Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
The OP started reporting anybody that disagreed with them.
Why the fuck go to a community built to discuss things, then get snippy when someone argues against your view?
I did remove one comment, but it was a personal attack.
OP - when your ban is over, feel free to come back, but with a smaller stick up your ass.
There are instances that have downvotes disabled, if it bothers you I'd recommend moving to one of those.
There’s no benefit to having this system on Lemmy.
Hard disagree.
If you disagree with someone, you should actually have to leave a comment as to why, instead of just downvoting.
No, because sometimes that just means feeding a troll. Some people are beyond arguing with. Downvotes are a great way to warn other users that there is bad comment that's not worth engaging with.
If you see -13 on a thoughtful post you worked hard on, it makes you feel bad.
Well, yeah ... maybe you should! Just because you were thoughtful doesn't mean it was good or correct, so maybe you should try to figure out why at least 14 people felt the need to downvote it. It's valuable feedback!
I downvote off-topic and toxic content. Some people deserve to feel bad about what they put into the world.
i disagree that "least upvotes" would serve the same function as downvoting. there's a bias towards older & more popular comments, especially if people sort comments that way.
a comment with almost no upvotes because that person commented after the main engagement buzz passed, is functionally different to someone spouting harmful rhetoric & getting downvoted for it, for example
Isn't that what the "hot" sort is for? Also if someone's spouting hate, they will naturally settle at the bottom, and that's kind of what the report button is for right? If 4 people agree with the jerk but 17 agree with the other people, that's telling in of itself.
"naturally settling at the bottom" is also what happens to new comments, or neutral comments that just don't provide much information. that's not on the same par as someone who's spreading misinformation, or hate speech.
and yes, the report button can potentially get that comment removed, but that depends on moderators agreeing with the report, being active, being in a similar time zone, etc.
downvoting harms no one but can help by pushing harmful comments out of sight & below the neutral / new comments.
Do you think my comments in this thread are harmful? The downvotes don't exactly spark joy.
Edit: I feel like one of the top comments explains people's mindset perfectly:
"Some people deserve to feel bad for what they've put in the world"
People know it's a negative button, that's the reason they press it. It's the "I want you to feel bad" button, as they put it, and so many others agreed with. It has nothing to do at all with moderation, that's not how people use it or think about it.
If you don't mind, I will weigh in, with my opinion.
When you get a drivers license, you agree to follow the laws of the road, or face consequences. Same thing for most things we do outside established rights. Hell, even with things within established rights.
Some things are clearly written. Some are social contracts.
By signing up for (anti)social media, or platforms where the option to up and down vote exist, you are agreeing to let people take those actions on your content.
Would you go to a seafood restaurant, and complain to them you're allergic to shellfish? I would hope not. You wouldn't demand a company to change their very nature to accommodate you, knowing that you're the outlier.
By complaining on the very platform that offers the feature you're complaining about, you're not voicing an "unpopular opinion", you're putting your hypocrisy on display, front-and-center.
I don't think those analogies are quite right.
In the driving one, it's more like, imagine when you were driving your car, you could downvote other drivers around you. It would create this toxicity ecosystem where everyone gets even angrier and more negative. You would arrive at your destination with -5 downvotes and think to yourself, "what the heck, I didn't even do anything wrong! I bet it was xyz cars who did it." Then, next time you drive, maybe you downvote more people, which makes them more upset. It would be like a cycle of negativity, like a virus, infecting everyone and making road rage even worse and drivers becoming more judgemental.
You go to a seafood restaurant and you get similarly scored on your behaviour in public and how good of a customer you are. Maybe people nearby get annoyed at you because you have kids, or any other reason that doesn't actually matter that much. Or maybe you're an obnoxious group that doesn't care about others. Again most people just end up with a whole bunch of negativity and feel put upon.
Maybe you did do something wrong, maybe not, but the vote doesn't teach you anything. At the end of the month you see -200 down votes just because you happened to be in a traffic jam, and -20 because you had to take back some undercooked food. You didn't break a single law, but how does that make you feel? All it teaches you is that there are people out there that vaguely disagree with you, or don't like you, which is basically worthless information. It's negativity without context. These sorts of voting systems generally don't translate very well to real life, outside of a Black Mirror episode. Thankfully.
I'm allowed to voice my opinion. I don't believe it's hypocritical to complain about something that I think could be better. It would be hypocritical if I downvoted every post in this thread that I disagree with, but I didn't. I generally only downvote people who personally attack me.
It's completely normal to enjoy something, and also notice it's faults. I believe it's strange to think that something is completely perfect because you enjoy it, and stomp on any criticism.
not especially, but i think communities like unpopularopinion is the kind of community that people head to, with tomatoes and boos at the ready 😅
i think downvoting here is supposed to mean that you're actually spouting a popular opinion, which would translate to how most people also don't enjoy being downvoted. idk if people actually stick to that here, though
i generally stick to smaller communities about things like foraging or diy etc and find them fairly positive, so maybe bigger comms have a higher chance of negative interactions..? best o' luck in future 🫡
Yeah definitely bigger communities seem to be more toxic… I'm not sure why that is though. I wasn't expecting this one of all places to be, since it's supposedly a place for discourse. Thanks, hopefully future interactions are kinder in this service.
