this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Actual Discussion
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Are you tired of going into controversial threads and having people not discuss things, circlejerking, or using emotional responses in place of logic? Us too.
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For more casual conversation instead of competitive ranked conversation, try: !casualconversation@piefed.social
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Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!
We’re back! Instead of putting a neutral topic in the introduction, I'm placing a bit of opinion on an issue to see if it helps spur discussion. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you’d like to help out.
This week, I'd like to discuss something that's been a bit of an issue for me personally.
Lemmy (and Reddit before it) appears to have a problem with overly-aggressive bannings for perceived slights. In the topic linked above there were people permanently banning users from multiple communities (any they moderate - dozens in some cases) for single downvotes, 4 downvotes across a ten-month period, and bannings because a moderator thought they maybe sorta kinda read that a user may have had a negative thought about their pet issue.
I've personally been banned from Communities (and sent some pretty vile PMs) for posting in our weekly threads here playing devil's advocate where I state hard questions that I do not necessarily feel are correct. They think they've discovered some secret agenda by finding posts I've made here and use them as "receipts" in order to dismiss anything they think they're reading that may be contrary to their opinion. Any context provided for the post falls on deaf ears.
I'm someone who operates on the idea of "If you can not defend an opinion from scrutiny, you should probably not hold that opinion."
To quote myself:
It’s pretty tragic that people can't handle opposing opinions. I think the activist nature of Lemmy is kind of a self-destructive spiral and people need to learn how to live with each other again. But I guess that’s the issue with modern social media as a whole… Nobody has any idea how to convince anyone else, only to yell at them louder.
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- Are niche Communities correct for banning anyone who downvotes?
- Do downvotes represent a "disagree" button for you (this Community notwithstanding)?
- Most importantly, what would it take to change this?
- Does it help build the Community? What about the platform as a whole?
- Is there a way to build a "safe space" without building an echo chamber online? Is that even a valuable thing to build?
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I am very new to this community, and I don’t have much experience with niche internet community dynamics, so I wouldn’t take my words with too much weight; I just like to contribute where I can.
After years of watching the upvote/downvote system play out, I have don’t think downvoting is particularly useful at all. In theory, it allows a community to self-moderate and remove harmful posts. In practice, people use it to downvote things they disagree with and it encourages alienation.
I have had moments where I downvoted something, remembered that this was Lemmy, removed the downvote and wrote a carefully worded response instead, because that is the best way to connect through the internet. Will it work every time? No. Are you a better person for trying? Yes.
It is much more difficult to challenge someone in a healthy manner. This challenging process gets completely avoided by downvoting. One downvote click and any attempt at empathy is gone. But that all depends on whether you want to bother.
Harmful people get banned anyways, so how do downvotes assist that process?
It may be that downvoting prevents people from writing enflamed responses but I’m unsure. My view is that upvotes and downvotes should not be the same as likes and dislikes for the exact echo chamber reasoning in OP. There’s needs to be room for dissonance.
How is net any different than people simply not upvoting? Wouldn't people simply upvote everything else more? Wouldn't we end up with the same vote rankings just different numbers?
As you identify later, I don't necessarily want to connect or correct every incorrect thing I see on the internet. I agree this presents an opportunity for self growth, but there's also diminishing returns. Engaging every single person is obviously not realistic.
The engagement is gone. One can empathize enough with someone they disagree with to recognize the futility in engaging with them.
Downvotes raise the ranking of superior content, improving user experience. This includes low quality, irrelevant, or illegal content. This effect is immediate and does not require moderation.
Downvotes provide a temperature check and a frame of reference. You can see the consensus of the community without having to read way too many comments. Without downvotes you can only ascertain the opinions of people who took the time to respond.
Eliminating downvotes is largely used by highly moderated subreddits (r/conservative for instance). The ones that most accurately fit the definition of echo chambers and who exist to perpetuate an agenda not foster discussion.
TLDR: I do agree that engaging people in good faith is the best thing... but I also think downvotes provide value.
Picture this: you post something that you genuinely enjoy and the second it is posted somebody comes along and downvotes your content because they didn’t like it (not because it didn’t fit the community guidelines). Your content is now in oblivion and you are actively discouraged from posting further in the community. This is what I mean by alienation. It damages diverse opinions in the community.
Is the community better and more democratic that way?
I really like this point. I think you bring up an interesting topic about downvotes being a form of expression, and that banning them equates to a loss of freedom.
It is not realistic, which is why I am not suggesting that. I would say a better method would be to avoid internet arguments and only engage if you are in a good place to do it constructively. I think niche communities can be the one place where disagreements are not completely futile.
I don't need to picture it cuz that's happened to me dozens of times.
A) Gotta get over it. Post engagement can literally come down to timing.
B) Negative scored content rebounds all the time. It's hyperbole to say 1 person can kill any post.
Some things to not justify a response. Nobody is entitled to my engagement. The phrase "No response, is a response." very much translates to downvotes.
It equates to a loss of information. The people who downvote and don't reply aren't going to start replying if downvotes are removed. That leaves ludicrous statements on the same playing field as mediocre ones.