Before Lemmy I never really did social media. Lemmy is my first experience in getting ratioed. I notice a surprising amount of my posts get 50% or more downvotes. I never realized how divisive my opinions and communication style is.
Thankfully I’m in a good mental place in my life, so this doesn’t bother me… too much. But I can see how it would have a big impact on people testing their toes, and expressing their voice for the first time, that dopamine hit of validation is tempered by the lows of feeling unpopular social pressure.
I’ve notice other people getting downvotes, and they just delete their comment entirely. I leave mine up, since I believe in keeping the forum record open and transparent is more important then my posting history.
I keep posting to Lemmy in spite of it, because I know Lemmy is just at its starting point, and content is more important then my personal validation. (but it does eat at me some)
When you post something that gets negative feedback do you modify your post? does it change your opinion? does it impact your participation in the community?
Maybe clicking downvote would require people to choose a reason for the downvote, and workflow would make it implictly clear that its not for disagreement
Trolling Spam Abuse Off-Topic etc
That’s what the report function is for IMO.
Often times a posting isn’t as clearly bad as those things but just a really bad take on something or very misleading. That’s not worthy of being removed but still should have a public note that there’s someone who thinks there’s “something wrong” with it.
Downvotes are more of a soft thing for me; situations where I think “eh, I don’t think that’s right”, “oof, that’s just not very nice”, “man, stop being so passive-aggressive” or “nah dude, you’re clearly talking out of your ass”. Those don’t warrant a removal. In fact, the comment staying there with lots of downvotes IMO has a much greater effect than censorship could.
While I’m aware you should be wary of using it that way and reducing it to just that is wrong, it’s also a form of presenting disagreement. Often times it’s also another factor but sometimes I just want to present my disagreement with something, sometimes without writing up a reply.
I just downvoted your reply for example, not because you’re being a jerk or I don’t like you, but because I disagree with the entire premise that downvoting is the correct course of action against Trolling, Spam, Abuse, Off-Topic and similarly bad actions.
Reports OTOH are for things that you actually cannot post and should be removed, regardless of your opinion on the content.
The fact this has a downvote is hilarious, it’s a well written comment that raises valid arguments - someone really saw it and thought ‘no I disagree, I think downvotes are only for troll and spam posts’ then they downvoted lol