As you might have noticed, there is currently no option to down-vote posts here.
When Lemmy was much smaller there were some bad faith actors organizing down-votes on posts they didn’t like and because a few down-votes already meant a lot this was quite effective (from their perspective) to shape the discourse to their liking.
These days our instance is bigger and we have also blocked the worst offenders (and will continue to do so), so I am wondering if we should re-enable down-votes?
Personally I think they are useful in some cases, but ideally the down-votes would not federate to other instances. This option however is not available in Lemmy, so it is either on or off.
I will make three comments below this, one you can up-vote if you are in favour of enabling down-votes again, one if you are against it and one if you abstain from making a decision on this.
Note to non-slrpnk.net members: please don’t up-vote any of the below comments I make.
I’ll leave this vote open for some days… and anyway: no decision is final and if it becomes a problem again it is easy to disable it.
Edit: If you have for some reason a strong objection and want to veto this, please comment below.
Edit: I enabled down-votes with the upgrade to Lemmy version 0.18. At the time of writing this it is 45 votes for enabling down-votes, 32 against enabling them, and 10 abstentions. Lets see how it goes.
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Up-vote to re-enable down-votes
Up-vote to keep down-votes disabled
I’m new but I think downvotes are an important function for some topics. In particular when the topic is a factual question and an incorrect answer is receiving upvotes because it may sound reasonable to the general public. As an expert on the topic it was helpful to reduce the prominence of incorrect answers.
That said I share concerns about its use as a disagree button, particularly in politics. I wish there was a way to moderate the use of downvotes somehow but in the meantime I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. It might be useful as a community to discuss when it is or is not appropriate to use them even if it’s just a voluntary community standard. Reddit used to have such a standard but it was largely ignored as the site grew.
It might be useful as a community to discuss when it is or is not appropriate to use them even if it’s just a voluntary community standard.
This my problem with federated down-votes. Here on this instance we might be able to agree on some community standard, but there is no way the wider Lemmyverse will ever agree on something like that.
I’m hoping people will get in the habit of reading the local rules/guidelines when participating on other instances but maybe that’s unrealistic given the huge number of them.
When browsing “all” (at least on Jerboa) I can’t really get to the rules of an instance when looking at a non-local community (or at least I haven’t figured out how)
I haven’t used jerboa but often they are in the sidebar, though some instances don’t have them there. Can you see the sidebar?
I don’t think so? Occasionally when scrolling a sidebar pops up unexpectedly but I think that’s only on the main menu, containing my subscribed communities.
For instance, from this thread I can click trough to the meta community, and I can see the “info” on this community specifically, but I can’t see the slrpnk.net info anywhere it seems.
That’s a fair point about comments that are factually wrong. But people have been downvoted on reddit numerous times for literally asking questions. It starts with a few people using it as a “I don’t like you” button, and then when the others see a comment with a negative number, they just join in.
Personally, I mend the lack of a downvote button by upvoting more often than I would on reddit. In such a system the “bad” comments would just have a noticeably smaller number of upvotes than the rest. I don’t particularly mind downvotes being an option, I don’t think they’ll destroy the environment or anything, I just think more people would exploit it than use it sensibly.
All good points. I think I stand by my perspective but I’m definitely open to trying without for a while if that’s what people decide.
I think that replying to a wrong answer with its correction or a reason why it is wrong should do the trick in your scenario. I don’t think most people write a wrong reply knowing it is wrong (In which case it is the moderator’s job to act upon misinformation), and not being able to downvote them spares them of the unnecesary -100 votes to a mistake. This works much better here than in Reddit, since the communities are not that big and these sort of comments would not be swallowed by the rest, but even in Reddit, what made me realize comments were wrong was the replies to them, and not necessarily the downvotes.
And as for personal oppinions, I feel like in real life we don’t use “downvotes”. If I like what you say, I hang out with you, if I don’t, I simply won’t be around you, I don’t go tellig other people “beware of that person”. So I don’t see the need to bring that to an online community.
But again, you probably have more experience in the matter, so take my opinion with a grain of salt :)
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Upvote this if you want to abstain and/or agree with the majority decision
I voted to enable because I think it’s worth seeing how restoring downvotes goes, but if the feature gets abused to bully or brigade I’m all for turning them right back off. I also think that even though voting rules aren’t really enforceable, it would be good to add voting etiquette to the instance wiki as a guideline to help discourage downvoting excessively, or for asking questions & other benign things.
Really I hope the ability is added to restrict who can downvote, or at least to disable federation for downvotes. That would be the best option imo.
