As part of a comment chain here a couple of users have expressed that they would like the downvote button back!
Background:
I think it was one of those things that was either the Default option, or when creating the server I looked at a few of the other instances and saw they were all leaving downvotes disabled, and left it like that too.
This was my initial thought process and in the spirit of making a community, only voting up seemed on the surface to be a nicer option.
Thoughts on federation & voting
As I’ve been on the fediverse for a while and was not a huge reddit user. So the concepts of resharing and liking a post was enough for everyone to get along and relevant to me. There was no concept of voting, you received a like if someone enjoyed your “toot”, and if someone really liked it enough they’d reshare it to all their followers.
Obviously this use-case is redundant in the Community-verse style where, one is you follow people, the other is communities.
If you didn’t like a post, you clicked hide or just let it be. And after 5-10 minutes it is probably gone from your feed. This concept of hiding posts, and “spoiler” (content warnings), is not actively used by Lemmy communities.
For example, did you know that you could even make a spoiler? (Click this line to expand it)
Yeah this is what it looks like. Not very intuitive, but something people could/should be doing! And the formatting after this spoiler sucks so hard, no matter how many spaces I put after, it puts the next paragraph on the immediate next like. Which makes it hard to even read a spoiler in text. 🙁
A user does not have the ability to hide posts or block instances, only communities and users. Blocking a user for 1 bad comment seems like overkill, especially on Reddthat. If it’s really that bad, you should be clicking the report button as well as the block button. So I can enact on banning that user from interacting with us again. (Especially if that one comment was enough for you to report/block them!)
So what could the downvote do?
As described by one of our users (thanks!)
- it makes it feel like your vote counts more, as not doing anything with a bad/unfit post sometimes doesn’t feel like enough
- seeing a post or comment downvoted to oblivion shows the opinion of the community better than it just having no upvotes, as that can also be seen as the thing not being seen
- not having the option to downvote could skew peoples judgement on some bad posts, as any post’ll get upvotes regardless of how bad it is, and downvotes would balance that a lot better.
What it can provide is an option to self-moderate in some regard but I think Lemmy misses a way to benefit from that outcome. Sure a post or comment could be downvoted but without a way to filter based on that, it would still be seen. The value of a downvote is enriched when you can sort by “highest” or have the ability to hide content that does not meet a required vote number.
Currently Lemmy only has “Top Day/Week/etc” which would fit that criteria, all other “regular” post sorting options would not account for that.
Federation with Downvotes
With federation, if an instance has downvotes disabled, we do not accept any downvote that is received from another instance, nor allow our users to downvote on other instances which have it enabled.
What are our thoughts?
What is everyone else’s thoughts? Should we enable the downvote button, or leave it as it is?
I don’t really think votes mean anything when the community is still small. There tends to be so few comments, you can actually read all of them.
The problem starts in the hundreds of comments. I’m not going to spend an hour reading one comment thread. If a post explodes in popularity your voice is just a drop in a Olympic sized pool, there is a good chance it won’t be seen by another soul.
Once a post hits this kind of criticality, voting is the only way your opinion starts having weight in the discussion. Most communities I use are still small, so either decision will have little impact on me.
I rarely downvote unless someone is being a literal idiot, and I like to see those comments being down and hidden with downvotes instead of letting them stand out like a normal comment. But that’s for the really stupid comments.
There still are other valid scenarios like disagreeing on an opinion, helps to see where the majority are. (Imagine people not wanting downvotes so they downvote this post. haha)
Personally I’d advocate for downvotes to be there but it’s also not the end of the world to not have them.
