I just don't agree that there's value in obfuscating how much a community hates something someone says. It doesn't mean I'm going to agree with those people all the time but if 24 people upvote something and 350 people would have downvoted it, that's information I'd like to know and I don't think there's a lot of value to be gained from not showing how stupid most people think someone is. Yeah I get that you have your own perspective on it.
The problem with major social media platforms is when they start knowing what's best for the community. Using the lightest touch possible, rather than leaving them to themselves to decide what they like and don't, while not without faults and far from perfect, always works out better than the alternatives every time. That's why there's BS metrics people talk about like "getting ratioed" on twitter since you have to rely on other vague indicators to know someone is disliked.
Everyone is always free to make their case. It doesn't mean everyone will like what they have to say. But hey, at least we can promise they won't be visibly disliked too much.
I don't know what sbbh is but am I supposed to go "no, YOU'RE the pedo!" in response now or what?
So at this point we have two options.
(Your stance) Allow downvotes so people know when others dont like something. Attempting to avoid the culture of strict moderation of wrong-think.
(Poal's stance) Downvotes should only be used for spam and off-topic posts. Attempting to avoid the culture of downvote brigading brought upon platforms like reddit and voat.
Seems like what is gained from the latter more than makes up for what is lost on the former. That being said, I agree that the less moderation the better, but the existence of the voat echo chamber is exactly the reason places like poal exist.
Anything related to "Poal's thoughts" are just my interpretation of what I've heard the admins say and the welcome/user guide shit.
Well, another point I should mention is I pretty much exclusively browse /all/new so I'm coming at it from the perspective of someone that likes to see all posts regardless of if they're loved or hated. I can see how that might not be the best approach on something like reddit but for low traffic places like poal and voat, it's worked for me.
To that end, I'm not interested in hiding a person's posts from people if they're heavily downvoted or using that information to inform the ranking on the front page. I just like to know what people think of it overall. Are people really neutral about this or that post or would they have downvoted it if not for the pressure not to? As it is, we don't know.
I edited my post while you were replying, just fyi. I realized I left a sentence incomplete and then I also had an other thought I threw in.
(post is archived)