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Stack overflow is almost dead
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this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Programming
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I find the concept of downvoting very toxic and discouraging. It can potentially prevent people to express different views, something a discussion and our personal development is thriving on. It can be well seen on Reddit and even on Lemmy, where people with different views get sometimes heavily downvoted. It is something I consider to be close to “cancel culture” - a majority decides not to like your opinion, so it tries to silence you by voting you “out”. I would really love to see that Lemmy removes this feature and just allows to upvote - so you can upvote a comment or not, but you cannot downvote a comment.
You can disable download in a lemmy instance. My instance doesn't have downvotes.
What opinions do you see expressed on SO? Maybe we're searching for different things there but all I see are answers that are either correct or not. If someone misunderstood the questions and the answers is not correct it gets downvoted. But I don't know, maybe others use SO for things like "what's your favorite distro?" or "Is AWS better then Azure?".
In my opinion, you're doing a great job by not enabling downvotes. Every user can see how many votes their comment has, which should be enough for them to gauge how well their comment is received. 👍
I haven’t been on Stack Overflow for a long time (around 15 years ago). Back then, I was mostly focused on statistics and programming in R. It’s true that rude responses were rare, especially in the sense that the OP should have known the answer beforehand or could have researched it themselves before asking. But yes, I never saw personal attacks.
Am still on Reddit and was reminded just minutes ago of what you just said.
Here is 20 people downvoting me for giving a TL;DR which is somehow both good and bad simultaneously.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you wrote on Reddit, but from what I read, there was nothing even remotely offensive. You simply provided information. Downvoting you for that is just silly.
The downvotes you're getting here on Lemmy for your comment are equally baseless (current status: 0). It just shows that some people have enough energy to downvote, but not enough to engage in a discussion. Maybe they should save that energy for something more constructive.
Some newspaper forums require identity verification (through paid subscriptions, social media accounts, etc.). These forums are generally much more civil - and we all know why.
Which Lemmy downvotes?
I got banned temporarily (but actually permanently) from TheGuardian for posting newspaper articles reporting on evidence that Assange's Swedish alleged rape victims boasted about their sexual encounter on Twitter and SMS (which bus lawyer submitted as evidence). No commentary from me.
I got banned from r/worldnews without warning because I posted an article by Seymore Hirsch suggesting that the NordStream pipeline was sabotaged by USA themselves. The only commentary there was to add that he is a respectedjournalist who exposed the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam.
I had a comments deleted on Lemmy WorldNews because the Mod did not like my politics. At least I wasn't banned.
Friends have set up a private forum and server which is a solution however it doesn't have much activity. Those in our circle are too attracted to popular socials instead it seems.