No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
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Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
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Downvotes are a digital shame button. They are community signals for what members consider inappropriate for the community. Like a lot of other shaming techniques, they are usually frustratingly lacking in nuance, prone to pile-ons, and are as often deployed in bad faith as good. Maybe more; I'm not sure how to measure or even define "good faith" and "bad faith". I have a gut feeling for it, but my gut is sometimes wrong.
Getting a lot of downvotes is the social media equivalent of your community telling you "your behavior is unacceptable, be better, or at least different, or shut up". That's a difficult thing to hear from a community; some people handle it more gracefully than others.
I take it as a point of pride. Someone went on record as being wrong about something. Every downvote is validation. I mean, upvotes sure, but I already know the thing I said is as elegant as it is correct. I don't need that reinforced. But a downvote? That's special. That's me being so right about something, that someone has gone out of their way to publicly humiliate themselves by indicating personal disapproval of my otherwise priceless seeds of wisdom. There is no better feeling in the world.
You have a dizzying intellect.
downvotes are whatever you think they are for... which is why it's totally random and shouldn't be taken serious. there is no definite rule on them in an open global platform
agreed. they are subjective by design, occasionally accompanied by objective constraints like community rules" that attempt to guide how members deploy their downvotes. Sometimes rules work, sometimes they don't.
disagree. They're noisy, and hard to interpret, but they aren't random. Something motivates a person (or bot, for that matter) to click the button when they could just as easily not.
disagree here too, though this one is more a question of taste. I am so curious about what makes people act the way they do on the internet. Especially the meanies; the behavior of jerks on the internet is so puzzling to me, but I don't think it's impossible to understand better. Part of understanding it better is treating it as a subject worthy of serious inquiry, whether or not it deserves it.
agreed again, which is part of what makes them so tough to generalize about. There are definitely common patterns though.
Downvotes are alao: disagreement, ideological, political, or just “I don’t like that you called me out.”
I don't think you're wrong, but I think that all of those (generic disagreement, ideological disagreement, political disagreement, and retaliation) are reasons why someone might deploy the shame button, separate from the action itself. Plenty of people on the internet disagree all the time without using the downvote button too, so they must be separate even though there is overlap between them. One of the reasons I don't like downvotes as a mechanic is that the reasoning behind the action is almost always obscure, if not unknowable. They're very vague indicators, which incidentally is also true of most IRL shaming techniques. Shame is usually deployed when someone "should already know better" and usually does not accompany an explanation, unless the shamer is feeling instructive.
Used to lurk in communities online that mocked others(' behavior). Sometimes, the "wow what a worthless human being, the world would be better off if they weren't here" comments also add "couldn't be bothered to [do good thing X], what a [bad trait Y]" or "what kind of monster does [bad thing X], how [bad trait Y] of them." Socially inept teenage me found this very instructive on what was acceptable and what was not, especially since I was inadvertently provided the why. (I avoid these types of communities now as a hopefully more-well-adjusted adult.) People can absolutely use their words to explain why something is shameful... at least when they are pretty sure everyone else is on their side, and the person being shamed won't be able to retaliate (I am sure whoever is filmed for r/noahgettheboat isn't aware they were posted on Reddit) or will be downvoted a lot if they try to defend themselves, whether justifiably or not (people judged assholes on r/AmITheAsshole).