There was recently some discussion on Feddit.dk surrounding the usage of upvotes and downvotes.
Currently in ActivityPub (the underlying protocol powering the fediverse), Lemmy sends “Like” and “Dislike” activities for upvotes and downvotes. Other threadiverse platforms (PieFed, Mbin and maybe even other non-threadiverse platforms?) do the same.
However, the “Like” and “Dislike” activities are meant for… well, “liking” and “disliking” things. They are not necessarily associated with the action of “vote this thing up so more people see it” or “vote this thing down so less people see it”.
For instance, on Friendica, you can dislike a post and this sends a Dislike activity. From Friendica’s point of view, such a Dislike indicates just that - the user dislikes the content. It doesn’t necessarily mean “this should be shown to less users”, but Lemmy will interpret the Dislike activity like that.
This leads to strange scenarios with posts that a user finds relevant and interesting (something that the user may reasonably want to upvote) but also something that the user dislikes (i.e. downvote).
As an example, imagine a post with a title like “AI is awful” (I’m sure many here has seen posts like that). A Friendica user could reasonably agree with the post and thus “Dislike” it. As in, they also find AI awful and they dislike AI, so they dislike the post, to show their disapproval of AI. The Friendica user’s intent is not to hide the post from other users or make the post be shown to fewer users! They just intend to show their dislike for the topic at hand.
However Lemmy will interpret that Dislike as a downvote, and the post will thus be shown to fewer users and get ranked down in the sorting.
So is Lemmy and co. abusing the Like/Dislike activities? Should the threadiverse instead use a dedicated activity for the acts of “I think this should be shown to more users” and “I think this should be shown to fewer users”? That way, it would not be confused with the Likes and Dislikes from other platforms.
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As an example, imagine a post with a title like “AI is awful” (I’m sure many here has seen posts like that). A Friendica user could reasonably agree with the post and thus “Dislike” it. As in, they also find AI awful and they dislike AI, so they dislike the post, to show their disapproval of AI.
I don’t believe dislikes are meant to function like that on any platform.
A better example for what they’re talking about might be something like a news story about something terrible. According to one paradigm, you would upvote the post for visibility. According to another paradigm (the Facebook/Friendica paradigm), you would dislike the post to express your disapproval of what’s happening.
Hmmmm, I suppose, but Facebook never had a Dislike, they added emoji reactions, technically, no?
When are you meant to use them then?
You express your like or dislike toward the sentiment expressed by the post, not the thing(s) mentioned in the post.
That’s fine but does that action always correspond to wanting to upvote or downvote the post? I guess maybe? Lemmy at least assumes so.
@SorteKanin My server translates Lemmy upvotes into likes and downvotes into dislikes. That blends quite well in the UI with Mastodon’s “favorites” and Pleroma/Misskey emoji reactions, so I think Lemmy’s assumptions are correct
your example of how likes and dislikes can be interpreted on different platforms further reinforces my idea that likes and dislikes are an inherently bad metric that will be interpreted wildly differently between users, and that there should be better ways to interact with our posts than just two arrows.
There are some platforms that offer emoji reactions. That at least gives a bit more nuanced of a reaction than just “up” or “down” - but it is not clear how you would use emoji reactions to sort posts. The good thing about upvotes and downvotes is that it’s a very easy signal for which posts should be at the top, and which should be sorted below.
Going by your explanation, sounds more like different design choices mixed with different interpretations from users, not necessarily abuse.
“Abuse” was maybe the wrong word, but my point is just that maybe liking and disliking shouldn’t be the same as voting up and down.
Eh that’s that age-old Reddit argument, isn’t it?
Vote for visibility, not for agreement.
But yeah, like probably 99% of users abuse Like and Dislike as “I agree” and “I don’t agree”.
Also here’s a picture just to screw with you:
Isn’t that why Mbin has boosting? To separate liking from increasing visibility?
At least that’s how I’ve been using them. Upvote to like, boost to boost.
Boost (if its the same as on Mastodon) is indeed entirely different. It’s an “Announce” activity, which is akin to sharing or “reblogging” the post. This is not treated as an upvote in lemmy as far as I know.
It isn’t currently treated as an upvote by Lemmy, yeah. But Mbin does count boosts to the score of a post when ranking them.
My point I was trying to make was more that I think Mbin tried to address the issue you’re pointing out there. Boosts actually even used to be swapped with likes in the early days of /kbin, and upvotes are still called “favorites” even today. Boosts are also not in any way displayed as retweets on Mbin itself, so I doubt they were intended to be used that way by users. But yeah you’re right on the actual implementation of how they’re federated.
When it comes to actually using them, I do stick to favorites for content I like and boost for promoting stuff I think should be seen by more people, but in most cases I ‘like’ what I want to promote (so I end up using both), and in the rare case where I don’t, I don’t really care that Lemmy isn’t counting my one upvote. I don’t upvote/boost my own content either despite knowing that Lemmy expects a self upvote.
