I don't have much experience with that community, but from the little I've seen, agreed. It's not good.

A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn't matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.

The best communities I've been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don't feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.

Dogpile on them

It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there’s no other option

In my experience, that's not what happens

Yeah, something that is becoming very clear in these replies is that people got used to Reddit way of things.

Perhaps it's one of those things that you have to experience for yourself.

It has nothing to do with explaining oneself, but more about fostering discussion. You can check my earlier reply to the other user where I explain it better.

I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.

Considering the point of the comment - and the post being about downvotes - my edit was meant to illustrate the point, not to whine.

Regardless, about another thing that I feel is more relevant:

If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.

To me this is not... A healthy way to interact with forums. You don't have to engage with every post or comment you come across, be it with commenting or voting. You're "allowed" to be neutral, to not know, to not have an opinion, or to simply not want to engage.

And if you feel that someone is pulling you into a pointless argument, you can just walk away. Having the last word != being right, as a lot of people misunderstand.

And if people posting ragebaits becomes an issue, downvoting or replying to them won't solve anything. The problem would need to be fixed on a more fundamental level, but that's another can of worms that mods need to figure out on their own communities. As for me, I simply walked away, as I did with Reddit and others

I have more respect for you for explaining and taking the time to reply. I have even upvoted your comment, despite disagreeing with it.

For me, upvotes and downvotes should not be used as agree/disagree buttons. Instead, they should be about "brings interesting points to the table"/"this comment adds nothing".

But that's not how the majority of people view them. Realizing that, that's why I don't believe this system works, as it dicentivizes discussions and - in my opinion - helps creating echo chambers.

A good example of a forum that uses only upvotes is Tildes. You need an invite to participate, but you can lurk and see what people do over there. Popular opinions still get to the top and get highlighted (resolving the issue of guaranteeing that the most helpful comments appear first, which is important for posts asking about tech issues and whatnot), and less popular opinions still appear down below. But here's the thing: in my experience in that forum, those less popular opinions are engaged with far more than what I see in Reddit, piefed or lemmy. Why? Because you can't downvote them. There's no button for that. If you want to express disagreement, you actually have to do that.

Because otherwise, using my comment as example:

• what did people disagree with?

1. The suggestion that the downvote button shouldn't exist?

2. The suggestion that neither of them should exist?

3. Me calling 4chan community trash?

4. All of the above?

No discussion is added, no new insights appear, nothing. Without your comment, this comment that I'm writing now wouldn't exist either.

Thus my point, we are discussing and bringing new insights to the table.

Might be the community. Voyager here shows downvote buttons (in my lemmy.world account)

upbeat music plays 🥰

The only concievable thing another company could do to get me to pick them over steam is to give me an exact copy of steam but with the option to change the color to anything but blue.

YSK, you can change Steam's look: https://steambrew.app/themes