this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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- 3.1) NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out
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- 3.3) Try c/politicaldiscussion, volunteer as a mod here, or start your own community.
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There was a time when Reddit showed not just the sum of upvotes and downvotes, but the counts of both. The best comments were always the ones with hundreds of both up and down.
Then they hid that, and you needed to use RES to resurrect the downvotes. Then they removed the separate downvote count entirely, replacing it with the controversial tag. Problem is that the flag didn't differentiate between 5/3 (+2) and 5000/4998 (+2).
That was the end of Reddiquette, and the beginning of Reddit's decline into mediocrity.
Do we know their reasoning behind replacing it with the tag?
They started inflating upvotes for sponsored content, about six years ago? It’s around when /popular/ became a thing. Posts with +1000 suddenly had +7000 or more.
Could an instance on Lemmy go commercial and try to do something similar? Let’s say .world continues to outgrow the others and in a year or two it’s time for them to capitalize on their size.
I guess at some point some instances will go “rogue” in one or more ways and it will be interesting challenges to the fediverse to deal with it.
Honestly I have no idea! Can instances fake numbers like Reddit did? I mean, they could use a bunch of bit accounts to fake upvoting and downvoting I suppose, but it’s all public info here instead of all being hidden.