Prediction: Reddit will someday remove the downvote from all posts.

I am predicting that before the company goes bankrupt, Reddit will remove downvotes in an effort to prevent users from expressing negative sentiment. This happened a few years ago on YouTube after YouTube Rewind became the world's most disliked video, several years in a row. This was embarrassing for the company because it revealed the discontent of the userbase.

Since expressing discontent is bad for their reputation, and manually removing dislikes is a time consuming task, removing the downvote button altogether for the sake of "preventing bullying" is likely the next step for Reddit.

smokinjoe,
smokinjoe avatar

It's definitely just a matter of time.

They already ditched downvotes unless the comment is below 0. Soon you'll just probably be stuck at 0.

MentallyExhausted,

Yeah, that’s the only way spaz will be able to post ever again

OpenStars,
OpenStars avatar

I'm not so sure of that... the number of people protesting the protests over there is a LOT higher than I expected, and between the troll army and their mechanized bot squads, he may have more upvotes than people alive on earth today in order to counter all the downvotes (especially with a little help from his friends, the admins:-).

That could be really funny to watch actually - downvote any two of his comments and "your account must have been hacked, so we're banning you forever until we can sort this out".

nostalgicgamerz,

Ah fuck the Facebook playbook

Secus,

They removed it years ago, sure the button is still there, but it's essentially meaningless

croobat,
@croobat@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, Lemmy reminded me how cool it was being able to see the up/downvote ratio.

Skellybones,

It should be this way, up and down vote with a total of what you actually had Being shown it's nice

damniel,

Yep. I've already upvoted more in the last week on Lemmy than I did in the last 5 years at reddit. It all became so meaningless and Astroturfed when their algorithm kicks in after the first 50 votes

kabukimeow,
@kabukimeow@lemmy.world avatar

I guess I'm a pussy but I've never been a big fan of the upvote-downvote system. It can be useful if someone comes in spouting some straight up nonsense, but people typically also downvote posts and comments that don't have anything wrong with them for petty reasons. And I tend to feel hurt by that lmao

Markimus,

Sounds like the beehaw.org instance is more your thing

kabukimeow,
@kabukimeow@lemmy.world avatar

I can see the value in that but in these smaller websites the more activity the better, and they already cut lemmy.world out 🫤

imaqtpie,
@imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works avatar

In these smaller communities people also tend to upvote and downvote more responsibly. The system isn't inherently a problem if the users can control their emotions and understand their role. On reddit, there was 0 chance of that. Here, maybe.

vamp07,

You need some signal to know what to look at. It’s at the core of how Reddit works. Sometimes looking at the most downvoted posts can be very informative.

psycrow,

One thing i love about lemmy and kbin is that up votes and down votes are separate and visible. The only other semi successful reddit clone that did this was voat, and I'm glad that shithole site is dead. Rest in racist peices.

TauZero,

Reddit DID display full up/down vote counts before. Reddit arbitrarily changed it in 2014 despite widespread community displeasure: https://teddit.com/r/announcements/comments/28hjga/reddit_changes_individual_updown_vote_counts_no/

naneek,

This link redirects to some random ware site. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/60137411-7555-4c8f-85c1-913cc5890807.png

Archpawn,

There's subreddits that try to get rid of downvotes with CSS. I'm surprised they don't make it an option for subreddits to fully get rid of it.

John_Shepard,
John_Shepard avatar

It's only a matter of time, and tbh, the downvote is seldom used correctly anyway (not for showing disagreement, for example). Some subs already hide the downvote button, but you can still downvote using shortcut keys (Z), at least on old.reddit using RES.

CoderKat,
CoderKat avatar

I think the more pessimistic view is that rather than removing downvoting entirely, they'll just lie on the votes for select threads. This isn't technologically difficult, nor does it need to be done manually. They could do something broad like making any admin flair post simply not count downvotes, guaranteeing it'll have a "net positive" (or maybe averaging karma from nearby positive comments, to avoid it being suspicious when an admin replies to a +10k comment and only gets +500).