Not sure if this is possible on Lemmy, but on HN, users don’t get the ability to downvote until (I think) their account is aged somewhat or their account receives a certain amount of points.
IMHO negative feedback is important. Without it, you end up with an outrage machine more easily. It would be better to have a mechanism to detect coordinated action
It looks like the admins at blahaj lemmy have or are working on a tool to implement downvoting, but have the downvotes weighted (the example mentioned on the thread was 5 downvotes = 1 upvote), in order to discourage brigading and other issues with downvoting. Not sure how tough this would be to implement, but it sounded like an interesting enough idea for me to want to bring visibility to it.
Personally, I voted to agree with the majority. I see the benefits of not having downvotes after spending some time here and on Beehaw, but I also think that it makes sense to include the option if most people want it.
What will the etiquette be for down votes? On reddit, they’re supposed to be used for flagging things as irrelevant to the discussion at hand. But they’re often used more closely to how the function on YouTube, in that they act more as a meter of popularity. More than relevance to the discussion, if the comment’s something that’s inappropriate/offensive to whomever reads it, it’ll tend to be down voted. This even seems to happen if it’s a respectfully written, well thought out, disagreeing opinion.
As it stands, I would like to see how things progress with only the up votes enabled. If it turns out that what should end up being commenter-detritus does not actually sink, then I’d be willing to try the down votes.
So I initially voted to keep down votes disabled, but now I’m thinking about switching my vote.
My initial though was essentially everything you just said. But now I’ve noticed a few comments that are just sort of negative in spirit, negative sarcasm, or basically just not a very kind. But they are reply’s to a parent comment that is useful. I feel bad for the parent comment, because someones reply is just mean spirited. Will those kind of comments actually sink? maybe downvotes are useful to show that you appropriate the top comment but not the sarcastic reply?
I dunno just thoughts.
The only problem with having downvotes disabled is that users from other instances can still downvote stuff here. Downvotes on hexbear have been disabled for ages and I think it’s generally a good thing, but only because they’re disabled for everyone.
If/when we get the power to actually turn off downvotes instance-wide, definitely do that. So posts here can’t be downvoted. But if some people are down voting it everyone should have the option.
I don’t think it really matters that people from other instances can still down-vote as it does not effect how these posts are displayed here at all.
I’d rather keep downvotes disabled because we can still remove bad posts (irrelevant, spam, harassment) through mod tools. Downvotes aren’t a good tool for burying bad posts if it can also be used to also harass and brigade.
I’d prefer to try downvotes out, but have no issues should the mods want to step that back given the issues they’ve had with people voting in bad faith
I’m brand new to Slrpnk, so I’m not sure if my opinion bears much weight here, but I was a bit bummed to get all set up with my subscriptions to find that downvotes are disabled (it’s possible I missed this info in the sign-up process, but I don’t remember seeing it mentioned).
I think the fact that the rule extends to even browsing other instances while logged in here makes it difficult to gauge a key part of the prevailing opinion on posts and comments. We are only getting half the story at a quick glance. It’s similar to when YouTube disabled downvotes, suddenly making it much more difficult to gauge the quality of a post at a glance (especially on videos that contained tutorials that could be rife with false information).
I get that I could just leave and join another instance where they aren’t disabled, but I really like the ethos and local communities here, and I don’t feel like a downvote necessarily goes against that ethos. If anything, I think it is a slight overreach on personal freedom of expression and a bit stifling to the overall vibe to feel like a downvote is the end of the world.
I’m curious how long your poll will be open before making the decision and by what margin the winning decision must prevail.
I don’t feel like a downvote necessarily goes against that ethos. If anything, I think it is a slight overreach on personal freedom of expression and a bit stifling to the overall vibe to feel like a downvote is the end of the world.
Lemmy pre-Reddit exodus was pretty much like this: a groups of well organized HOA supporters starting arguments about why /c/nolawns is really bad and immediately down-vote all the posts on /c/nolawns and any other posts elsewhere that might be interpreted as against well manicured lawns. When calling them out on this, they would get really defensive and ask all their HOA friends to come over and down-vote and argue even harder. When blocking their main HOA instance, they would user their alt-accounts on other instances to continue down-voting anything they don’t like.
If down-voting was just a number next to the post, you might as well just ignore it, but it also effects the sorting algorithm, thus meaning that if you have a chronically on-line group of people that almost immediately down-vote posts they don’t like, they will disappear pretty quickly from the default “hot” sorting most people use and thus never be seen.
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