My favorite rebuttal to the idea that the Confederacy seceded in order to preserve States’ Rights is this excerpt from the Confederate constitution:
Article I Section 9(4): No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
If states rights were so important to the Confederacy, I have to wonder why their constitution stripped the states of the right to abolish slavery in any capacity.
Technically, it stripped ALL legislatures of the ability to restrict slavery in any way, making slavery a permanent feature of the Confederate government.
The rights argument is trivial to rebut, just like you did. Pick any letter of secession sent to Congress and you’ll likely find the institution of slavery listed as the top concern.
Here go Mississippi:
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
I found Amazon just won’t stream full quality on Linux browsers for some reason, I forget why exactly but it’s very annoying.
Because of Widevine, i.e. Google DRM. The DRM “Level” determines the quality a device can stream, Linux desktops can only stream 720p content, for the most part.
You are in for a hell of a ride when you figure out that folks STILL downvote randoms for self-validation purposes, even if theres no “punishment” for the other user.
I disagree. It does the same thing as the karma system. It’s about punishing people with opinions outside of the norm, for the purpose of furthering engagement. It makes every conversation an argument, not a discussion.
Downvotes/dislikes are a great way to weed out misinformation and low quality content
That simply does not happen. Even so, the report button exists for dealing with both situations – you don’t need a 2nd option (which can be easily manipulated, considering there is no age gap and/or restrictions – even your toddler can flag your post as “low quality content”). In other words… that is why we can’t have nice things.
If anything, voting in either direction keeps content samey, bland and generic so it appeals to a wider audience. Basically, enforcing the same enshittification happening because of capitalism, but for bullshit numbers that don’t even allow you to buy shit.
But, uh… That is most certainly not what the report button is for.
how do people on this site not realize that the points next to your posts affect how your posts are sorted and are literally the exact same system as reddit? am i just so blind that i can actually see the numbers next to my posts or is everyone here just trying to be so anti-reddit they’ll make up bullshit that isn’t reality?
I never changed my opinion just so I get more karma on reddit either.
Lemmy’s system is no different from Reddit’s and my original comment was sarcastic. I’ve noticed sarcastic posts without /s get downvoted more easily on Lemmy for whatever reason.
There’s a lot more good faith here. On Reddit you could safely assume anything ridiculous was meant sarcastically, and usually be correct. Here, the sarcasm is not assumed so your comment is more likely to be judged as having been spoken sincerely.
Which is actually really nice, even if it gets a comment misunderstood from time to time. Reddit just feels shitty and hate-filled anymore. But Lemmy feels a great deal more emotionally neutral, and if I dare say so, human – which is to say, not attempting to increase emotional involvement and generate clicks by being provocative and antagonizing by design.
They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.
Lemmy also has that bro. Some clients display it and some don’t, but when I click on your name I see that you have 510 total comment score and 0 total post score.
It wasn’t important on Reddit. Even there you could only lose 15 points on any downvoted comment and you couldn’t lose points for posts. Karma was just a way to measure how frequently you interacted in an additive way. It’s only real utility was for mods to bar new accounts from posting without getting come karma from other places first. and Lemmy definitely needs something like that in the near future for moderation, but they have to fix the bug with the total first.
I believe the devs have said they aren’t going to make it officially visible, which is all I care about. If you want to make value judgements on people based on a number so bad that you had to find a client that shows it, more power to you.
I hadn’t thought about it until just now but IDK if that number is accurate. My instance doesn’t have downvotes, so if you view my profile from lemmy.one it might look like I have a higher karma than if you look from lemmy.world, I’m not sure.
Lemmy also has this and everyone’s point totals are visible from the API. If you’re not seeing it, that’s because your client is hiding it, not because it doesn’t exist.
The nice thing is though, it’s different for every server and from every server, so unless you follow a convention to say the user’s homeserver vote total is the definitive amount, then there’s no true karma.
My beehaw account is a great example. I made some comments on Lemmy world before it defederated. World and shitjustworks users can still vote on the old comments but they won’t count to my home total, and from Lemmy.world my vote total won’t change for that account significantly from that point. The vote totals on this lemmy.ca account will be different from lemmy.ca, beehaw.org or lemmy.world’s perspectives because the servers defederated can’t see the karma I earned on each comment on the other server, while lemmy.ca can see both.
Downvotes are also disabled on beehaw, so any downvotes won’t affect my total at all but could show on other servers.
