My baseline is to upvote everyone who replies to me, cause it's neat that you're here, contributing to the fediverse.
I only downvote trolls and bad faith actors.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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The vast majority of things I see, I neither upvote nor downvote. They have to be either extraordinarily good (exactly what I would have written or extraordinarily insightful) or extraordinarily bad (bad faith, blatant falsehood) for me to do that. When I disagree with something, I write a reply explaining why, or upvote one if there already is one, but I don't downvote what I merely disagree with.
I sort of agree, but I think any comment that facilitates further on-topic discussion is worth an upvote. It doesn't need to be exceptional in any way. In rare cases I've upvoted incorrect comments before to put more visibility on the correction in the response.
But 100% agree with not downvoting comments just because I disagree. Anyone I bother replying to, even if I vehemently disagree, I probably don't downvote — because they led to more conversation.
It's only when I see a comment so self-evidently idiotic or trolling, that I downvote and move on without further engagement.
I think upvoting incorrect comments is a bad thing; if incorrect comments have a net positive score, readers might get the impression that they are correct.
Readers can think for themselves
It's situational. My one upvote isn't usually going to have a big impact other than offset some of the downvotes. I would want the response to have higher upvotes than the incorrect comment and if I thought my vote was tipping that scale I wouldn't. But like most voting processes, I'm just one drop in the river and for the most part the river will go where it goes.
Re the upvotesTotally. Me too. IMO, the best thing you can do is reply intelligently. I don't care about for, against, up, down or any of that.
Re the downvotes. I'm thinking just ignoring them is most appropriate. Blocking even. You can't talk to everybody.
I'm amazed how worked up people get about down votes.
I have had people literally tell me that I am wrong and bad and cite the downvotes as evidence.
I recently had a post locked. The moderator cited "he got reports", which are basically secret downvotes.
What have you been saying that pisses people off so much?
A lot of it. I don't go in for smalltalk and I come here to probe the wall of the bubble more or less exclusively. I like scifi ideas.
Some tell me that I'm just trying to sound smart. Some seem to be triggered. Some seem to get upset by even considering the subject. Sum that up and there's like 1% left to talk to.
I've been aggressively blocking recently, pruning the mass down into something better. Seems to be working.
Well, don't be surprised if people have a bad response to someone being rude/blunt/argumentative.
If you want to change minds you're going to need to work on social skills, too.
Based on what you said your goal is I think you're going to need to grow a thicker skin if you don't plan on changing your approach, or you'll need to work on your presentation and conversation skills if you want a more positive reaction from people.
Rude, blunt and argumentative, eh? And change minds? I think we have different kinds of conversations.
No, I just want a nice conversation.
I find aggressive pruning makes the bush bloom better.
Nice conversation takes conversation skills, or finding people that already think like you do. Based on this conversation it sounds like you'd prefer the latter.
I'm guessing I'm getting pruned, so have a good one buddy 👋
Lol. I've seen worse
A gentleman doesn't care about downvotes.
I often see downvotes due to people disagreeing or not understanding there can be different perspectives. So yes, I can agree with this very much.
However, it also needs to be stated the up and downvote mechanics are completely open for personal interpretation and there are basically no rules. So everything is fine.
I see it more as a "this person is a moron/ arguing in bad faith" button for comments, or a "this doesn't belong here/ is spam" button for posts.
Yes, same for me. If a person is hostile and trolling. Although the latter can also be subjective.
If I'm being 110% honest, if it's a comment being down voted, I'm probably about to start trolling that person. Life is too short to not fuck with unreasonable people.
Sometimes I receive a share of downvotes. Which only bothers me when I really have no idea why, because usually I want to know if I am on the wrong path and improve.
Yeah, that's happened to me a few times too. Sometimes it's a misunderstanding, sometimes my opinion just doesn't really mesh with some other folks. Sometimes I'm just being a dick and deserve it.
Where the rules are made up and the points don't matter.
Something, something, who's line is it anyway
My personal standard is I try to upvote people I reply to, since whether I agree or not the fact that I'm replying means that they're engaging at least (I often forget to though). It's lazy to downvote just because you disagree.
Downvoting is an honourable duty of its own though. Especially if something is irrelevant or low effort I wish more people would downvote, it's helping your fellow users.
Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them?
Someone got big mad rofl
I feel like it's okay to downvote abusive or dishonest posts.
TRUMP SHOULD BE ARRESTED
There's a bot I downvote on sight. It spams reddit threads to communities it moderates so reporting would be fucking useless. I won't block it because someone has to tell it that it sucks.
Hmm. That's smart. I think I saw that bot.
one should rarely downvote but be prepared to downvote. Downvoting a curtesy you do for the community for things that are not just something against your opinion but is stuff no one wants to see. Rude, aggressive, mean swearing or such.
Consider the consistently rude, aggressive and dumb. Would you be better off just blocking them?
Block enough and it could be pretty sweet. Like, early 2000s IRC sweet.
That's a pretty good argument
This would probably do better in Unpopular Opinions
I got banned from that for being too unpopular.
What got you banned specifically? Just curious
Not being able to distinguish between a shower thought and an unpopular opinion (no kidding). And doubling down by insulting the mods.
What, in your opinion, is the greater offense, removing a post or insulting a mod?
Without knowing the details of what you're talking about, I'd say on first principles the owner(s) of an instance has the final say on what posts they allow on their platform because it's their platform, they don't owe you anything. The benefit of the fediverse is that anyone can have their own platform so if you don't like one platform you can post elsewhere. Just as it was with forums before the tyranny of centralised social media. So I'd be inherently more sympathetic to a mod removing a post than someone insulting a mod but it may vary depending on details, such as if the mod was doing a bad job for their platform.
So I figured I'd just look it up in my history and couldn't find it. Then I remembered that when they remove your post from their community they also remove it from your history. That is disturbing. I mean they're literally editing history.
Nope it ain't in the modlog either.
The moderators here have a special kind of attitude.
I don't even remember.
What if someone judtify settler colonialism and genocide
Well if it's a coherent argument then we argue.
Well I have no idea how anything works but I imagine upvoting or downvoting would be recorded as activity, so downvoting the post/comment would actually make sure it got more views right? (As many apps default to active being how to sort posts)
I don't believe there is a sort method where downvotes show mass downvoted contents at the top
Is there a chart somewhere that lists how each sorting is determined? I just assumed active would have been total votes with a decay over time. Never looked into it