by serenity007 » Fri Sep 09, 2022 1:06 pm
Downvoting abusive, off topic, or inaccurate posts improves the quality of the content, but anecdotally I observe that downvotes to seem to be used to indicate disagreement overwhelmingly more often.
So what this ends up doing, as I’m sure anyone here has already thought about, is disincentivizing minority opinions, and also longer more thoughtful comments in general as well as sincerity in general as opposed to sarcasm.
Anecdotally, what I experience is that downvotes make Reddit seem toxic and unpleasant and incentivize brief sarcastic exchanges which are also toxic and unpleasant. What do you think?
E: the opinion seems overwhelmingly that it’s bad. Interesting that the feature exists. There must be a reason.