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 see the downvote button as serving at least one essential purpose: it sends bad content into obscurity quickly, where it won’t be seen and won’t generate further engagement. This matters becasue engagement on bad content tends to also be bad: arguments that are either vicious or go in circles, dogpiling, etc.
Have you ever seen threads that seem to never die on traditional forums, where people keep joining in an argument that goes nowhere becasue the thread is always visible, and the thread is always visible becasue people keep joining in? That’s one of the major downsides of sorting by engagement. Reddit-likes not only don’t do that, but with downvoting can do the opposite of that.
I’ve also observed that downvoting tends to be a substitute for making an angry reply - not just becasue it makes the content less visible, but also becasue it serves as an outlet for the human desire to to something to solve the “problem” that the bad content represents for the community.
Getting downvoted sucks, but I’d rather see that than a dogpile any day.
Also, it helps provide a bit of a temperature gauge as to the popularity of some viewpoints. I’ve come across discussions where I’m not well informed enough to make an opinion, so am reading the various comments from others. The downvote count most certainly gives me a glimpse into the popularity of some POV’s.
In today’s world, having access to information is not enough. You need to also have access into how relevant and accepted some information is. Otherwise, how will you discern between useful information and horseshit?
When I see posts with heavy negative feedback, I can see that the post is too short sighted, or too rude, or too contrary to the discussion to be accepted with open arms. Especially for the generations who are growing up online.
There needs to be a way to learn what societies accept, merely tolerate, or condemn. Downvotes are not the end all and be all, but they most certainly are better than just the “happy happy joy joy,” of blind approval upvotes alone.