Sometimes I see a post that could really use a downvote, but I can’t downvote it. I really think being able to downvote posts that are not great (rascism, tankieism, dumbass takes, etc) is a really cathartic experience and I miss having it from my old instance.
I understand wanting to remove downvotes to combat negativity, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. When YouTube removed dislikes, people missed having them.
Edit: A lot of people are replying to this saying that if someone posts hateful content, I should just block and report them. Which I don’t disagree with, but there’s always content that’s annoying enough to want to downvote, but not bad enough to go against the rules of the sub. I’d rather just downvote that sort of thing and go on my way than leave a comment saying “shit’s cringe, yo”.
Their feedback is their comment being removed and/or them being banned for a period of time. In most cases said person is acting in a way that is either flat out harmful or disrespectful, downvoting is like booing, you wouldn’t boo a person for vandalizing, assaulting, or raping someone, you call the police. Similar story here.
The minor piece is opinions, which honestly, suck it up. This platform doesn’t need to and frankly in my opinion shouldn’t cater to people who can’t handle other’s opinions. Lemmy has a problem with apparent issue legitimacy at this time where issues reported aren’t seen as valid and that you should just “downvote or block” people, so by weeding out snowflakes and excluding them it makes communities healthier, removing downvotes is one part of that.
People will make funny comments (that’s what happens in 196), though if you went to far it might get removed, you might get a message from the admins about unacceptable behavior, or you might just find yourself banned for a period of time.
What if someone posts factually incorrect information that doesn’t technically violate any community rules? Like, I could just go on one of the casual conversation communities that don’t have any “no untrue statements”-type rules and claim something absurd. For example, pretend I stated with confidence that,
“No, exact Euclidean nearest-neighbor searches actually get a lot more efficient as the dimensionality of the points increases because the increased per-point entropy allows algorithms with better time complexities to be applied.”
This is complete horseshit and the problem actually gets way harder due to something nicknamed the Curse of Dimensionality (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality), but only people who have actually studied this problem would know that and while you may feel inclined to reply debunking my bogus claim, it would be a lot more effective if you and others capable of understanding your debunk could downvote my comment so it was less likely to appear that I was the one with the votes and you were the one full of shit.
Lemmy just isn’t busy enough for that. Unless you’re looking at “all” you’re going to see pretty much every post in every sub you’re subscribed to. And if you’re watching “all”, then upvotes will curate your experience just fine.
And ultimately, it’s a moderation issue, not an admin issue. It’s certainly not something I’m going to turn on, opening our trans users to revenge votes, just to avoid a questionable niche scenario
It definitely makes more sense if it’s also preventing downvotes in communities on Blahaj and not just stopping its users from downvoting elsewhere, given the marginalization of Blahaj’s main demographic.
Depends on how the Blahaj admins feel about misinformation, but in general misinformation is pretty bad and if you are operating in bad faith you will likely be actioned, especially since reports aren’t like Reddit where they target specific rules, they are a written response. basically anything that operates as bad-faith is getting the axe here, there’s extra incentive for it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that malicous actors can give themselves fake upvotes if they have multiple accounts of different names. In that case it’s best to not even bother with Booing them and just get to giving them the boot (ban evasion can’t be proven so actioning upvoting accounts only when you can prove a correlation between them, oherwise you’ll ban people who simply upvoted them).
I’m not really talking about people who seek to abuse Lemmy for profit (see: misinformation VS disinformation). I mean more just the people who are confidently incorrect and talking out of their ass. Some of these things would be very hard for a mod to definitively fact-check without field-specific knowledge and understanding. Also, even if Blahaj has anti-misinformation policies, the fediverse is a big place. I’m arguing against disallowing downvotes on an instance I’m not even on because we’re federated and a portion of Lemmy’s population not being able to downvote makes things a tiny bit worse for everyone, not just them.
yeah, I think it’s a significant problem that I can’t downvote in places where other people brag about downvoting.