I feel you OP, but as soon as you give someone control over your emotions, you’ve already lost.
On the web I don’t see vote weights at all. I saw you addressed this and have your own opinions on that, and that’s fine. Positive or negative, I’m not affected by votes.
Comments sometimes get my goat, but that’s my fault if I give in. Most times I just scroll past. I might downvote rudeness. I’ll block the person if they’re persistent with rudeness, just because I don’t care to see it.
Mastering my own emotions isn’t a done deal just yet and it’s taken a lot of work, but I’m getting there.
Yeah I'm really getting thrown into the deep end on this service lol. I'm usually pretty chill and don't care too much, but I'm getting like 4Chan tier mistreatment here sometimes.
I guess you could look at it as training, but I'm not sure I want to be the kind of person who doesn't care about others feelings at all. Otherwise I wouldn't be giving people advice and trying to help them. But if you care a little, it's easy to accidentally care a bit more than you expected.
You don't have to be uncaring to defend your own mental health.
You touched on a point, that downvoting someone is a quick, dirty, and cheap way to disagree with something without having to actually engage with it. Okay, so consider the value of that interaction: not much.
To put it another way, say you and I meet for the first time, and I say your mother is a whore. You might get offended for a variety of reasons, but what I'm telling you is that I do not know your mother, so you can place a value of zero on that opinion and let it pass right by you. In fact, while I've said one thing that was quite offensive, I've told you something else entirely. I've told you that I'm a toxic person who doesn't care about your feelings (and probably don't respect my own mother, or women in general). Use that information and handle me accordingly, which is to say, ignore the comment (as though it never existed, because it shouldn't have) and completely disregard me as my opinions are beneath you. That doesn't make you uncaring, it makes you emotionally mature and intelligent, and more civilised.
(Please know that I would not call your mother a whore, and that I do not disrespect women. But people are put off when you use them as an example (e.g. "say you did X, Y, and Z"), it puts them on defence immediately, so I used myself instead. It's all a bit of emotional manipulation, but once you've seen how the game is played, you can use it to protect yours.)
The same people who use Reddit and 4chan also use Lemmy. The people you meet online will mostly be irrelevant. Some will be hostile. Some will be scammers. A few people might be worth knowing, but you'll have to sort through the rest to find the best. And if you can't keep your emotions in check, you'll ward off the best as well. And you don't want that.
I still give advice and try to help others. I just don't care when people are rude. That's their problem, not mine. I gain nothing from making it mine.
Others can explain this better than I can. I am but a student. I'm happy to share what I know, but I don't know everything.
People can be toxic, downvotes are just a tool to indicate relevance or not to the community theme, though most people subvert that and use as a popularity contest regardless.
I tend to ~~upvote~~ (edit: downvote) less often than once a month, but occasionally do find it useful - e.g. if someone has -10 downvotes and at least one person has already responded to indicate why, there is little point to adding another reply, but another downvote adds weight to the countervailing POV.
Note that hexbear.net has downvotes disabled, yet is widely regarded by the entire Fediverse as the literal #1 most toxic place here by far. Instead of downvoting, people are forced to reply - and quite often use things like images of pig butts (literally) in the process of pooping.
Note that PieFed has an option for each individual community to decide whether it wants to enable or disable downvoting - it would be nice to see this in Lemmy too? Most often I think downvotes have a real, actual purpose to serve, but rarely I could see cases where they do not.
Usually I think the problem is something else - like people coming in from All, not bothering to read the rules, yet adding their opinions regardless. e.g. people who feel the need to man-splain into women's communities. In such cases it's not the downvotes per se that are bad but the input from non-community members. Btw PieFed has an option for a community mod to set that restriction as well.
In most cases like this, the limitation is simply that Lemmy is too primitive and needs to add features to allow nuance and subtlety, but its feature development is slow as molasses. (Then again, PieFed has its own... issues as well.) Maybe more people will contribute code to help speed it along? Unfortunately donations won't do much - a great deal of finances goes to moderation of the Lemmy.ml instance to help spread its political ideology, and Dessalines has refused to allow donations to exclusively speed up code development but not be used for the latter purpose. So, we make do with the tools we have as best we can.
I am not in favor of downvotes being removed, but some instances do that already so move your account there if that is what you personally want for yourself. The top example there is probably Reddthat.com.
I will never understand this
I remove my own upvote from my comments. I think it's weird that by default you upvote your own comments in the first place. That doesn't really have anything to do with this discussion though.
Yeah, I can understand where you’re coming from.
My only advice (and it’s lame) is just disregard it and keep posting and commenting. Your opinions are valid, regardless of vote count. You’re contributing to the conversation, which is what this place is for.
Thanks, yeah that's what I've been doing. That's why I posted this, I already know it's going to go straight down to Lemmy hell 😂
Who cares dog, it's a number on a silly website it literally does not matter. Upvotes are equally toxic in that sense, you determine your value based on the votes of others? That's just treating your own mind as if it was a stranger.
I disagree, but that's the right place to post this and you've put effort in explaining your view. Take my upvote!
Sheesh people, it's upvote unpopular opinions in this community! I guess a bunch of people must secretly agree.
Downvoted for complaining about downvoting
