Invalidate? No. It incentivizes certain behaviors, sure.
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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You say that like it's a bad thing. There are a lot of things people genuinely don't want to see in their feeds. Just like there are a lot of behaviors people don't want you to do in real life. You might really, really want to start belting out Don't Stop Believing in the middle of the subway train, but that's annoying.
Da da da da da—
Something something LONELY WO-rld
Da da da da da—
Something something SOUTH DETRO-oit
Sto-oplights
Pizza-a-a-A
Not unless getting dirty looks IRL does, too.
As a teacher once told me, you have a right to speak, not to be taken seriously. If you're right, that sucks, but you need to find a way to be okay with being in the minority.
people are hard wired for social approval, not individualistic inquiry of the truth.
the latter makes you a social pariah, but after you're dead people will probably admire you for your commitment, but while you're alive they will resent you for not telling them what they want to hear and being part of the group consensus.
a lot of our former great thinkers/scientists, etc we celebrate now... were totally socially ostracized from their communities at the time of their lives, often under threat of death. and still are today.
at least in the west today, you can say shit online and get downvoted or banned, but the government is going to jail or kill you for your work on mathematics, etc.
a lot of our former great thinkers/scientists, etc we celebrate now… were totally socially ostracized from their communities at the time of their lives, often under threat of death. and still are today.
Well, mostly poets, artists and philosophers fall into that pattern. When a scientist comes up with something, it tends to be hard for a peer to argue with, and obscure enough to threaten few people. Einstein was Einstein, he mainly had problems with being a Jew, and being too famous. Feynman was sometimes unpopular, but was still listened to - even when in disguise.
Tons of political ideas will be massively unpopular in a given time and place. Unless you're a big writer that some revolutionary picks up, or go all the way to joining La Resistance against a faction that loses within a lifetime, you're probably not going to get much credit, even when you're dead.
I always preferred post reactions below a post on forums as opposed to up/downvotes. More nuanced set of ways to express your reaction to a post without having to make a post yourself.
Voting provides feedback and a way to democratically determine something's visibility. I would call it a stretch to say something is invalidated just because it's unpopular. The only benefit to having a popular post/comment is better visibility. The points themselves have no value beyond what you personally give them.
Some people will filter what they say to exploit this system, but no system of even modest complexity would be fully immune to that. If there is a problem, it's the users having poor judgement, but it's beyond the scope of a forum sorting system to save people from themselves.
Voting is the only way a community can separate posts by quality on their own instead of blindly trusting an algorithm.
Fediverse is small enough so people browse by /new, but eventually there would be too much volume for that to practical.
People that complain about votes, always care about their own feelings, and never the actual reason it's a thing.
What I hate, is none of you ever ask:
Is there a reason we have _____, because it seems like their isn't a reason?
Never see those posts, because inquisitive people would just find out instead of assuming there's no reason they haven't immediately thought of.
The downside is that in competitive environments (ie, not lemmy), people tailor their comments to get upvotes and avoid downvotes. I've done it myself. Voting doesn't avoid algorithms because people have their own in-built algorithms you can game.
so if you look at what the wikipedia guy did with trust cafe. you can rank everything. I want that but not for public use. for my personal feed use. I don't care to have other peoples opinions decide my feed. I want my opinions to. I also don't care for other people to know my opinions and I don't need to know theres.
Think with the herd and it's fine. Be a meat eater among vegans and nothing you say has any value according to votes
To be honest, even in real life, going into a vegan community and talking about the benefits of meat doesn't seem like a very reasonable idea.
I'm talking about being in a meat community
Lemmy karma is worthless compared to Reddit.
At least it doesn't determine when and how often you can post.
It more often than not brings a hive mind kind of behavior into a platform. It’ll also influence what someone wants to write because they might think “if I say this or that, x might happen”. I think it also influences someone’s thoughts if they see already huge upvotes or downvotes.
It is the very reason I have disabled the up/downvote thing on Lemmy. I don’t see any karma and I don’t care about it either. Especially not on Lemmy.
I think the upvote/downvote system and karma systems popularized by reddit, etc. are largely failed attempts at mitigating the effects of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
If I were to set up a new social network today, I'd look towards antenna systems instead for inspiration on how to design it. That said, I haven't spent much time on Misskey and that kind of thing probably has its own issues that I don't know about.
What are antenna systems?
Antennas on Misskey are a way to filter posts based on certain conditions. (e.g. include/exclude certain keywords, tags, etc.)
As I understand it, users can set up multiple antennas and tune them to select for messages they care about, and you get a timeline for each one.
Oh fair, never heard anyone refer to it as antennas. But I also don't use Misskey.
Up or down votes are pretty worthless as you don't know why. If think it would be better if people would need to give a reason for their vote.
No. Typically the only way people's thoughts are invalidated are when someone they are emotionally close to is hurt by those thoughts. People don't stop hating the gays until their kid is gay and they have a direct conflict of interest in themselves.
But yeah, for the sensitive insecure types, they live or die by the upvote/downvote... and those folks are the worst kinds of people in an online space, because they are the ones who ruin it for everyone and will bring online disputes into real life. And those people... feed off one another.
And bulk of interaction on the internet interactions is now driven by validation seeking folks and their followers who are seeking validation by proxy from these people. That's what the who influencer system that dominates social media and streaming is all about.
I just wish it was more nuanced than good/up or bad/down. I really miss the old /. style of being able to classify how a comment added to the discussion or not (insightful, troll, offtopic, interesting, etc.). Not sure the implementation ever was perfect on /. either, but it FELT more meaningful, especially because the ability to vote wasn't given to absolutely everyone on everything all the time. When I got the chance to vote, I tended to put some genuine thought into it. I'd like to think that meant less impulsive and reactionary voting and it was a constant reminder about what that site wanted you to value in a discussion.
Nah, it's fine. Also it doesn't take much to completely disable them on the fediverse, so you can always opt out if you don't like it.
I think the ease and anonymity of online interactions is the biggest part of the problem, including karma and upvote/downvote systems.
YouTube had a 5 star rating system ages ago. I even remember many forums had a way to "+rep" people's profiles and signatures and such.
Hey, where's my Lemmy signature feature, huh? How am I meant to show off that cool Sasuke banner image?!