Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
shifts focus to how the community values of the content.
Ok, I think I get your point, but I can tell you that in my experience is the exact opposite:
The hivemind effect is strong, and a lot perfectly-acceptable content gets up/downvoted by people just because the score is already high/low.
I have been posting quite a bit since I joined Lemmy in the different niche communities from the instances that I run. Invariably I see downvotes from people who are not subscribers. I’ve sent DMs to some of them asking what was wrong with the post, and the answer was simply “this is not interesting to me”. I replied saying “Look, this isn’t Reddit. There is no algorithm. If you are not interested in the content from this community either block it or don’t browse by all”. Their response was a basic “how dare you tell me how to browse Lemmy?!” Unsurprisingly, when I tried to bring this up for general discussion, I was mass downvoted for the majority that thinks that “downvotes-as-disagreement” is okay..
So, yeah… In my view, for better or worse votes are part of the conversation. If people were using votes as a valid filter for content quality, I’d totally agree with you. If there is a mass of people downvoting a comment or post that seems to be aligned with the community’s values, I feel like I should know why about the comment is deserving of the downvotes. At the very least, I think it’s important to know who is downvoting for legitimate reasons and who is downvoting just because they are a whiny brat that should be ignored/muted/blocked.
Ok, I think I get your point, but I can tell you that in my experience is the exact opposite:
The hivemind effect is strong, and a lot perfectly-acceptable content gets up/downvoted by people just because the score is already high/low.
I have been posting quite a bit since I joined Lemmy in the different niche communities from the instances that I run. Invariably I see downvotes from people who are not subscribers. I’ve sent DMs to some of them asking what was wrong with the post, and the answer was simply “this is not interesting to me”. I replied saying “Look, this isn’t Reddit. There is no algorithm. If you are not interested in the content from this community either block it or don’t browse by all”. Their response was a basic “how dare you tell me how to browse Lemmy?!” Unsurprisingly, when I tried to bring this up for general discussion, I was mass downvoted for the majority that thinks that “downvotes-as-disagreement” is okay..
So, yeah… In my view, for better or worse votes are part of the conversation. If people were using votes as a valid filter for content quality, I’d totally agree with you. If there is a mass of people downvoting a comment or post that seems to be aligned with the community’s values, I feel like I should know why about the comment is deserving of the downvotes. At the very least, I think it’s important to know who is downvoting for legitimate reasons and who is downvoting just because they are a whiny brat that should be ignored/muted/blocked.