I'm making a point about why these are not the same thing, and you're willfully ignoring that point.

Sorry, sister. As others have said Blahaj Zone doesn't do downvotes. I think it was to ensure a less negative space for The Community (in that you can still downvote things and brigade without being clocked as bigoted) but that's a bit apocryphal.

Once you amass a collection of communities that do interest you, you could browse your subscribed feed instead of all. That's what I've done. It got annoying needing to skip past a lot of content that wasn't relevant to me, was crossposted and showed up as duplicates, or was in a language I don't speak. Then you have a whitelist you can grow when you feel like it instead of a blacklist that needs to be added to when new communities show up. Subbing to one of those new community promotion places lets you see most of the active new communities anyway, and you can check out any interesting ones without them invading your feed first.

Can't they just block the communities?

Already 2 steps ahead, 3 steps backwards, and 2 forwards. If one shows up on the "all" feed, I block it. Ain't much left AFAIK.

It's best for me to block them rather than just downvote a random post purely based on the community it's in.

I pointed out that you don’t practice what you preach.

That's uhhhh, an interesting conclusion.

How do you mean? Have you decided that this simple thought:

But the downside is that people then upvote or downvote based on their preferences, not the community’s.

somehow secretly also means "don't ever downvote" ?

downvotes are redundant

In practice they are redundant because most people vote based on opinion, so both become the same (agreement gauge). However ideally they aren't redundant; upvotes are to be given to things that stand out, and downvotes to things that detract from the discussion (noise, trolling, etc.)

Those that downvote willy nilly just want to have more say in things than others who don’t have energy to religiously clean website from „wrong” content.

Some see this as an abuse of the system, not as its normal usage. I'm not sure on the dividing line between both things, though.

If you [=anyone] don’t like what’s being said but it doesn’t break rules then reply and explain why is it wrong, let others upvote if they agree.

The problem with that is Brandolini's Law: even if we ignore "intention" (whatever this means), it takes far more effort to address bullshit, assumptions, oversimplifications, "ur sayin dat cuz ur..." etc. than to come up with it. And if it takes too much effort, people won't do it.

As such, a system can't rely solely on replies to let users show each other "hey, this post/comment is bad".

You can rely on stricter moderation; but that comes with additional costs.

Tildes solved this already.

Incidentally my proposal to fix downvotes isn't too different in spirit from what Tildes do.

So, people want to up/downvote based on opinion, right? Let them do it. But give people other ways to quickly show some piece of content is bad, and why. Effectively splitting the downvote button.

I don’t see how downvotes help filter content. It makes sense at first, but either people are sorting content by New, in which case votes do not matter, or they are sorting by Top and will get only the “good” content.

Think quantitatively. Ideally "meh" content should still be easier to see than the bad one.

lemmynsfw

In their situation (as admins of an instance where downvotes were consistently misused), I agree with their decision. However I still think something needs to be done on a software level.

Again, I’ve never seen users there complaining about being unable to filter good from bad because they can’t downvote.

Note this is prone to selection bias.

I’ve seen posts and comments with -100 votes often get lots of interaction from people who can’t stop themselves from arguing with a troll. Sometimes there’s only 1 or 2 comments under a post so the score doesn’t even change its visibility at all.

If it wasn't downvoted, you probably would've seen way more interaction with it.

(Additionally I think people who argue with trolls should get 1d~3d bans. Just a "stop it, you baka!". Including myself. But that's an aside.)

The way to say “I disagree!” is with the reply button!

I mentioned this in the other comment, but basically: if the reason you disagree is due to some issue in the content (e.g. it's an oversimplification, assumption, or plain bullshit), it takes more effort to address it in your reply than to generate that content with the issue. As such a quick-and-dirty way to voice "hey, something wrong with this" is necessary, even if some people abuse it.

Perhaps it's my personal bias, but I don't like the idea of hidden information. If you can't see it, it's easier to manipulate.

What if it was the opposite - all votes were shown, including who up/downvoted? From what I've noticed, people think twice before mindless downvoting if they know they can be called out for it.

Jet has an automated removal bot that will nuke someone for a single down vote. Their opinion is worthless because their moderation is dog shit.

Not actually true, there is nuance there: https://hackertalks.com/post/13655318

But hey, everybody makes mistakes including me, would you like to participate in those communities? If I unban you would you positively engage?

You have two downvoters, probably the same person

:::spoiler flyingsquirrel a sockpuppet with 0 comment / 0 posts
https://lemvotes.org/user/flyingsquirrel@lemmy.dbzer0.com

:::

:::spoiler nothis a vote manipulation account with 0 comment / 0 posts

someone I've had to remove from my communities
https://lemvotes.org/user/nothis@sh.itjust.works

Probably a real person's main account, but just really combative with nothing to say
:::

preferring to try to curate the fediverse at large

In my opinion, it is presumptuous and arrogant to attempt to curate the fediverse at large according to one's own preferences.

It is arrogant to think the context of a community overrides anyone's personal preferences on how to interact with the voting system.

Piefed has the answer:

Why care? There is no karma system. Just move on

If you're moderating a small community, downvotes can bury posts and hurt its growth.

Votes are public as far as the API is concerned and there are tools to show you who voted in what way.

I'm aware of lemvotes.org. However, I think this should be part of the default interface, for everyone.

In Lemmy currently this feature is exclusive to comms you moderate:

Sadly I don't expect anything similar for PieFed. I really like plenty of its features, but when it comes to vote visibility it's going the opposite direction - making them unavailable by the API instead.

making them unavailable by the API instead.

Votes are available via the API. There is a setting to limit it to your local instance. By default, they federate.

That's a rather recent change, isn't it? From what I remember the votes were cast by alternate profiles, so even if you tried to grab them from the API you wouldn't know who voted on what.

It's been around for a while, I don't remember the dates

Basically, this is what it looks like