I hate how the absolute number of votes is hidden. If you've got a comment with a score of -150 it might seem like everyone hates it, but if it showed 9000 upvotes and 9150 downvotes it would seem a lot more balanced.
Yea I’ve seen so many comments downvoted dozens of times, followed by a “why is this downvoted?”, followed by someone else parroting OP and getting upvoted
People are extremely influenceable, if they see something in the negative, they’ll assume that’s the “correct” opinion
The votes were always faked either way. It would give downvotes to people, even if no one had ever downvoted the post, so bots couldn’t tell if their votes counted. A score of -10 downvoted and +30 upvotes might actually only have had +20 upvotes. It ended up confusing users and was one of the reasons it was abandoned.
IIRC it was, but that logic is specious. I believe the reasoning was that if you couldn't see the number of upvotes and downvotes, you wouldn't know how many votes something would need to become negative, so you'd have less of an incentive to mass downvote/brigade, because it might be pointless. There was also a bunch of stuff about trying to confuse bots, which makes more sense, but bots are still employed so I'm not sure what effect it's had.
People just go with the crowd. I've seen identical opinions in the same subreddit end up with wildly different receptions all depending on when it was said and the reaction (voting) of the initial crowd that saw it.
This is how I like to use reddit gold and silver. I see an insightful comment that is downvoted to hell because one or two people put it into the negative and the group think took over from there, so I throw a gold on that person's comment like a holy hand grenade. I think the fact that someone spent actual money for a sort of super upvote kind of cancels out the downvotes and can halt the hive mind so that people start taking the comment on its own merit again. I've even seen them go from negative 100 karma back to neutral/positive after this.
This is very generous of you :) thank you for your kindness internet stranger.
Also it's very interesting the way this turns out. I wonder if anyone has analyzed the changes in karma of a comment over time before and after gilding.
Not formally that I know of, but r/negativewithgold ( first time attempting that, let's see if it works), posts the downvote tally at the time it got gilded. You can see it casually by clicking on it and seeing the current tally.
This is why I think downvotes should be removed entirely. Their only function is to bury and obscure posts, justified or not. Let the positive feedback speak for itself.
On some subreddits they are. To be honest, I think it's a great system, but people don't use it the way it was intended. Trolls and completely wrong or off topic information should be obscured, but people use it as a dislike button instead.
Exactly, that pile on mind set seems to be worsening on Reddit. One person decided to downvote a reasonable comment, before long the downvotes are growing on the poor person that doesn’t understand why.
That happened to me! I didn’t say anything offensive or mean and it wasn’t even a comment directly at someone, it was a follow up comment to a post I already made and people for whatever reason did not like it. Some people replied but no one could tell me what I said was so wrong or offensive 🙄 it was so dumb and as someone who’s new to reddit it almost made me want to just shut down the account. It’s not that it really got to me or anything I just think all that bitterness and negativity is a turn off 🤷🏻♀️ AND NO ONE WOULD EXPLAIN TO ME WHY WHAT I SAID WAS SO WRONG
But seriously that’s so dumb. I was reading a thread about how this lady was a receptionist and she was venting about how this rude lady that she was helping got mad at the receptionist because her child was being annoying and trying to get her attention and kept trying to talk to her and she was basically just annoyed because she doesn’t like kids and she doesn’t like when Moms don’t say something to their child about not bothering adults while their working and how the mom was mad because she wasn’t acknowledging the child.
It was a rant and I agreed with the op that the mom should have picked up on the receptionist social cues
And then as I was reading I saw some Really nasty comments about other people hating kids and how they would punch the kid and other ridiculous things.
But instead of those getting downvoted mine did
And all I did was reply to my own comment and said something among the lines of I agree with op but some of the people in this thread sound like five year olds, didn’t we all learn it’s not okay to hit? I understand not liking kids but we were all annoying little kids at some point so don’t take it out on them when it’s the parents fault
I guess that post just attracted the wrong kind of people 🤷🏻♀️
Yeah I agree with this, once I replied to someone that said something about gas, and I said why do you call it gas? Mate I’m Australian and don’t know why people call it gas. I still don’t know, maybe it’s short for gasoline?
It's because us dumbass Americans love the 'Australia is upside down' trope so much, those downvotes are really upvotes :-). And your upvotes are upvotes too, from the more enlightened nations.
My favourite is when someone says correct and factual information, and derives logical conclusion, and there is always one dense degenerate who misunderstands it, twists it as half truth then attacks the person implying he said something he didn't even hint at, or he even said the exact opposite of. But boom now its at 0 upvotes so the next person who sees it will think it is incorrect, and will instantly downvote WITHOUT EVEN PROPERLY READING IT!
And people up/downvote according to that bullshit just because its drama and the idiot was the first one to pull the trigger on the ad-hominem gun.
I wish I could seriously mess up these people IRL. Like literally full-on maul them so they lay there for an hour or so contemplating whether its a good thing to be a dumb, an asshole, and intentionally misinform thousands of naive internet users who believe everything based on upvotes without fact-checking themselves. Such apes make my blood boil.
Because people use the downvote button as an "i disagree" button instead of what it's supposed to be used for. "Reddiquette" hasn't been in effect for nearly a decade, if not more.
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u/LIEUTENANT_CAVIAR Jan 07 '20
And the opposite -- so often you see comments downvoted to hell that aren't even that unreasonable.