Lastly, there are some servers with 40000 accounts and 3 active users (who post and comment), vote botting is feasibly a thing. Imagine if I made a Lemmy server at Rentlar.org and as the admin I made 20000 accounts who upvote me every where I post. I’d be the first user on Lemmy with 1M total votes, but would that mean anything other than I’m a somewhat tech-savvy narcissistic loser? No.
And there is 0 content so no one is going to show up. This site will fizzle out if all the admins don’t start pushing to grow so that nitch communities start getting populated.
The site will fizzle out if all the admins don’t start pushing to grow…
I know where you’re coming from but this is a misguided take, imo.
Servers like Lemmy.ca, beehaw.org,have stuck around just fine for over a year with less than 30 people actively posting. When I joined in March this year, All/New was the only way you could get a refreshed set of stories more than once a day. But it was fine like that too, imo.
So Lemmy servers can totally survive without the need to grow for growth’s sake. This mindset that says growth at all costs is what turns websites into shitholes like Twitter and Reddit, and reminds me too much of the hunger for infinite unsustainable growth commanded by capitalism.
if there is not a large population then there will be 0 small subs with interesting content and people will not use this platform. social media sites are successful by being a complete experience for as many users as possible. right now i can’t spend any time on this site to talk about any video game or media franchise at all. there is virtually 0 content, discussion, or news about that. its all memes and drama because posting and upvoting memes is easy content, but actually supporting users interests is hard. the only way this platform takes off from here is if some major influence is brought here inorganically because none of the admins seem to know fuck all about running a social media site.
And that system was irrelevant on Reddit just like it is here. You still have a total karma number in the API, every app I have used shows it, even if it is broken right now. Only the default theme on the web page hides the number. The only people who saw value in karma are the people who farmed it and the people who bitch about the people who farmed it. Either way, making posts that get a lot of upvotes specifically to get a lot of upvotes happens here just like I does on Reddit so idk what this OP is trying to say because they’re farming karma lol.
There were many subreddits that did not allow participation unless someone had a karma over a certain threshold. For many of them the threshold was pretty low, only meant to stop brand new accounts and trolls, but still.
Additionally, the “people who farmed it” often did so because a reddit account with a high karma score was literally worth money to adspammers and people running bots.
The karma system contributed to what made reddit bad.
I don’t see how that addresses any of what I said. If anything this seems like this would mean the subreddits that blocked people with no karma weren’t even doing it to block trolls, just new users.
I didn’t care about my karma or any specific persons, I like to get into arguments about stuff and that is how you get downvoted. I just don’t like the behaviour a karma system motivated.
If you’re getting downvoted in an argument, guess what, that means you’re bad at making arguments. And this system is exactly the same, regardless of if you can see it or not, sorting by top will still sort by the net sum of votes.
You really don’t seem to understand the mechanics of link aggregators and their comment sections. The votes are for curating content and downvoting posts that are not relevant or are poor quality is the entire point of the system. If you remove the ability to downvote bad content, you degrade the content for all the users. This is exactly why YouTube removing the dislike counter was an issue.
They never are on the front page. Idk why you don’t get this. If I sort by new I see them but only then. If I did see a post on the front page that I don’t like, obviously it is just a matter of taste. It doesn’t bother me that I can’t downvote it.
You really don’t understand how removing the recourse from users to downvote bad content is a negative to any link agregator? Do you just never go to small subs and see less than 5 posts from the last week and not understand that someone could just flood those communities with poor content and the only recourse is for mods to ban that user who could have not even violated their rules? This is to say nothing of how bad nitch communities are already on Lemmy, if we remove the users ability to group moderate it would be even worse.
It’s not spam, it’s content within the rules, it just bad. That’s the situation we’re trying to avoid so that bad content is seen by the least amount. Of users. When you can’t downvote bad content, the moderators have to remove the content so we have just pushed more work onto moderators. Congratulations.
Lots of bad content posted excessively is spam. I refuse to let you handwave that, that is what spam is. But I’d like to be done here, I’m not enjoying this back and forth. You keep whatever opinion you want.
So how do you know it’s bad content if no one downvoted it? A lack of upvotes does not mean it’s bad, it could easily mean no one saw it and they simply fall of their first page too quickly to ever see it, a common issue on Lemmy. You’re just making a judgement on what is or isn’t good content, meaning the quality is no measured by the mods, not the users.
Simple. If the post is old and has no upvotes, I assume everyone else thought it was bad.
But really, on a post by post basis, I make up my own mind? Do you not? Like, do you decide whether or not you like a post based on the votes it has? Because I just, like it or dont like it.
