Every day, I see absolutely moronic comments getting upvoted while perfectly reasonable takes are downvoted. This would be a great opportunity to curate your feed by blocking these users en masse. Active curation like this is the only way to make social media even half-tolerable.

Whether you use it to filter out toxic users or to build an echo chamber, I think everyone should be free to do so. No one should be forced to share space with people they feel bring no value to the discussion - or, worse, make it more toxic.

  • LvxferreEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    If the objective is incentivizing good behavior, here’s another idea: reward upvoting and make it costly to downvote. Details TBD but other forums have done it and it works.

    A simple way is to make downvotes “cost” more clicks. For example:

    • if you want to upvote someone, you click the arrow up button and you’re done.
    • if you want to downvote someone, you click the arrow down button, then a pop-up confirming it.

    It isn’t too much of a deal if you downvote people sparingly, but if you’re consistently downvoting others it would get annoying.

    Additionally, PieFed has a feature in line with your idea: up/downvoting people gives you “attitude”, and if your attitude is too low (too many downvotes in comparison with upvotes), a warning mark appears near your username. Mods can also use this as a piece of info to decide how to handle you, as users who are consistently downvoting others are typically combative.