Thank you for the explanation - upvoting btw (unless you cross-post your explanation where it does not belong, then I guess we should downvote it? :-P)

But why not simply block the community? An "Apple" news item in a community dedicated to "Apple" seems entirely relevant to me, and if I do not like "Apple" then I would want not to influence others to not see that one specific post but to see no similar posts in the future, which is accomplished by blocking the community rather than downvoting.

It would be like if I said that I hated your username b/c I do not like banjos - I don't btw, I love your username actually:-P - but really, who cares, as in why is my opinion relevant in that context? It is your username, you can name yourself whatever you like! I respect that.

Why not respect the preferences of others then, even if they decide to like "Apple"? (I am ignoring the comparison to Hitler b/c that is not merely hyperbole as in quantitatively different but of the same kind, and rather that one is a fully qualitative difference in kind)

You cannot change the entire world - certainly not merely by downvoting. All that you will accomplish by not respecting others' legitimate preferences will be to influence people's opinions of yourself.

Fun fact 90% of piefed users can't see your comment because the code comes with baked in blocking of hexbear and Lemmygrad lmao. If they can't handle down votes they could never handle getting dunked on by us.

The bots that I have heard of - I think it was called Santa or some such? - all require much more than a single downvote.

I dunno, if someone followed me around and downvoted half the stuff that I ever posted, I might make a bot to block them too. The key there is the severity of the "offense".

Instead of downvotes, we have many, many disapproving emotes.

Not made by me, but excellent oc by another lemmite https://startrek.website/post/27897300

There was at least one guy on here that basically didn't have weights to his script so someone seeing a post for the first time on All had a very high chance of being seen as a "serial downvoter" from a single negative interaction without a single positive interaction to counter it. It was quite funny but I would hope they fixed that by now.

Weird thread to be commenting on if you literally don't care but you do you!

I personally think this sort of stuff helps keep the fediverse from being awesome but you do you!

I care about voting freely, not the actual vote results.

I upvote a shit ton of stuff which makes it more visible. That helps the fediverse. The shitty posts and comments that I downvote are what I see keeping the fediverse from being awesome.

Except, and I'm stunned this is a surprise to some but here we are, not everyone agrees on what's awesome and what's shitty.

So, in OP's case, the people who come here to talk about the nintendo games and then decide to take the plunge and post something are met with downvotes for having the audacity to post in a harmless community that others don't like.

It's lame and makes the fediverse less fun for folks, which is poison for somewhere that depends on network effects.

Oh yeah, the admin of Midwest.Social? That was hilarious. A bunch of communities migrated off of that instance, treating it like Lemmy.ml-lite, and I mostly forgot about it:-D.

And it looks like the Santabot project died off, or at least the community migrated without warning or something: !santabot@slrpnk.net.

List of votes for spankmonkey@lemmy.world:

Total post upvotes/downvotes: 38206/883 [39089] 97.74% upvoted

Total comment upvotes/downvotes: 90499/9089 [99588] 90.87% upvoted

List of votes for mybrainhurts@lemmy.ca:

Total post upvotes/downvotes: 5591/171 [5752] 97.20% upvoted

Total comment upvotes: 1081/179 [1341] 80.61% upvoted

Maybe you shouldn't be down voting so much?

What does this have to do with what I wrote?

Downvotes are useful to make bad content sink. Without them, the bad content has the exact same score as fresh new content, content that failed the Fluff Principle, etc. And you do want the bad content to sink; if you don't reduce its visibility, some clueless muppet is bound to interact with it, usually generating more bad content.

That's why I'm not sure if the best solution is to outright remove downvotes. It feels to me like throwing the baby out with the dirty water.

Instead I feel like splitting its role into 2+ buttons might alleviate the issue. Perhaps a simple "disagree" button, or a more complex Slashdot-like system, dunno. Either way, giving people way to say "I disagree!" without interfering on the main purpose of the button - sorting content.

This could also solve another issue with downvotes I don't see people mentioning often: you're often downvoted without knowing why.

Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines.

At least in the default interface, the sardines comment would show +12 -62, so you know at least 11 people upvoted it.

You said, as a response to me saying that people should be able to vote how they want.

I personally think this sort of stuff helps keep the fediverse from being awesome but you do you!

Yes, and?

Edit: is your position now that any and all down votes are bad for the fediverse?

You are making my brain hurt.

I really liked how you explained this, thank you

I've had to remove the person your talking to from several communities for always downvoting the content, they don't hate everything, but the things they hate they love to hate.

Their philosophy, suppress the things you don't like, doesn't scale to a general population. For every topic there will be people who don't like it. So if everybody can suppress everybody else, everybody suppressed, participation is chilled, lemmy dies.