Quick definition for those who don't know: Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person's behavior and beliefs do not complement each other or when they hold two contradictory beliefs.
Story time! Please read this in it's entirety as there is important context as well as an actual point.
I have been spending some time with the in-laws over the past couple of weeks, because reasons. They are an immigrant family, but have been in the US since the tail end of the Vietnam war. All hold US citizenship and it's a large family.
Politics has cone up occasionally, but for the most part, we tend to steer away from those discussions when we mistakenly bring them up in conversation. Strangely enough, some are actually Trump supporters but I wouldn't go so far as to say anyone is full-blown "MAGA" or anything. I would describe the support as mild and truly ignorant of broader level politics.
So, there was some discussion about how immigrants needed to be kicked out of the US and there was support for mass deportations. Another conversation was about how "everyone"abused food stamps and welfare, but within about 10 mins, the discussion flipped to what products another person in the family could buy with their EBT card. Medicare and Medicaid is also a waste of the countries money, but then later there was a discussion about how to use those benefits for another family member.
Politics aside, cognitive dissonance is a bitch to deal with, especially when it's coupled with anecdotal evidence that may not even be real. I suspect that any experience with other "immigrants" I heard over the last couple of weeks are likely the result of a single, heavily biased experience coupled with gossip. (The gossip may create false memories of a situation the person believes is true. I think there is a special name for that.)
Telling a person bluntly that they are wrong is usually counter productive. Calling out the contradictions in beliefs can also be strangely unproductive as well. When a valid argument is made and a person realizes they can't resolve a conflicting belief, the tendency seems to be to fall back on a generic phrase like, "Well, I don't fully understand it, but that person must know what they are doing.", or something similar.
Provided that you actually give a shit, how do you go about cracking the shell of someone that has fallen victim to this kind of thing?
Let's dig in! While I don't agree with implementing any of those systems, I still upvoted this post for the relevancy it has to Lemmy.... Let's get back to that in a sec.
I think all the voting systems above are basically the same. You have incentive (dopamine rewards for upvoted posts and is a helluva motivator; a sense of responsibility with limited votes), a penalty (down votes) for shit posts and possibly a reward for better posts or behavior (not losing $10; "reddit gold"; high karma) [I could go on for hours about this, but I'll spare you.]
All those three systems above do is fiddle with the same knobs and are effective in their own ways.
In the case of Slashdot, I would speculate they used a "vote economy" system to encourage quality and a sense of responsibility. Reddit just wants more dopamine and Something Awful just found a way to punish trolls and make money at the same time.
Quick past recap: What Reddit voting was rumored to do (and never really did), was elevate good posts and bury bad ones. This works when you have a collection of like-minded folks that share a the same goal of ensuring good quality information. You liking or hating a post shouldn't have any relationship to how you vote on the post.
Mainly because of Facebook, we have a broken association to "liking" and "upvoting". It is what it is, but it kinda makes a point that people generally vote with emotions, not a sense of responsibility.
I believe we need to find the holy grail: identity effective incentives for "proper" voting based on content, eliminate dopamine-based systems (in regards to vote quantities or bullshit gold/silver rewards) while still providing a reward for participation. That's still "dopamine", but a reward system may need to be decoupled from the number of votes a post gets. Most of all, there needs to be an aspect of fun as well and additional incentives to return the next day.
(If you think the above paragraph sounds contradictory, it's because it is. You can't eliminate brain chemistry or emotions as a factor in this topic, even though I clearly wish I could.)
The elimination of exploitive financial incentives for creating bots and bulk accounts (with the intent of selling high karma accounts) was mostly eliminated on Lemmy, and it's awesome.
Do I personally believe that a "perfect" voting system can be created online? Nope. However, I would kindly ask for you to brainstorm about what could eliminate voting systems completely.
Edit: I am not a psychologist or some shit like that and the premise of vote systems already has been studied all to hell. There are likely much better ways to describe the psychological impacts of vote rewards, but I believe I have the basics down.