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Let me ask you this: do you think even a slight majority of people use upvotes and downvotes to delineate between high quality/poor comments and posts? Because I think we all know that the majority of people just use them as agree/disagree buttons to try to build momentum during arguments.
That is (often) the noble intention by those who programmed into forums, but we all know that is not how it shakes out. Removing downvotes still allows us to push the best to the top considerably more easily than allowing up upvotes and downvotes does.
Self-moderation doesn’t work at scale unless you have a team of mods at the top aggressively policing the content, which I am actually in favor of but people also get mad about that and call it “power tripping.“
From what I can see, people will downvote shitposts even if they agree with it. But the downvote is used as the disagree button the majority of the time.
I will upvote any comment that seems to be made in good faith but I don’t have any illusions of that being how the majority of the network uses their votes. I think a higher percentage of people use their vote that way compared to Reddit but not much to make a difference.
That’s why I suggested hiding votes entirely. I think that would be unpopular because people like the dopamine hit of seeing your comment score go up, and so my compromise was to only hide 0 or negative scores.