@evan You only need dislike to feed algorithms not people. Keep Mastodon people friendly.

@evan That's why you should consider the opinion of those you trust, not just anyone. Maybe

@evan @benbrown reddit is also terrible

@quinn @benbrown it's a lot better than if all those downvoted comments were visible.

@liilliil sure.

@cmsdengl 1) Fediverse, not Mastodon 2) the algorithm is as simple as "things that are highly downvoted should be hidden by default".

@evan I see the appeal for distributed moderation but am unsure a dislike button could accomplish it. I recall Slashdot (though haven't used it in a long time) had descriptive words that could be "voted' on, which made filtering for certain qualities (e.g. looking for expertise) possible. I fear that a dislike button could lead to "downvoting" stuff without consideration and maybe diminish interaction. Liking adds a positive feeling but I don't want to put effort into disliking people's stuff.

@owlyph I think the key use case is a popular post with a lot of comments. Many of the responses will be bad -- mansplaining, hostile, etc. Without a dislike button, the original poster or another commenter has to reply to the post, explaining for the umpteenth time why mansplaining is unacceptable (or whatever). This puts the conversation into a he-said-she-said mode, where the OP has to argue for why the behaviour is wrong.

@owlyph A dislike button, on the other hand, gives instant, distributed, low-friction feedback. It shifts the effort from the OP to the community, and it gives the OP a sense of collective support: "We all know why this sucks."

@evan I see how that makes sense and that sounds like it could unburden people in some ways. I worry about a sort of mob mentality too that might not give legitimate comments a chance... seems like something I've seen happen on Reddit occasionally. Maybe the trade-off in risk would be worth it. Maybe there's also a distinction in having such a button on replies to a post versus having it on the original post.

@evan I expect a patronising response and wasn't disappointed. Muted.

@owlyph I think we have an advantage over Reddit in that each person has an audience outside the thread. I can say something that's important to me, and even if it's not seen in the thread because it's unpopular there, it would still be seen by my followers, who by definition want to hear what I have to say. I think the follow graph in Reddit exists, but it's much less important than the forum-style posting.

@cmsdengl Muting is another great peer moderation algorithm!

@evan a simple but effective way to avoid pile-ons is to not display the number of likes/dislikes. Whether I like something or not shouldn’t depend on others views so showing that stat seems unnecessary.

Of course, that’s predicated on the assumption that using the like button actually means I like it. I use it for a variety of reasons ranging from “I agree” to “I saw this response but have nothing to add.”

@evan @cmsdengl Not simple at all. What does "highly downvoted" mean? > x dislikes, > y% dislikes vs likes, weighted voting based on follower counts, ??? also, "hidden by default" will not be reliable since the dislike activity will not be published to all instances that cached the activity being downvoted. This is the same Fediverse issue with inaccurate Like counts.

@eyeinthesky @cmsdengl yes, and just as easily solved, by fetching the `likes` and `dislikes` collection from the remote object. Recent versions of Mastodon are finally using this feature of ActivityPub.

@evan @cmsdengl You're suggesting syncing 'likes' and 'dislikes' and then calculating the metric for blocking dislikes for every incoming message/activity to determine if it's blocked or not? AFAIK, Mastodon doesn't synchronizes Likes with remote servers. Do you have a reference for that?

@eyeinthesky @cmsdengl https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/22627#discussioncomment-11175113

@evan @cmsdengl I was hoping to see a reference to a PR or commit. The GH issue you linked to is an unanswered question. There is a vague comment from renchap about (a one time?) fetching of likes with posts, but that would not be enough. I can say that, empirically, Mastodon (4.6.x) does NOT maintain a synchronized Like count. I see differing numbers on mastodon.social and remote instances. Masto dev in GH issue: "This is by design on a federated network, and is _a hard problem to solve_."

@eyeinthesky @cmsdengl As one of the people who designed the network, I can tell you definitively that it is not by design.

You are correct that Mastodon's updated like counts are still not perfect; I think you should report that to the Mastodon dev team. There are actually some pretty good mechanisms for keeping collections in sync within ActivityPub, using the `Add` and `Remove` activities.