You’re a moderator, not a publisher. You don’t decide what is or is not good content, you decide what is or is not against the rules. If “bad content is not allowed” is a rule, witch it virtually is if you remove posts because no one upvotes them, then why would anyone post to a community that forces you to appease the mods before anyone else has seen your post. The downvotes mean the mods need to do less work and the community can self moderate good posts and good content with the push of a button. How you do not understand that pushing down bad content is fundamental to link aggregation and combating community vote manipulation after all the shit that happened in Reddit, even through the downvotes, is beyond me.
This is silly. I just disagree with I think all of it. Spam is bad and should be against the rules. Part of what made me personally so ready to leave reddit was the toxicity, and the favorite toy of the toxic redditor is the downvote.
this isn’t about what you agree with, your only counter to a situation where bad content can reach more people because no one can push it down is that it would never get upvoted in the first place, witch isn’t the issue with not having downvotes.
If you’re getting downvoted in an argument, guess what, that means you’re bad at making arguments.
I pretty much agree with your second sentence/point, but this is bullshit. I got so many downvotes on reddit for literal descriptions of my perceptions and experiences as a gay woman. Half the time there wasn’t even a debate or argument happening. As reddit culture skewed more and more conservative, many technical and nerdy communities became actively hostile to the basic facts of my existence. Then there are all the downvotes I got for believing in human and minority rights while downthread with some bigots. My more visible posts on the same topic would be solidly upvoted, while everything below the arrow was smashed below zero because only angry little shits followed the discussion that far. I agree that the system on Lemmy isn’t meaningfully different and will inevitably have the same effects, but sorting by voting over-centralizes the meta and destroys real discussion and diversity of experience and opinion. It literally only works in limited circumstances within subjects that have objectively correct answers. Anywhere else it introduces so much chaos.
I’m not saying people don’t pick sides in an argument, but the point is to convince someone you’re right, so if you’re not doing that, you’re getting downvotes meaning you’re either wasting your time or making bad arguments.
I’m not saying people don’t pick sides in an argument
What I’m saying is that these weren’t arguments. These were people weaponizing the voting system to keep minorities from self representing. I was downvoted below zero on a car repair sub for having runflats instead of a spare because I worked in and commuted through a bad part of town, often after midnight, where I wouldn’t feel safe stopping to change my tire. They made it clear that I was unwelcome because I am a woman, because my description of this gendered experience was unacceptable subreddit content.
I’m not going to argue with someone about the story they tell me and how it made them feel because an individual’s biased perspective is not an objective observation of how the vote system works. This isn’t about you.
You’ve declared someone you disagree with is making things up while criticizing the debate skills and tactics of those who disagree with you. What a fucking joke. You got some peer reviewed numbers to support your position about votes and arguments? Because from where I’m sitting, this nonsensical notion that people vote rigorously based on debate acumen and never with their emotions and libido along the lines of their existing beliefs is just as much a made up story. I’m not going to find numbers for a bad faith participant like you, but we already know people vote for real, important, world changing things with their emotions. The idea that the general populace is wildly more reasonable and responsible when the votes don’t matter at all is ludicrous.
LegionEris, I have seen what you describe many times, and you have put the case eloquently. I just wish you didn’t have to.
Meanwhile, as a latecomer I’m laughing my ass off because this comment now stands at -11:
If you’re getting downvoted in an argument, guess what, that means you’re bad at making arguments. And this system is exactly the same, regardless of if you can see it or not, sorting by top will still sort by the net sum of votes.
Arguably one difference is that on lemmy it’s just a straight up sum AFAIK, while on reddit there are some algorithms attached to tweak things so you can’t lose vast amounts of karma from a single shit comment and such.
you can only lose 15 points for a comment and 0 for a post. the only thing they do is they jitter the total points to fight botting. its designed to make karma a representation of content given, not necessarily that you have a high hit rate.
Karma is the total of upvotes and downvotes a user receives over time not just single posts and comments. It leads to discrimantory moderation and users tend to whore themselves out for upvotes to boast.
Ever heard of gallowboob?
It wasn’t a 1upvote=1karma system on Reddit. Mostly, Lemmy does it better by the community caring less and not having posts limited if a user is under a threshold.
The initial point of the karma system was to push to the top of discussions relevant information while the shitposts were put at the bottom. It works sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t.
