I got an email from the devs asking for style advice.

I think that approach drives polarization and echo chambers. It literally suppresses dissenting opinion.

I think that approach to content is directly responsible for the increasing division we see in political discourse.

Ok, Boomer.

Nazis are a group of people. Republicans are a group of people. Pedophiles are a group of people.

Admin@beehaw.org currently presents as male and provides his name and other relevant biographical information in his public profile.

You assumed OP’s ignorance of admin’s preferred pronouns. That assumption was unjustified.

You misgendered admin by pressuring the use of gender-neutral pronouns instead of admin’s own, preferred pronouns.

I think you can do better.

Beehaw is pretty notorious for their dictatorial approach to moderation. Pretty useless instance, IMHO.

So what is the desired end result of a voting system, to promote popular opinions, or to promote interesting opinions?

The voting system just presents the community opinion on the comment. There are any number of ways to weigh those opinions. The other metrics I would want to see are number of threads, average length of threads, average word count in replies, etc. But raw upvoted and downvote counts go a long way toward finding good content.

For instance, r/conservative on Reddit famously bans

That’s a moderation issue, not a community voting issue.

The problem is that second part is incredibly broad. It can simply be because somebody didn’t like that you use a certain source, even if it’s completely valid.

I disagree that this is a “problem”. Votes are opinions, not objective fact.

There is a very specific zeitgeist/mentality there that must be adhered to, regardless of the quality of what you say. That is not a virtue, that is a problem.

Again, that’s primarily a moderation issue, not a community voting issue. The moderators enforcing a zeitgeist is certainly a problem; the community, not nearly so much.

For the community, it’s really only a problem if we assume upvotes are “good” and downvotes are “bad”. You have thus far completely ignored my point that the 80/20, 50/50, and even the 20/80 comment threads are consistently superior to the 100/0 threads. You need disagreement and conflict to have debate. Without the downvotes, you just have a weakly upvoted comment. With the downvotes, you have an immediate indication of a divisive position, ripe for a lively debate.

I value the ability to view the community sentiment more than I value artificial manipulation of the voting system to make the community seem more fair and open minded than it actually is.

When my opinion is not well received by the community, either I am wrong, or I have not presented it in a way they can understand and accept.

“Downvoting to oblivion” is not an inherently bad thing, even when it is due to a mistake or misconception. Just because that particular conversation has ended and 99.9% of the traffic has passed through does not mean the topic is finished. It will come back up in the future, and I know I will need to focus on that mistake or misconception when it does.

I also reject your characterization that upvotes are a “reward”.

Does the individual need such protection?

Am I supposed to be spoon-fed only those ideas that some nameless, faceless entity deems appropriate for me to receive? Do I need someone to hold my hand and guide me around the fediverse, like a toddler in a grocery store?

If a community collectively adopts shitty or evil ideas, why would I want to continue to associate with that community? Why would I not simply leave that particular community, and focus instead on the dozens of others of which I am already a member?

Who better to protect the individual than the individual themself?

+80/-20 +50/-50 +20/-80 +1/-99 +100/-0

Just from those vote counts, I can be pretty sure the first comment is insightful, the second controversial, the third a troll, and the fourth is definitely spam. The fifth is probably a cat pic, relevant xkcd, meme, or a single-sentence comment that everyone loves, but doesn’t actually add anything important to the topic. If I’m looking for an interesting conversation, I’m focused on the first two, maybe the third. If I’m looking to be pissed off, the third and fourth. And if I’m looking for an easy read, the fifth.

+80, +50, +20, +1, and +100 doesn’t provide the same information. It’s the downvotes that provide the relative context.

Nah, we just need to interpret downvotes differently. If we count the votes the right way, it doesn’t really matter if we use downvotes to indicate disagreement.

Reddit used to provide a tally of both upvotes and downvotes, rather than just the sum total of the two. The best top-level comments often had hundreds of both upvotes and downvotes, and vibrant discussions always followed. The quality of Reddit conversation dropped precipitously after they combined up and down votes into a sum total. They made it impossible to find the +500/-498 comments among the +4/-2 comments, calling each of them “+2” with a controversial tag, even though one was highly relevant, and the other was almost completely irrelevant.

A “vote” indicates a strong opinion on the subject, and is the more important metric to consider than the specific composition of the votes. Up or down, any vote is saying “check out this opinion”.

A quick search provides plenty of links…

None of those links are to federal statutes. Some are to government sites, but not to the statutes. The statutes do not support your claims.

When you download, you create a copy on your computer.

VHS and cassette recordings of broadcast or pirate transmissions also end up with a copy of the work in the possession of the receiver. Both are legal. It is not legal to share or retransmit those recordings, but those recordings are themselves legal to create and consume.

