You’re saying that you want the site to promote contrarian hot-takes and edgelord trolling above posts that the community approves of?
Reddit already exists.
Well, we’re in unpopular opinions…
Sometimes the echo-chamber is wrong. 🤷
Yeah, and you can argue with them. That doesn’t mean controversial comments should be assumed to be higher quality than those with widespread support by default.
Have you ever been on Reddit? It’s a pure hive mind, nothing of value, and filled with bots pushing agendas. If you write anything out of line your comment immediately gets hidden by moderators.
The average post has around 4 top level comments, sort doesn’t really matter.
IMHO “Controversial” is a wrong criterion.
Nobody should want to read only these texts where everybody agrees (but many do, in our streamlined world now).
And nobody should want to read only these texts where most people disagree.
A mix is the best. Even when it may be a little more difficult to digest :)
The weather is corn!
If you feel at ease/thrive in conflict and arguments, it definitely makes the whole experience much more enjoyable, lol.
Thats definitely an unpopular opinion. I think its a good balance at the moment. Even if you get -100 you aren’t blocked from commenting or penalised like on reddit. It let’s you double down on your argument and fight everyone instead of getting down voted then being unable to respond.
Considering upvotes and downvotes are used trivially, it doesn’t really make any difference
That’s completely untrue, it impacts what people see when they load the site.
Used by people when giving the votes I think they mean, not by the sorting logic to view posts and comments. Eg. Agree = upvote, disagree = downvote when in reality, it should be known that upvote = more visibility, downvote = less visibility.
yup, this. It can be “controversial” according to the algo but it’s just a guy being downvoted because they are unpopular, for example
People have their own standards for upvoting and downvoting, but I wouldn’t say it’s trivial. Nearly everyone would intuitively agree “I think more people should see this” is a reason to upvote and vice versa and so act accordingly.
With a controversial default sorting order, you would be incentivised to downvote a popular, quality comment and also downvote unpopular spam to affect visibility appropriately. The difference between high updates and downvotes disappears. The current default sorting order doesn’t incentivise changing your vote based on a comment’s current score to influence its visibility, which is nicer.
No, there should be a profile setting to set the default, just like with posts.
Controversial surfaces more trolls and low effort content to the top over universally well received replies. If everyone thinks something is valuable over something only some people think is valuable, people should see the former first by default. If we make a point of prioritising stuff that only ~50% of people like, we’re only going to alienate new users and ultimately stunt growth of the fediverse.
If anyone actually wants this, they can just change their user settings at the end of the day. New users should see uncontroversially well received content first.
