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?
Downvoting is a method of moderation. If a community chooses not to allow downvotes, it had better have plenty of attentive and levelheaded moderators to make up for it. The power of downvoting as moderation scales with the activity and population, making it an indespensible tool the larger a community gets.
Still, whether or not to have downvoting should be the choice of the community. Reddthat ought to be able to make the choice not to have it, if they are willing to put in the work of manual moderation. However, disabling users from downvoting in other instances’ communities means taking away that choice from those communities. As things are, I (a Reddthat user) cannot become a fully contributing member of a large community elsewhere, if that community relies on downvotes to help moderate.
Downvoting can be abused, but then again so can upvoting. If I choose to make a community on Reddthat, I’ll say that I would prefer to be allowed to use downvoting to help moderate. My feelings are much stronger when it comes to downvoting on outside instances: if Reddthat prevents users from participating in outside communities, those users will have no choice but to find another home for their Lemmy account. And since users can only create communities on their home instance, that bodes unwell for the growth of Reddthat.