By default, Lemmy allows downvotes globally. However, when a server disables downvoting, it is similar to using a feature that is usually reserved for enterprises and very small, non-federated communities.
If a user prefer to not see downvotes, they can disable it by his favourite client settings, but the rest of the community should not miss this functionality for the pleasure of few users.
The problem with downvotes in LemmyNSFW was very specific to that instance and its sexual nature. It boils down to the typical user doing the following:
As a result, content geared towards gay+bi men, hetero+bi women, and plenty non-binary people was consistently downvoted - and it was discouraging genuine OC for those demographics.
It was totally a band-aid measure, mind you. But it kind of worked?
An actual solution for that issue would be to require people to tag their content, and allow posters to pick what they want to see based on those tags. But for that you’d need further improvement of the software.
Sounds like they should have more LGBT
subreddits(communities? Is that the term?)They do, but once you hop into the “local” view you see all of those posts. And the users, instead of blocking those communities as “content that is not relevant for me, but might be for someone else”, simply downvote the posts as a knee-jerk reaction.
(Yup, communities. I typically shorten it to comms.)
The sellers were also a big part of the problem, people were downvoting and reporting them constantly, which was turning them away… Which… I mean it’s fucking Lemmy, such response against sellers should have been expected.
And they are still a problem, you can see them being very aggressive with their multiple posts (I call that spamming).
I think the other part of the problem is that a lot of people came expecting some sort of safe space/echo chamber where they could control everything from their instance, but the fediverse is way too open and diverse to achieve that (specially Lemmy with at least 3 big troll instances).
As a huge doomer, I don’t think tags would have worked because we are talking about people who went out of their way to troll that content, not normal users who might downvote or not and then block the community or user. I don’t know if removing the downvotes actually discouraged those trolls or if they are still going at it, but I am sure it didn’t help to increase the quality of the content.
Sellers being also part of the problem is a fair point. But it isn’t just about Lemmy being Lemmy; it’s that unless a community disallows sellers, amateurs eventually leave.
This would probably need a different approach, like different comms for sellers vs. amateurs. Or, if the tag system were to be implemented, forcing people to tag their content accordingly.
About sexuality: the reason why I think that tags would’ve worked is that, once legitimate-but-shortsighted users stop downvoting things based on their sexuality, the trolls stick out like a sore thumb. And then you can simply kick the trolls out.
Supply demand is king either ignore the downvotes or find a new target market. I dont recon its worked at all its just means people will block the accounts meaning they are memory holed perminantly.