Your oppinion about the upvote style of forums
Lets get a good discussion in here, I've meant to post this like... A month ago... (Woops) But I am interested in your opinions about upvote style forums, like Reddit, Imgur's comment system, ETC.
I personally think its a horrible designed system, I think that it encourages someone to just get something out there fast for upvotes. Not thinking too much about the content they share. Then comes the idea of downvoting arguments that are valid but the user doesn't agree with. It throws the valid argument down the thread where less people will see it.
Anyways, I would love to hear from what you people think about this.
6 replies
well, your post has no upvotes.
@[email protected] good god did you reply to an 11 year old post? 😝
I'm replying to you because I accidentally sorted by "OLD", and clicked the post before I noticed.
@julian Lol, honestly - this is kind of why I love forums so much, that you can revive old threads by commenting on them.
As for the original question - I think its a double edged sword for the points everyone has already brought up already. I will say that I think in a traditional style forum, its not as big of a deal because the content is not ranked based on the amount of upvotes, but instead based on the time posted. Also, I think nodeBB does it well - where it is hidden until hovering over it, which makes it less "in your face".
> @julian said: > > @[email protected] good god did you reply to an 11 year old post? 😝
Thread necromancy is why forums are awesome! I've posted about this elsewhere, but with forums, you can have a single thread go on for years as long as people keep posting. On aggregator-type sites like Reddit that prioritize new content over old but still relevant content, you have to make new posts about the same topic once the old post drops off the first page because nobody's going to go looking for it. I have a thread on a phpBB forum that's been going for years, but I had to abandon an identical thread on Lemmy once it dropped off the first page.
> @Kowlin said: > > it encourages someone to just get something out there fast for upvotes. Not thinking too much about the content they share
I think that applies mostly to sites where total votes are tracked per user like Reddit's karma system, but yes I agree. Lemmy for example doesn't track upvotes per user, only per post and comment, so there's less incentive to karma farm. It does encourage echo chambers as you suggest, where dissenting opinions are buried. The default sorting algorithm on sites like Reddit and its clones counts votes as well as post age (another gripe of mine).
I also think it makes for less meaningful interactions. I've stated this elsewhere on here. Instead of saying "I liked this because..." or "I disagree because..." you just click a button to change a number.
I think voting does have merit for Q&A or how-to topics, where you can use it to quickly see what's good advice vs bad when you may not be familiar with the topic.
> @anchorite said: > > On aggregator-type sites like Reddit that prioritize new content over old but still relevant content, you have to make new posts about the same topic once the old post drops off the first page because nobody's going to go looking for it.
And you get yelled at for "reposting" just because you want to ask a question or continue a discussion that died because it's been six hours since the last time it was posted.