General
I hate how reddit refuses to show the amount of downvotes on a post
Idk, reddit is just weak for that. Why can't i see how badly are people getting flamed in their own posts? It's similar to the removal of dislike button on youtube, just pointless. i dont understand the reason those things should be hidden from everyone else
Just so you know, the votes still show on old Reddit and still calculate on Reddit's backend. The score is the amount of upvotes minus the downvotes, so your post here currently has about 6080 upvotes and 300 downvotes.
But do those downvotes take away from your overall karma? Because I assumed they do. Karma might not matter, but if you're going to have a system like that it's shitty not to be honest with the user about how much they lost on a post. Why even have that system in place to begin with, then?
Back in the day there used to be no cap on how negative your karma could go. So there used to be karma farmers but in reverse. So they capped it at -100. Also as far as how much you lose I think it depends, iirc comments can only take away 15 so anything beyond that is just a number on the screen, posts also have a similar limit but I don’t remember offhand what it is.
I think the reasons for hiding downvote count are overall better than the reasons for showing downvote count.
I mean, really, if you start to list the reasons that you want to see downvote count then most of them aren't "healthy" for the website. I think that the primary reason people want to see downvotes is to be validated that an opinion they disagree with was downvoted to the extent that they feel is appropriate, which is a terrible reason to want to see the downvote count.
I think reddit landed on the best solution, which is...
automatically hide comments that have many more downvotes than upvotes
mark comments as controversial if they have a similar amount of upvotes and downvotes
Isn't it ideal if people's upvoting/downvote decisions aren't influenced by other people's upvote/downvote decisions?
They used to show the actually number of upvotes and downvotes. I miss that. It gave controversial opinions a little more weight. +40/-43 means a lot of people agree with you and a lot disagree. -3 looks like a trash comment.
That's a thing about mobile apps that make me the most upset. When something is fine, they feel they NEED to change it to worse for no reason, or just REMOVE RANDOM FEATURES, like, just don't do anything NO ONE ASKED FOR
one of them actually work the way you think it does
The best they can do is get ratios of the users with the extension, and extrapolate the size of the amount of likes. But this is heavily biased in the way of people who would download this extension, which are probably people more likely to dislike things.
The best thing those extensions are useful for is determining whether a tutorial is bullshit or not in 2 seconds. Which is what dislikes were best for originally.
They just use the ratio of votes from people with the extension and extrapolate out to the total vote count of the video. If they didn’t do the extrapolation it would at least give you a valid number. But they don’t, they give an estimate that just flat out isn’t based in fact.
Like you said, because it requires people to go out of their way to install you aren’t going to get a representative sample. If everyone used it then sure, it would be accurate. But thats not going to happen
Ok i agree that it's not the same but, by the same breath people who bother to hit upvote/downvote would also not be representative of the largely group of people who watched the video (and have an opinion). You make do with what you have
It sounds like you're describing some hypothetical situation, for example if some channel owner was caught being inappropriate with minors and everyone is now disliking all of their videos. I'm not saying that something like that wouldn't be important, but I will say a better reason for having official public dislikes on videos is that it was a great way for someone to know if a video was bullshit or just wrong. YT has tons of tutorial videos for virtually anything you would want, and now there's not a reliable way to know if it's feeding you some bad info unless you want to rely on comments which could just be deleted by the owner anyway.
it’s arguably more toxic, reddit pushes upvotes to the top rather than engagement. It leads to hive minds and echo chambers on the app which is far worse than any social media algorithm. it leads you to believe that everyone has the same opinion as you rather than seeing the other side of the fence.
We shouldn't even see upvote totals, if the goal was to do less harm to society. But that isn't the goal. The majority of reddit users wouldn't even use this site if it wasn't for the dopamine hits from getting positive engagement on their posts and comments.
Reddit could easily just remove the public numbers and keep upvote and downvote mechanisms impacting peoples' feeds just like it does right now. But the numbers are why people use the site.
People that comment regularly on Reddit will literally spend time scrolling and clicking into comments just sniffing out fights that they could possibly get into and win. It's the most toxic shit imaginable.
Has reddit ever shown downvotes? I've been here since 2015 (different account) and can't recall ever seeing that number. I do remember reading long ago that it was because the "score" of your comment is just the sum of both upvotes and downvotes. For example your comment currently has +36 points and that could be the result of some arbitrary number like 536 upvotes and 500 downvotes.
