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What's the plan for downvote federation?
(kbin.social)
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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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@ernest
Personally I like the current system because:
I think this is because we can see each other's downvotes and so we use them more responsibly. People from other instances don't have that so they behave differently.
Downvote-to-disagree has an offputting effect on discussion and creates echo chambers.
Brigading from places like hexbear doesn't really affect us.
I'd prefer that kbin communities continue to develop based on the ethos of the people here, rather than potentially having our upvotes cancelled out by downvotes from a larger instance.
I responded in another comment of yours, but I'll also respond here for the sake of visibility.
I completely agree with this. From what I can tell, public voting has made people on kbin.social much more reserved with their downvotes — tending to only use them for spam, hate, off-topic, or noncontributory posts and less for just disagreement — without having the risks that come with a complete lack of downvotes (i.e., not having a quick way to give negative feedback on posts that are off-topic, noncontributory, etc.).
This is a good point, but there are a lot of issues with not federating downvotes. Yes, not federating downvotes DOES help to emphasize the downvoting culture on kbin.social, but it also means that the downvote counter is misleading and unintuitive. New users would reasonably think that, like the upvote counter, the downvote counter represents anyone who's downvoted your post (outside of people on defederated instances). Having downvotes act like they do right now makes kbin.social less approachable and more confusing to new users.
Also, as long as we're using the same system as other instances, I don't want to push the idea that negative feedback from other instances doesn't matter. A downvote is ultimately a downvote, whether it's from kbin.social, another Kbin instance, or a Lemmy instance. The last thing I want is for the main Kbin instance — the one to which many will default — to have an exclusionary culture.
If we don't federate downvotes, I think we'd be better off just ditching downvotes entirely and instead having something more conducive to how we want instant negative feedback to be used. As I've mentioned in other comments in this thread, it'd be great to have a set of reactions people can use. "This is spam," "This is hateful," "This is off-topic", "This doesn't meaningfully contribute to the discussion," etc. would be a much better system for promoting the voting culture we want here on kbin.social. And if other instances adopt such a system, we could federate those reactions with them as well.
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568
This would be my second preference.
Out of curiosity, how would the current system be preferable to specific reactions? The whole idea of "we should only count downvotes on our instance" only makes sense if everyone on our instance is using downvotes in a more reserved manner, which isn't the case for everyone. Different people on kbin.social use the downvote button in different ways, and that'll be even more so as the instance grows. If we really want to preserve this voting culture we have, wouldn't it be better in every way to replace downvotes with reactions specific to how we'd want downvotes to be used?
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 like I said, it's my second preference.
If you're asking why it's not my first choice, the answer's partly that I'm happy with the status quo for reasons I've already gone into, and partly pragmatism.
@ernest has a really long to-do list and figuring out how to implement it in a way that wouldn't undermine the report button or do something crazy e.g to reputation is probably not the best use of his time right now.
Definitely agree that Ernest has a ton to do and implementing a whole new system shouldn't rlly be the top of his priority list. If it's too impractical, I'd prefer that downvotes just federate instead of the unintuitive system we currently have, but I've already discussed that at length.