Is it true that a social media platform that allows anonymous downvotes has the potential to become a toxic environment?
Should social media platforms only allow upvotes or favorites?
As I understand it, Kbin doesn’t allow downvotes just like Mastodon. Users can only mark a comment or OP favorite (upvote) and the Kbin user can see what account favorited / upvoted their comment or OP. Also if it’s from a Lemmy user by the way.
Kbin does allow downvotes from what I can see and downvotes doesn’t really bring it to a toxic environment as it’s just a way to easily disagree with someone without having to go into depth in the comments. It’s like YouTube videos, if you dislike it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means you personally don’t like it.
I think it has the tendency to create a snowball effect. You see a comment with -50 points you are already subconsciously looking at it trying to analyze why everyone hates it. It essentially primes you into disagreeing with it. Sometimes it's obvious in the case of a troll or someone saying hate speech or something but other times it's someone sharing a genuine opinion that's relevant to the discussion but the snowball effect of the first few people downvoting it causes it to spiral downwards.
By itself it isn't a bad thing but when comments are ranked based on votes or downvoted comments past a certain threshold are hidden, it contributes to creating echo chambers.
Personally, I think it's like that Churchill quote. Democracy is trash and has a lot of problems. But still, it's the best thing we've come up with so far. It's got its issues but the transparent nature definitely helps if someone is consciously trying to read things with an open mind.
You can’t hide from it on the Internet. I have seen forums where downvotes are visible to everybody and there still was lots of toxicity. One of such forums later moved to no-downvote model and guess what? Downvotes are no longer there but toxic people still are
On the Internet people don’t know you, what you went through etc. They only see a string of characters as your nickname and it doesn’t help much to make them more understanding
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