this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Also, those upvotes and downvotes don't mean shit here
This is one thing I’ve been trying to figure out, I keep hearing this a lot. What exactly is different with the upvotes and downvotes? Do they not bury comments and posts or something? Serious question just trying to be informed
At least in the app I’m using there is no cumulative score for your upvotes/downvotes, so people don’t care about it.
Also comments don’t seem to get hidden due to downvotes thankfully. That was always a stupid system.
Tbh I wish that the comment voting system didn’t exist, or that to downvote you had to write a legit reason why, and everyone could see the votes and reasons. Shit reasons would take away your ability to downvote temporarily, extending further the more you do it. Too many people just use it as a disagree button.
i hate this so much about reddit. a lot of users abuse this system so much to hide your comments so nobody sees them anymore.. they just vanish because usually users don't click unhide.
even if you are nice in the comment and are in the right.. if someone dislikes your comment they can pull out their twink accounts and downvote it. and if a comment is at around -3 to -4 or similiar, most users just click downvote without actually reading it.. because "others have downvoted that comment so it has to be right. downvote click"
its just so toxic on reddit..
Doesn't even have to be downvoted heavily. If you bash the admins/powermods, your comment gets magically collapsed, even if it's near the top. I don't know how that happens.
admins and mods working for reddit (the paid ones) have "tools" to do such things. thats also how /u/spez manipulated user comments who said fuck spez etc. - also how they manipulate /r/place currently. they just paint a huge black square or checkerboard over images they dislike.
Some mods basically thought their job amounted to having a power downvote… they’d banish comments they just didn’t agree with, not abusive, but just something they didn’t like and control the conversation that way. That’s one thing if it’s really their sub, but pretty lame if it’s something like /r/Portland and you’re not allowed to disagree with whatever the mods think on a topic, or even discuss other viewpoints.
Yeh I had this happen to my comment once, but it wasn’t even abusing the mods or anything, it was just not the circle jerk reply the mod wanted. It was one of the most upvoted comments on a post, and all of a sudden it was gone from the top. Lo and behold it was now collapsed down the bottom with a huge positive score. Absolute joke.
Yep, reddit works with upvote and downvote bandwagons. Often (though not always) the first votes on a comment or post determine how the whole thing will go, especially with the self-reinforcing sorting. I noticed what you said about downvotes too, that if someone has an slightly hard to interpret, ambiguous or sarcastic post, once a few people downvoted it, other people will assume it’s a “bad” post and be more likely to down it themselves. Also you can post the same comment on similar threads in the same sub 2 days apart and the results might be wildly different depending on timing, placement, or just who saw it first.
i'm around 12 years on reddit, and votes & how good a post or comments gets welcomed by the communitys on reddit feels kinda random to me.
you can post like you said the same thing at random times, and it will be either welcomed or punished to hell. i had times where i tried to find out if time & timezones have something to do with, but even when trying to post on specific times this didn't changed much.
after all this years, i decided for myself posting on reddit is like a dice. you roll and either win or fail.
edit: sorry for the horrible english by the way. my motherlanguage isn't english so i often have still issues with finding the right words for things :/
Ah, very Reddit of you to type a comment eloquently and then apologize for your English!
(I say this in jest! First-language English speakers would use apologies to pad out their fake AITA stories. Also your writing is totally fine!)