this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Unpopular Opinion

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Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!


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Vote the opposite of the norm.


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Tag your post, if possible (not required)


  • If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
  • If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].


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1. NO POLITICS


Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.


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Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.


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4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...


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This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.



Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

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I seriously cannot have any degree of nuanced conversation here.

Like I get it, we all know capitalism is bad, but it feels like every time I or anyone go towards discussing the steps that need to be taken to address current looming problems in the short term, someone has to jump in and shut it down with "capitalism bad >:[ " and tear down any idea presented because its not complete and total destruction of the current economic model.

The result just feels like an echo chamber where no actual solutions get presented other than someone posting whole ass dissertations on their 33-step (where 30/33 steps are about as vague as "we'll just handle it") plan to fully convert the world to an anarchist commune.

Edit: I still vastly prefer Lemmy and the fediverse and a whole, my complaint here is that many of you are TOO INTENSE. You blow up small scale discussion.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Welcome to the Internet? It's not just Lemmy lol

[–] [email protected] 64 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Agree. Reddit was the same thing if not worse. Nuance is [apparently] dead and if you do not explain everything from the dawn of Man to cover your thought, people pick the comment apart like carrion as if you've never thought about anything deeply before. They might even gloss over things you did say and attempt to invalidate or discredit your post because only they hold the Truth of the Internet handed down from the Elders. It can be a bit frustrating.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Did you even consider vegans don’t eat decaying flesh? You cant just hold everyone to your standards. I’m not even going to bother reading the rest of what you wrote because you're so fundamentally wrong already that I'm confident i can stop there and not miss anything of substance.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

This is gold. Thank you!

[–] Ataraxia 5 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thats a great song, thanks for sharing!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (4 children)

IMO, it's anywhere that has a voting system in place. Every forum has a hivemind, but the hivemind is especially reinforced when fake Internet points are at stake. That, and moderators yanking comments they don't agree with.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Its not about the points, its about the weighted value.

Higher point posts go up higher snd are seen by more people. Lowering posts makes them less prominent.

You can go for a system of whoever posts first gets their comment to be first, leading to people rushing low quality crap to be at the top. Or most recent comment first, giving you a shit experience like browsing a discord for information. Or random post order, where high quality content gets buried under a sea of shit.

Ranked voting is the best option we've found that works online so far.

Personally I downvote shit all the time if i feel its not more worthy than other content. Everyone should be judging posts according to their own metric so we can average out content across a communities views.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The system was a lot more useful when it showed up votes and downvotes separately. I was stoked when Lemmy came out and that was the default display. Now they seem to have removed that even as a user config option, which is very disappointing. People perceive something with 20 downvotes very differently than they do something with 380 upvotes and 400 downvotes. Showing an average skews people's perception and helps create a hive mind response approach. People don't want to reply if their reply might be controversial, because it looks like they're just being shouted down. And then people who agree don't want to respond and say they agree, or they're just jumping into the fire with the first person.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I still see separate counts in the web UI. And I agree that separate counts are essential information. I think the level of discourse on Reddit dropped significantly when they hid the separate up/down counts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think the config option is set per instance. Some of them have it, some of them don't. And then a lot of the popular apps don't support it, even if your instance has it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There is no option like this, it was probably changed in the app you are using.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I checked the website too, and it was combined. I checked again just now and it's not combined. Weird! I have instance hopped a few times, so it must have been whatever instance I was on at the time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Ah I believe lemmy-ui only shows seperate counts if the post actually received any downvotes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I 100% agree that this is how it should work, and it doe work in more objective communities, particularly tech-oriented ones such as troubleshooting. The issue lies in subjective conversations, where people are debating their opinions, especially politics.

If the vote counts were hidden, it likely wouldn't be an issue. But in practice, it turns conversations into an opinion popularity contest if the topic is of a more subjective nature (I'm right, you're wrong, yada yada).

The other important metric to this is that a significant number of people simply lurk with no interaction whatsoever. While participation is key to determine a proper weighting of content quality, it's not like there's a mechanism for forcing participation. And if there was, a good number of people probably wouldn't even bother if there were such a requirement. Ultimately with link aggregators and microblogging, people just want to consume content (including comments) while keeping to themselves.

[–] can 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I was really hoping we'd leave that behind when we stopped totalling them up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Both the web interface and various apps still have the functionality in place (though I think the individual user can disable it). I think that since a lot of Lemmy users are reddit refugees, the mentality carried over unfortunately. That said, hiveminds and echo chambers are kind of human nature, so it's pretty hard to escape; ultimately it's on the individual to either fall in line or ignore it.

[–] can 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The web ui shows your total karma?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ah maybe not total but separated, still though, simple math. I'm on Voyager more than my desktop so I don't really see the web UI very often.

[–] can 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

simple math

Go ahead and try to add up my my comment karma lol.

ETA: if your app shows an aggregate this is because it wasn't removed from the API. This is an oversight as noted on the github.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Karma is removed in 0.19, curious where you still see it. Anyway its impossible to calculate correctly for remote users, because there is no guarantee that the local instance has fetched all posts from that user, and all votes on those posts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The Boost for Lemmy app still gives you your total "karma" score for some reason

[–] can 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It was removed from the web ui but was still left in the API.

dessalines:

Public karma counts and karma farming are one of the things we really don't want to replicate from reddit, there was a discussion about it for lemmy-ui, and it was decided to stop showing them because of how psychologically harmful it is.

We should've removed these a long time ago from the API. As a substitute, you can show the post_count and comment_count instead of those scores.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I honestly forget it's there most of the time as I don't typically look up my own profile lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

You need some way to order stuff. How would you prefer to order content if not by votes? Isn't votes at least a somewhat democratic way to do it? And much like democracy, it might not be great but I have no better ideas.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

And much like democracy, it might not be great but I have no better ideas.

Just make me godking of the universe and I'll put it all right.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Traditionally, forums just sort by time. Doesn't scale that well for big places obviously

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And as case in point, some dickhole already felt the need to apply one downvote to your very factual comment.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Lol yup, at which point I giggle and move on with my day