Unpopular Opinion

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Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!

How voting works:

Vote the opposite of the norm.

If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.

Guidelines:

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].

Rules:

1. NO POLITICS

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

2. Be civil.

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

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...

Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.

5. No trolling.

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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Social media platforms should not display post scores to the users (lemm.ee)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The ability to up- and downvote posts and comments is useful but the score should not be displayed to the users and you shouldn't be able to enable it even if you wanted to. This means both, posts made by you as well as by others.

Nobody wants to see their messages get downvoted. This is bad for our mental health as individuals but especially as a group. It's like walking up to a person on the street, saying "I don't like you" and then moving on. You're free to not like (downvote) someone but they don't need to hear it. If you really want them to know then write a message and explain yourself.

Upvotes on the other hand skews the reality and encourages groupthink. People say what is popular even if they don't fully buy it themselves and conversely refrain from saying things they truly believe because they then dont get the upvotes and get downvoted instead.

Seeing the scores also primes the reader. When something is heavily upvoted for example you assume it to be true/good instead of using your own judgement to decide.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

I wholeheartedly agree. When you have an upvote/downvote structure, there is an incentive to not go against the grain and just post stuff that's considered "acceptable" in the local community.

Not everyone treats the votes the same way as well. Some people downvote because they don't agree with the content, the poster, just because they sound disagreeable or simply because the post is too much to read. You can apply the same myriad of methods to upvotes. Not one motivator is the same.

If we'd ditch showing the numbers and just have them work under the hood, discussions might start looking a lot more genuine.