I think, honestly, politics is the biggest issue here when it comes to the karma system and it doesn’t work well at all within it, but for many other things it’s actually a decent system and a good way to find relevant information in a thread without reading through 500 pages on a forum or something
Yes? I don’t think I’ve ever heard the vote totals on individual posts and comments referred to as “Karma”, just upvotes and downvotes. In my experience Karma is exclusively used to describe the total on peoples profiles. “Karma farming” is increasing that number by posting lots of different low effort posts, not when someone posts something because they think that one post will get many upvotes, as an example.
It’s a genuine question, because I still check my comments and their scores. Big numbers make me feel good, small numbers make me feel bad. (Not losing any sleep over it or anything.) So I could still see people who make posts they know will get a lot of points being referred to as “farming karma.” The same way you might accuse someone of “fishing for compliments” on social media. If that makes sense.
No instance has no downvotes, they just hide the button in the theme like subreddits would do too. And nothing about this system prevents people from mass downvoting or upvoting a post because of group think, ask me how I know.
If you downvote my comments they do not register on my instance. It is more than the lack of a visible button, the downvotes do not federate.
Edit: to be clear, this post is on lemmy.world, so I can be downvoted here (even though I won’t see it unless I browse from lemmy.world). And from lemmy.world you can appear to downvote things on instances without downvotes, but you are basically just downvoting the local copy of the thing. The downvote never gets sent through, it just lives on your instance.
If your instance removed the button, the system will register the votes, even if you can’t see it. This is just more fragmentation of the experience for users fostering more confusion and alienation of new users.
Wanna check? Log in though an app and… Ta da, downvotes!
Still no downvotes. Just because some apps can show the downvotes from the api doesn’t mean they are federated.
For the record, downvote me. Please. I don’t care. I like not having a downvote because it doesn’t allow me to downvote other people. It helps keep me in a better headspace.
Not really in my experience. I can tell when something is disliked by how few upvotes it recieves. Instead of bad posts sitting at the bottom with -20 votes, they sit at the bottom with 1 vote. Functionally the same.
Youtube removing the dislike button was more about their attempt to obfuscate public opinion on things like movie trailers, game trailers, and the various videos related to big PR decisions by companies. The companies posting these things wanted a hosting place where only positive interactions are allowed, regardless of the topic in question, and youtube accommodated them.
It is still infinitly possible to distinguish bad videos from good ones without a dislike button on youtube. But it is much more difficult now to find out how many people agree with you that a video is bad, which used to be nice to know on things like movie trailers, game trailers, and big PR decisions.
If you remove downvotes you remove the recourse users have to push down bad content. A bad post with 100 upvotes and 500 potential downvotes should never see the light of day because the community decided it’s a bad post. But because no one can push it down and there isn’t enough content to push up over it, now a bad post 10 people would have seen and pushed out of the system is now bothering well over 500 more people because you couldn’t downvote it.
The situation you described is asinine. First of all, a post with 100 upvotes should see the light of day, even if 500 don’t like it. Something that recieves a large amount of upvotes and downvotes is controversial, not a bad post or irrelevant. It also assumes there are no moderators to correct things that are truly against what that community wants to see.
For posts that are severly off topic or is against the rules in some way, that is what moderators are for.
The situation I described has been abused in reddit through even the downvote system by various subreddits for everything from memes to pushing presidential candidacy. Imagine the_donald in a world without downvotes.
Dude… You should get paid for this, you are too skilled at being annoying to do it for free.
It was just an example of a functional link aggregator with no downvotes. There are others you could look at. None of it had fucking anything to do with federation, or your opinion of the community, or anything like that.
Can we be done? Do you have some last things you wanna say before I leave and don’t come back?
These examples you show are small and not proven to be viable. Beehaw for one had several problems outside of not having downvotes that make it as an example problematic, and Lemmy as a whole is such a broken experience right now that you can’t use anything here to prove that having no downvotes is viable either.
Beehaw only defederated from lemmy.world and a few others, btw. It isn’t isolated, and it is fine IMO.
Maybe this disagreement is all opinion, you just don’t like anything but a fully curated feed. Did you never browse by new? I think the way things are here is fun.
I’m probably only gunna wait for one more response if you wanna say something else. I really wanna be done here, so please say what you wanna say and we can both move on with our lives
Because if the only way you can interact with a post is by voting up or voting down, then a few problems occur. First, any instance or app that lets you use the downvotes now has a stronger voice than anyone who isn’t using the downvotes. Second, it means users can not push down bad content without a consistent supply of new content to vote over it, a massive problem for small communities. And third, it fragments the community making the service harder to use.
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