The term “ratio’d” originated from twitter at a time when it had neither upvotes or downvotes (it refered to retweets vs comments). Fundamentally any platform that has more content than can be reasonably consumed by one person must have a way of filtering good and bad posts and as soon as you have that you have people who will chase both the good signal and the bad. You get rid of the upvotes and you encourage people comment farming, you see this on some platforms like tiktok where people will intentionally add in minor errors so that a lot of people comment corrections boosting their engagement or in traditional forums where every other comment is “bump”. Personally I think upvotes are the least bad thing to have people fixate on as it has the least number of side effects.
I do agree that upvote begging like this post is parodying is bad though and should be discouraged.
Yeah some degree of sorting is necessary when there’s a lot of content, but there might still be another way. Following people, tags, and communities and allowing people to sort things themselves I think might be a better system. I know some people will be obsessed with follower count, but that doesn’t need to be a metric that is actually tracked and shown. I guess at some point it stops being lemmy/piefed, but I do think that we should be thinking about these kinds of things.
The truth ofc is that any system can be abused but that’s partially a culture problem too, and different systems will encourage and incentivize different behaviors.
The term “ratio’d” originated from twitter at a time when it had neither upvotes or downvotes (it refered to retweets vs comments). Fundamentally any platform that has more content than can be reasonably consumed by one person must have a way of filtering good and bad posts and as soon as you have that you have people who will chase both the good signal and the bad. You get rid of the upvotes and you encourage people comment farming, you see this on some platforms like tiktok where people will intentionally add in minor errors so that a lot of people comment corrections boosting their engagement or in traditional forums where every other comment is “bump”. Personally I think upvotes are the least bad thing to have people fixate on as it has the least number of side effects.
I do agree that upvote begging like this post is parodying is bad though and should be discouraged.
Im glad the post was properly picked up as a parody. I was worried the levels of irony would make it come across as sincerely upvote begging.
Yeah some degree of sorting is necessary when there’s a lot of content, but there might still be another way. Following people, tags, and communities and allowing people to sort things themselves I think might be a better system. I know some people will be obsessed with follower count, but that doesn’t need to be a metric that is actually tracked and shown. I guess at some point it stops being lemmy/piefed, but I do think that we should be thinking about these kinds of things.
The truth ofc is that any system can be abused but that’s partially a culture problem too, and different systems will encourage and incentivize different behaviors.
But following people might easily be done by bots. You’d need to make the system as botproof as possible…
?
What’s the problem with bots following people if follower count is neither visible nor used for sorting?