I’m very curious about the reasoning different people use when deciding to downvote a post or comment. Often, when something gets “heavily” downvoted, the OP will ask some variation of “why the downvotes?”. This is sometimes answered with sincere criticism, but sometimes is received even more poorly than the original offending post.
Do you downvote people who ask “why the downvotes?”? What informs the decision?
In all fairness though, those are reasons to down vote
You down vote if you disagree or dislike a comment
You’re on a very progressive place where people prefer products and policies that are good for everyone, not good for a few and shit for everyone else
Windows is good for a very few executives and it’s a shit show for the rest of the world. Has been like that for 40 years already, bit yay that people are finally catching on to this
Linux is the antithesis of windows. It’s from everyone for everyone and it’s fucking awesome. I can do miracles with a computer with Linux 30 minutes after I bought a computer and started installing it. I can’t even get windows installed without having to dive into documentation, bios and who knows what other shit
Same for rockets. NASA yay! SpaceX got 3 billion dollars to take us to the moon and they took that tax payer money, gave Elmo a huge bonus and never even managed to arrive into a stable low watch orbit. Musk, being the pathological liar that he is about fuuuuuucking everything, just keeps on lying and loads of people lap it up because … Reasons?
Cars? You mean those things that replaced human beings in cities in the Americas? Especially in the US where without a car you can’t even have a job anymore? Where cars kill hundreds of people per day, needlessly, because of badly designed infrastructure and rules that favor cars over anything else? Those things that spew pollution, CO2, plastic particles everywhere and is mostly used for trips where a bicycle would be 5 times faster?
And you wonder why posts that don’t rile against these things get down voted?
It’s like asking why turds in your bed get down voted so much. One would think “well doh!”
There are very good reasons for these down votes
holds up a mirror
I’ve always known that a lot of people used it this way, but I thought most people were on the same page that that’s a misuse of the feature. I’m sad to see that I was wrong.
The purpose of downvoting (or voting in general) on any platform that offers it is for you to indicate that a post doesn’t contribute to the discussion. It’s a soft knob for you to say others won’t find it worth reading. If you believe that use inherently aligns with indicating what you already believe then that’s what makes people see Lemmy (and Reddit) as elitist and hive-mindy, because that’s elitist and hive-mindy.
I think it’s simpler than that. By default, Lemmy/piefed/etc. orders comments by top using upvotes and downvotes.
So if you want something to move up and be more visible you upvote it. If you want something to move down and be less visible, you downvote it.
The difference between likes/dislikes is that you don’t need to like something or dislike something to up/down vote it. You might like something but think it doesn’t contribute or is in the wrong comm or even just that the other comments should be higher up than it. There doesn’t need to be an assumption of negative judgement (although often there is anyway), they’re tools for arranging comment/post order.