speaking of ideas: what about being able to allow downvotes in the comment section?
if the twentieth idiot is asking the same stupid question in a community of lets say 100 active people, having the ability to downvote each instance of it, except the very first one, and then focussing ones argumentative powers there, for many to see is much more productive. since all the downvoted repeat-comments would at some point get hidden and not get a “false positive reaction” fron all the other “idiots”
Additionaly the downvoting of bad comments is
a) not something someone would do from the Feed and
b) not something incredibly tiring to good posters
yes, I personally want to agree, freedom and smarts and such.
I’ll try to explain it to myself, as I’ve come to understand it, after watching the discourse in apropriate places, and you may listen:
I’ve been a lot on the internet again and I must say that all humans are stupid, depending on different contexts. And sometimes you’re not dealing with friendly people talking about trains and locomotives, but things with more of a personal touch, like watching porn, being trans, being religious, having a scientific view… and then suddenly you don’t have to only deal with some spam-bots that post everywhere, but horrible-asshat-people coming out of the woodwork and wanting to shit in your safe-space.
Imagine 20% of a population suddenly having to deal with a new thing, because the internet has shown it’s existance to them for the first time (like getting a huge reaction and getting to the front page of r**dit, or just in the all-tab on Lemmy).
The natural reaction would be fear, disgust, or even just asking some stupid questions. (which individually is fine, but having it happen ten times a day, under every post, is just too much (similar discussion with software-support and the RTFM-mantra.)) And thats just reasonable people, unreasonable people have macedonian bot-farms to spam your comments with helpful "I don’t like you"s or invite their online-only-friends over from discord to “own the libs” or something.