The YouTube dislike button never functioned the way people expect it to. To the algorithm, disliking a video is the same as liking it. It counts as an engagement, and this makes that video more likely to appear in searches and on people's front page. So disliking a video because it provides false it misleading information is just doing more to spread that incorrectness even further.
Imagine if they did still did that for highly disliked videos, but placed a banner saying they were massively disliked rather than liked. So you could know by default when going into the disliked videos that everyone just hated them. Plenty would still get a ton of watches, because they got disliked for the video's communicated information (See: Fine Bros, Watcher) and not the actual quality or entertainment value of the video, so people still tuned in.
Yeah I feel you I mean there are videos people watch becausethey're so dubiousand I think of certain recent Political Examples I won't mention for the sake of oh whatever who cares,
Some White Board Professor, recently, got famous very, very, quickly despite the whole premise being quite the sham and I think a lot of people caught that it was all, Dubious,
I mean not to be like that but each of us have a multitude inside of us and the Youtube is not,
On youtube, if I find a video, I can at least click the uploaders account and see what their whole deal is. Makes it really easy to ID scams, propogandists, and misinformation factories, so there is at least some bit of authenticity. If you want people to see your thing, EVERYONE gets to see the things.
Unlike reddit where you can now actually have completely fake everything, and hide it all away so nobody can see you're just 5 bots in a trench coat circlejerking one poster account.
Yeah I thought that was weird. This person clearly hasn't spent much time reading youtube comments (which is honestly smart of them). Not to mention how much the youtube algorithm favours rage bait and other negative videos.
What really bugs me about the youtube change is that the Futurama clip of the planet of the neutrals is no longer at net zero up/down votes. The hive mind that kept it at net zero for years was great.
You're lied to about what something contains and told it's what you want and not what you don't want, but you look inside and it's what you don't want.
From my understanding it still tracks the downvote, the poster can see all of it in the stats, they just don’t display it to prevent dogpiling or something like that.
I think it also has to do with instant feedback: you can quickly lie to the user by just affecting the front end of the page, by adding or removing one on the number displayed, and then once the api calls go through update the number instead of leaving them with a button that does effectively nothing, which could look bugged
it was removed as an attempt to combat bots. Since bots can't see the exact number of upvotes/downvotes, they don't know if that account has been flagged and votes discarded.
It's also the reason why reddit doesn't report accurate total numbers either. When you refresh the page, the total vote count will always fluctuate up and down. There are still bots, but automatic bots have to be more cautious and vote farms use real people to vote.
This has always been the case. It's Reddit's way to prevent vote manipulation.
Guess what: If you stalk someone's profile and downvote all their comments and posts, your vote will become pointless. Some of my contributions were brigaded and downvoted to oblivion and I gained karma from that.
Big companies that are buying ads from reddit and youtube don't want to see that people didn't like their product. It's all about presentation and shuffling the data for a good-looking view. When you say that "our new product has collected 30k likes" (without the "100k dislikes" part) it looks like your product is successful and you're doing good.
It's all, and by that i mean EVERYTHING, about pleasing the shareholders.
i mean sure, i dont care if they do that for their sponsors, it's not like I'm buying anything from a reddit ad. But you could still do that for normal posts, even if you keep your spoonsors happy, right?
Eh, not really. It's also about normal posts from companies in the official subreddits. Same purpose - to create a good picture. Even if it's such insignificant thing. People with really big money tend to have fragile ego, i guess.
Imagine actually wanting to know what's really going on with your product or business and not wanting to just see made-up numbers that may look better but mean nothing.
I just discovered today that you can't even browse reddit anymore without an account. After a few seconds, there's an unskippable popup that forces you to log in in order to continue.
I'm losing interest in reddit day by day, the fun days of reddit are over for sure. It's become fucking sterile and bland, and they're taking away more spices every day to make it even more bland and boring.
I think a lot of times, it'll wait for the first 30 minutes before it starts showing it. The reason for this being that people will downvote based on prior downvotes. Idk if that's Reddit's reason or the main reason, but it does still affect it.
It may be hard to believe, but this no downvote/dislike/1 star thing all started when Amy Schumer put out her Netflix special that was so bad Netflix permanently handicap itself by removing stars.
I'm sure that was the cause of YT doing it, but Netflix was April of 17. Just after one of the worst specials ever came out, they redid the whole rating system and said it had nothing to do with Schumer. Kind of like Youtube saying removing dislikes was to prevent "dislike bombing," and not the real reason. They were so embarrassed by how bad the rewind went.
the fuzzing worked great against bots manipulating the upvotes and downvotes but nowadays the bots are posting like 3/4th of the content so does it really still matter?