I see that as more devious because it'll be hard to detect it's happening and the fact that you can still downvote other comments would lead to disbelief that it's what's happening.

nodsocket,

If they fake it, it's likely they'll get caught eventually, so it's better to just remove it to avoid a scandal.

Skray,
Skray avatar

Reddit already fudges numbers although not to that extent. If you go to someone's page from their profile and downvote all their comments it won't actually count.

Exact upvotes and downvotes are also a little fluid, it'll give you a number within a range but not an exact amount depending on the amount of interaction on a post.

lich_hegemon,

This is not exactly true.

It's not that the votes don't count, it's that Reddit uses a particular technique where the karma you see is randomly modified every time to make it impossible to see if your vote has an effect.

The goal is to prevent bots from realizing when they have been shadow banned.

TauZero,

they’ll just lie on the votes for select threads

This possibly has already happened in 2016/2017. Popular r/The_Donald posts had their vote count set to zero (even while still being on the front page: https://archive.is/rfc22), and the highly-anticipated Donald Trump AMA was pushed to page 190 of r/all despite having tens of thousands of upvotes. Admins were saying that the voting algorithm was working as expected, and the posts were simply being downvoted by haters like r/EnoughTrumpSpam brigades after reaching r/all. Conveniently, since display of downvote counts was removed in 2014, this was impossible to verify. Admins clearly hated r/The_Donald and have made multiple changes to the front page algorithm just to make their posts show up less. It's possible they were modifying the vote counts in the database directly, but there was no clear proof at the time.

Coincidentally, 2017 was the same year when u/spez/ did get caught modifying the database to edit users' comments, and he only admitted to it because there was clear proof of that. The users he "pranked" were incidentally r/The_Donald posters.

slicedcheesegremlin,
slicedcheesegremlin avatar

More recently, Spez removed most of the downvotes on his recent AMA thread, and someone took a screenshot before it did it. If I remember correctly (not visiting Reddit to check), it went from being comparable to the infamous "sense of pride and accomplishment" comment to only having like 5 downvotes, and hundreds of people in the comments were calling him out on it.

borkcorkedforks,

That would track. Maybe just hidden results. YouTube did that with dislikes. I think Facebook did as well.

BarrierWithAshes,
BarrierWithAshes avatar

I doubt it. Downvotes are pretty much already useless. Maybe they'll remove it from comments but I dont see them outright removing that option.

Kichae,

They can always just not tally down votes. Make the button subtract 1 from the displayed value when you click it, but not save it.

WhoRoger,
@WhoRoger@lemmy.world avatar

Possibly. But some Lemmy instances actually do that and they have their reasons. Guess it does depend on what you want the social to be. On some discord is part of the culture, elsewhere it's about showcasing and showing support.

Or it can just be about showing a friendly rubber mask of a face spread over a soulless corporate shell, of course

nodsocket,

I don't have a problem with it on Lemmy because no one is forced to use a certain instance

IntergalacticTowel,
IntergalacticTowel avatar

Every day, I see more value in the federated universe. This stuff is so cool.

SterlingVapor,

This topic always reminds me of that shirt, "don't ratio me I'll cum"

BrooklynMan,
@BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml avatar

YOU WILL UPDOOT. MOD TEAM NUKING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.

END OF LINE

MentallyExhausted, (edited )

Apollo dev:

https://reddthat.com/pictrs/image/f3784487-c198-4f14-8601-bd007bfd0edc.jpeg

WhoRoger,
@WhoRoger@lemmy.world avatar

!totallynotrobots INITIALIZED

nodsocket,

YOU WILL UPVOTE THE POST

YOU WILL LOOK AT THE ADS

AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY

Kettlepants,

Fitter Healthier More productive Dead In a cage On antibiotics

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