Blåhaj Lemmy is a Lemmy instance attached to blahaj.zone. This is a group for questions or discussions relevant to either instance.
I prefer not having downvotes enabled here. Instead of just downvoting your suggestion, I’m having to actually think about why and put it into words and contribute to the discussion. 😉
Downvoting usually impacts marginalized people far more than “idiots”. (Side note: this sort of casual ableism against people with mental disabilities is extremely common, but we can strive to do better.)
What about showing both the number of up-and downvotes? This concept of ratios as we know it on twitter leads to the supporters only upvoting the post, but people disliking it upvoting the comments, which means the top comments always disagree. This fosters a climate of rage because the majority of intercations are negative this way. I'd rather just downvote and move on.
You make a fair point, but if the replies to a Lemmy post are overtly hostile, I see that as a failure of moderation rather than of the system itself. Twitter has long been an “almost anything goes” sort of place and was never purposely designed for community-oriented discussions. It’s a microblogging site with discussion features grafted onto it — way back in the day, the Tweet box literally asked “What are you doing?” and there was no reply function so people posted their own “top-level” (there was no other kind) Tweets along the lines of .@user_xyz “Lorem ipsum dolar” My opinion is blah blah blah but that wasn’t automatically shown next to user_xyz’s Tweet for all to see.
Also, I’m not certain of this, but I think displaying downvotes without enabling them would require a software patch. I also suspect it would be confusing to many users and lead to a lot of bug reports.
Moderators can't do anything here, this system just means that there will be a lot more arguing because the replies will be negative, reagardless of the overall toxicity level. Enabling users to display their disagreement with a comment directly has many benefits, how that effects how many people will see the comment is something else, but this is one of the things I really liked about reddit. You can still discuss if you want, but often you don't wanna waste time and/or get drawn too much into it. It is a more accurate measure of what people think about a comment.
I don't think it really matters either way whether there's downvotes or not,
but I super want to point out that you do not need to get into random debates with people who are just breaking the rules of a community/instance and being bigoted. The correct response is to report and ignore.
Yeah I think avoiding downvoting I prefer. Im not sure how it works entirely, but the fact that outside people can't just come here and downvote is actually very appreciated. I know for smaller hobby-type posts, in places like Reddit, seeing downvotes can be very demoralizing for continuing with the hobby, so not having that risk is kinda nice. What would be useful is if Lemmy had some way to allow communities to set if downvotes are allowed or not, but I dont think it does. I rather until Lemmy provides that feature, for this server to not allow downvotes overall.
What would be useful is if Lemmy had some way to allow communities to set if downvotes are allowed or not
Agreed here. On Reddit, some communities use downvotes very effectively as "this information is incorrect" so that mods don't have to remove disinformation all the time. Others it turns into a popularity contest, which isn't great.
When I was on reddit, I would use downvote to mark a post as read if it was boring, since unvoted posts would show up on my feed again.
I'm confused, does this mean that if your account was created on an instance without downvotes you can't downvote thongs elsewhere where they're enabled? How does this work the other way?
Yeah, everyone from another instance can downvote things on our communities but we can't, neither on our communities nor on others
Ngl, that's a little weird. Thanks for the clarification :)
Not quite. Their downvotes don't influence our algorithms. So here on Blahaj Lemmy, their downvotes don't do anything even if their instance allows them to down vote.
Basically, our ranking algorithms here don't take downvotes in to account, wherever they come from.
Which means that if you view "hot posts" in a community on our instance and then view the same community on another instance, the ranking of the posts might appear different if they count downvotes.
Ah, good to hear, that makes a lot of sense :)