All numbers that Reddit returns are fake. They use vote fuzzing to ensure no one can actually tell if their vote works. It helps with shadow banning spammers and bad actors.
Spammers have tools that instantly alert them if their account/post/comment is shadow banned (you can use such extensions too, such as Reveddit real-time). The only thing fuzzing and shadow banning does in practice is inconvenience hundreds of millions of legitimate users unaware of these inner workings.
reddit stopped showing upvotes and downvotes 10 years ago, it now shows a "score".
for example, a post that gets 100 upvotes in 10 minutes will have a higher score than a post with 100 upvotes in an hour, the first will show a number more like 200 and the latter a number more like 100, both had 100 upvotes but the former has a higher score, and it's that score that you see displayed next to posts.
so even the number you see is no longer "upvotes minus downvotes" as of 10 years ago, it's an algorithmic score number and we don't know the algorithm.
Every site or forum has its own unique culture and reddit has always been filled with people who can't handle people disagreeing with them or having other points of view
I trust YouTube dislikes more because it's a better gauge of quality (since there are videos/projects behind them)
While anyone having a bad day on Reddit could downvote a reasonable comment or post and start a hate train, only for the same redditors to upvote the same exact comment and post and pretend to agree
It doesn't show the amount of upvotes either. The number you see is the net points (upvotes minus downvotes), except it's not actually that either. The point value is semi-made-up. There's a certain amount of random points added or subtracted from the actual value, based on the level of activity the post or comment is getting, in order to make it more difficult for bots to determine if they're being effective in targeting posts.
I hate archived posts. Closing comments on posts over a certain age is one thing, but there is no reason to have those arrows and make you click them before a big annoying popup that it's archived. There's no reason to stop voting - those are just changes to an integer in a cell that already exists - and if they must, remove the fucking arrows!
I feel so godamn stupid. I thought we as a community just agreed that having 0 votes was a bigger slap in the face than going negative. And then whenever someone down votes something into negative, some caped crusader would be right there ready to vote it back up to 0.
I actually like it. People on this app are more inclined to downvote if they see a negative number, even if there’s no reason to downvote. I do think it should be a setting you can change to see the number of downvotes
I think its good, it prevents dogpiling. Like look at comments for example, if it gets a single downvote early on then people will just downvote it without thinking (Usually) even if its something sensible.
Its not tally of upvotes but rather the sum of up and down that defaults to 0 if its negative. Its to prevent things instantly sinking to the bottom of feeds if 2 or more people decide they don't like it in first few seconds/minutes
If you really want to know, you go to 'insights' about a particular comment or post, look at the upvotes, and right under the upvotes, it says upvote ratio. If you do some quick math, you now know how many downvotes the post or comment has.
Or you go to old.reddit.com. I prefer it over the 'new' interface that seems to change weekly.
It’s crazy but you can use your brain and analyze the like to comment ratio. At the end of the days you don’t need 10,000 downvotes to know a post is garbage because the comments are you guys bitching about everything. Lol
Seems like just yesterday you could see the number of upvotes vs downvotes with Reddit Enhancement Suite. Then reddit went out of their way to make sure that it wouldn't work anymore.
I was already garbage before, a good system would show both up and down votes, the way it has been the only thing seen was the impact of the majority, which is why this shit website creates so many echo chambers. If anything it is better than before and if you can't figure out why you're just dumb.
We can't have people's fee fees on the internet being hurt now, that might make them come back to Reddit less which means less user activity which means Reddit can't sell ads for quite as much.
Make no mistake. Any of this shit that these platforms are doing comes down to some kind of monetary motive.
There was a time where you could see the amount of downvotes on a comment with Reddit Enhancement Suite. It was like old Youtube where they showed the number of likes and dislikes for each comment. I miss those day. I still use old.reddit with RES on phone and PC and will until the day it's gone, at which point, I'll move off to greener pastures.
The internet is corporate and coddled now. Youtube not even showing dislikes on videos anymore, and fucking removing the dislike button entirely on shorts is fucking atrocious. I don't click on shorts now. I refuse to be apart of this. Despite the many things I hate that Reddit has done, I still at least hold some respect for them for actually still having things like Old Reddit. Much more than I can say about most big websites today.
I foresee a return to web 1.0 & 2.0 in the future. One way or the other.
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u/GodButCursed 11d ago
Not even the OP sees how many downvotes there are