I don’t have much experience with that community, but from the little I’ve seen, agreed. It’s not good.

A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn’t matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.

The best communities I’ve been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don’t feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.

Dogpile on them

It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there’s no other option

In my experience, that’s not what happens

Yeah, something that is becoming very clear in these replies is that people got used to Reddit way of things.

Perhaps it’s one of those things that you have to experience for yourself.

Yeah you’re right, I was just making a joke.

But it does create some silly situations like you said

I could’ve told you that for free, no need for a study

deleted by creator

It has nothing to do with explaining oneself, but more about fostering discussion. You can check my earlier reply to the other user where I explain it better.

I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.

Considering the point of the comment - and the post being about downvotes - my edit was meant to illustrate the point, not to whine.

Regardless, about another thing that I feel is more relevant:

If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.

To me this is not… A healthy way to interact with forums. You don’t have to engage with every post or comment you come across, be it with commenting or voting. You’re “allowed” to be neutral, to not know, to not have an opinion, or to simply not want to engage.

And if you feel that someone is pulling you into a pointless argument, you can just walk away. Having the last word != being right, as a lot of people misunderstand.

And if people posting ragebaits becomes an issue, downvoting or replying to them won’t solve anything. The problem would need to be fixed on a more fundamental level, but that’s another can of worms that mods need to figure out on their own communities. As for me, I simply walked away, as I did with Reddit and others

I have more respect for you for explaining and taking the time to reply. I have even upvoted your comment, despite disagreeing with it.

For me, upvotes and downvotes should not be used as agree/disagree buttons. Instead, they should be about “brings interesting points to the table”/“this comment adds nothing”.

But that’s not how the majority of people view them. Realizing that, that’s why I don’t believe this system works, as it dicentivizes discussions and - in my opinion - helps creating echo chambers.

A good example of a forum that uses only upvotes is Tildes. You need an invite to participate, but you can lurk and see what people do over there. Popular opinions still get to the top and get highlighted (resolving the issue of guaranteeing that the most helpful comments appear first, which is important for posts asking about tech issues and whatnot), and less popular opinions still appear down below. But here’s the thing: in my experience in that forum, those less popular opinions are engaged with far more than what I see in Reddit, piefed or lemmy. Why? Because you can’t downvote them. There’s no button for that. If you want to express disagreement, you actually have to do that.

Because otherwise, using my comment as example:

• what did people disagree with?

1. The suggestion that the downvote button shouldn’t exist?

2. The suggestion that neither of them should exist?

3. Me calling 4chan community trash?

4. All of the above?

No discussion is added, no new insights appear, nothing. Without your comment, this comment that I’m writing now wouldn’t exist either.

Thus my point, we are discussing and bringing new insights to the table.

Might be the community. Voyager here shows downvote buttons (in my lemmy.world account)

I wish lemmy and piefed didn’t use downvotes. Just upvotes buttons.

But even then, an ideal forum imo would be one without any of that stuff. Like 4chan, except without the trash community that they have

Edit: Case in point, as soon I posted this comment, it got downvoted. Instead of having people engage and explain their points of view, maybe even have an interesting discussion about it, downvote buttons serve as an immediate “disagree” button. It’s a design that dicentivizes discussion

upbeat music plays 🥰

I’m all for letting UK back in, but agreed. If they come back, they should be like any other member.

My company forced us to use only Chrome on our PC’s and one of the things I was worried about was the ads. I put youtube in the background while I work.

And I was surprised by how… My experience was exactly the same as Firefox and Brave. Ok, actually, one or two ads managed to slip through and appeared in the front page - albeit rarely and randomly - but I never got those ads at the beginning of the video. On other websites, I never got ads.

I was wondering, then, if there was some catch. Maybe the trackers would still get through or something. But according to that link, not even that? lol

Probably Kagi. Everyone that uses it swears by it, in my experience.

I tried it for a bit (until the free searches ran out), and it’s genuinely good. But I don’t use search engines enough to justify paying subscription.

That’s pretty much it. I don’t think there are other ways.

Sorry for the tangent, but your post reminded me of Herodotus and his book “Histories”. If anyone reading this don’t know who that is, he’s called “The Father of History” for being the first (known) historian writing down events and history.

If you read his book, it’s full of “he said that, she mentioned this, I heard about, etc”. It’s an interesting experience compared to reading modern books, because modern books reference each other and won’t bother you with where they got that info in the text itself, they’ll just give you the sources at the bottom of the page or at the end of the book. Herodotus didn’t have that, he had to rely on what people said.

This resulted in some interesting accounts. For example, he talks about enormous “ants” that were about the size of foxes, lived in the hills, and carried away piles of sand that contained gold dust, which the locals collected and turned into wealth.

There’s some theories that he was likely talking about marmots, but we’ll never know for certainty. It may have been him just misinterpreting accounts, or maybe it was just someone who pulled his leg and he believed them.

Where I’m getting at, every book/article/etc we have is actually just writing down what someone else said/wrote with new insights. It’s easy to forget that nowadays with modern books and articles, “Histories” is a reminder of that fact.

The only concievable thing another company could do to get me to pick them over steam is to give me an exact copy of steam but with the option to change the color to anything but blue.

YSK, you can change Steam’s look: https://steambrew.app/themes

Not really. Censorship is not only about political opinions. Banning child pornography is a form of censorship, but I doubt anyone sane would dare to argue that that’s a bad thing. (if anyone reading thinks otherwise, please do me a favour and go jump off a bridge, the world would be better place without you)

But even if we focus on political discourse, consider the paradox of tolerance. If we lived in an ideal society, censorship would not be necessary. But we don’t, there are people that are more than happy to take away other’s rights and freedom of opinion. A functional society must be intolerant of the intolerant and not give them a platform.

Edit: I’m not going to pretend that I know exactly where tolerant opinions end and intolerant opinions begin, but I know that both exist, and I believe we must censor the intolerant ones

There was a recent article about a dev saying that when their game was given for free on Epic, it increased their sales. But not on Epic Store… They increased on Steam…

The problem with Epic is that they were with the wrong assumption that people will “just” migrate to a new launcher. You might be able to attract new players that don’t have any baggage, but older ones with games on Steam, you’ll need to climb the Everest to convince them.

That task would already be hard even if your platform had 100% parity in features with Steam. But it isn’t, it lacks basic features that Steam has for years, so I’m not sure what they were thinking that giving free games would be enough (and I’m not saying this in hindsight, I’ve been saying this ever since they launched Epic Store)

GOG manages to get by because they offer something different. As long they offer DRM-free games, they will always have an audience. Steam can’t compete with that, unless some day they decide to do the same. So GOG will always have a place in the market.

Epic on the other hand, is picking a fight with Steam, on Steam’s territory, with Steam’s rules. It could be a David vs Goliath story except David doesn’t even have a sling or a stone.