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I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
Or you can just like, not let it bother you?
My whole last page of comments got ratio’d and I’m still alive.
Humans are basically hardwired to care about that sort of thing. For any average human, arguments between people are mostly just popularity contests, not truth-seeking exercises. Even though the Motte might be composed of people who are several standard deviations away from being "average" in that sense, it's still bothersome. If the downvotes happen on posts you also thought were not your greatest, that would be one thing, but having them happen only on posts with a particular type of political persuasion makes it start to seem like a BOO OUTGROUP button.
Some are evidently hardwired to care more than others.
There's a reason why TheMotte leans heavily rightist, while leftist spaces don't even let us post there.
It is only rightist relative to usual high education online spaces cleansed from rightists.
I was just using rightist as a synonym for anti-woke. Because I think that’s basically the most salient definition of “rightist” in the West today. Some people will say that true rightism means neo-monarchism, or tradcathism, or whatever, but what actually matters most on a day to day basis and what determines how you interact with people and how well you integrate into various social spaces is how woke you are.
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