You read a file from a server,

No. You’re radically oversimplifying the scenario. You’re ignoring the second party involved.

P2P downloading is like calling up a pirate radio station and asking them to play a song. You set up your recording device, and wait for them to play it… The recording you make is legal. The act of requesting the song does not obligate the station to play it. They can ignore your request, or play it immediately, or play it three nights later. Their choice to play it is theirs alone. Their playing it is the infringement.

P2P downloading, your computer sends a request to the server. Depending on how the server is configured by the uploader and the resources available to it, it may or may not begin sending the requested work.

To argue otherwise is to claim you can legally take whatever you like without paying for it.

Do you not understand the fundamental purpose of copyright law? It is not to ensure that artists get paid. The purpose is “To promote the progress of science and useful arts”. The purpose is to expand the depth and breadth of public knowledge; to push ideas into the public domain, where they can be used by anyone.

You’re getting so hung up on the method of copyright that you’re ignoring its purpose. Yes, you can legally receive whatever you like without paying for it. The trick is in finding someone willing to send it to you. That sender might be prohibited from sending it, and you might be prohibited from sending it to others, but there is nothing in copyright law that prohibits you from receiving it.

The value of winning a single case of infringement against a downloader is the precedent it sets. The costs associated with that first case are miniscule relative to the benefits. Winning that first case would allow rightsholders to truly annihilate P2P platforms. With that one case as precedent, they could credibly demand billions in settlements from the American public.

No, that “not worth the cost to prosecute” claim is complete and total horseshit. The reality is that every time they have tried to target downloaders, their cases have been dismissed long before going to trial, because they can’t show how a downloader runs afoul of copyright law. The law targets distribution, not reception.

Nah, rightsholder organizations have been spreading their FUD propaganda since the advent of the cassette tape and VHS. They have tried, but they have never won a case against someone solely for receiving and saving a work. Downloading is not a crime in and of itself. The criminal act is uploading.

Student book reports are for educational purposes, which has its own specific exemption under fair use. As does work which is critical of the original, along with news. A critical piece, for example, is transformative because it introduces new ideas, talking about the work and framing it in new ways.

You’re forgetting two other important categories of fair use. Paste that student’s book report in a newspaper, and it is no longer “educational”, but it is still “news reporting”. “Author publishes work” is a newsworthy event.

Paste it in response to an individual asking about the work, and again, it is no longer educational, but it is still “commentary”, which is much the same as news reporting but with a typically smaller audience.

Even if these two categories of fair use were not specifically included in copyright law, they would naturally arises from the right to free speech. Making a summary subject to the original copyright would make it unlawful for anyone to even discuss the work at all.

eh it gets fuzzy. the sender transmits, but the receiver also writes a copy

Got a Ring doorbell? A security camera? If I walk up to your camera and start playing a copyrighted work, have you infringed on copyright? Of course not. The recording you saved now contains a copy of the work, but you were privileged in recording at the time.

That doesn’t change when you ask me to come “send” that work to your camera. You are free to ask for something that I am not obligated to provide. If I choose to provide it, I am the infringing party, not you.

Downloading is no different. You ask me to use a specific protocol to send a specific work to a specific port at a specific address. I can choose to do that, or I can tell you to pound sand. If I choose to send it, I am the infringing party, not you.

The specific processes applied by the computer to save and replay the work would not qualify as “copying” under copyright law. If they did, viewing any copyrighted work would be an infringement, as the computer uses those same processes to view legitimate copies as illegitimate.

You can’t open a file like you would a book. You need to copy and process the file in order to display it.

That precedent has never been set in the US. The “process” you’re talking about for a human to open a digital book is not considered “copying” under US law.

There have been no prosecutions for downloading only because the level of damages is so low

That is a theory. Not a very compelling one, given the level of pettiness we regularly see in the courts. The precedent of a successful prosecution for downloading would be extremely valuable to rights holders: it would have a chilling effect on the entire community of pirates. The reverse is also true: a failed prosecution would lend a great deal of legitimacy to piracy for personal consumption.

The actual reason why rights holders aren’t pressing cases against downloaders is because they know they will fail. Copyright law is not written or interpreted in such a way as to enable prosecution of people for receiving a work, or even for requesting a work be sent to them. Copyright law envisions pirate distributors, not consumers.

Transformative doesn’t mean that the idea is different. It means the purpose for expressing the idea is different. Informing an individual or the general public of the general idea presented in a book is not an infringement. If it were, every book report every student is ever asked to write would be an infringement.

The US copyright office says this on their website

Their website has zero legal precedence. It is an oversimplification that does not stand up to scrutiny.

The combined act of transmitting the work from uploader to downloader is infringing, but only the uploader’s actions conflict with copyright law. The downloader’s actions do not.