) where they came from and what their votes mean.
Well yes, the visibility thing would be the point. Interesting and relevant content is upvoted, becoming more visible to more people, and uninteresting and irrelevant content is downvoted, becoming less visible and shown to fewer people.
Your interests are not identical with interests of other people.