

“We’re the front page of the Internet!”
“No, not like that…”
“We’re the front page of the Internet!”
“No, not like that…”
Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.
At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.
Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?
“Millions of users” is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small – assuming you’re interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active “Lemmy” is is entirely dependent on which topics you’re interested in.
Hey, do I work for you?