for some reason i literally can't downvote anything

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.

Your question made my brain hurt because I had no idea how you think my opinion did a 180 because I pointed out that you don't practice what you preach.

There are plenty of reasons to be shitty at valve but my understanding is the steam deck is modable without breaking warranty

I am optimistic, that is why I'm here!

I don't think you're wrong about the tradeoffs, I just think the tradeoff is worth it.

What if all votes were hidden? You could still press the buttons and it would affect the sorting, but nobody sees the number.

Instances can disable this feature maybe blahaj has done so?

Are you saying you would report someone to instance admins for talking about Mario Kart?

Do you feel like that's what I was saying?

Yes, they can. But that's quite a lot of permanent work. Lots of people interact with the content here without even looking where it is.

I have only seen the "bad" unaligned communities doing that. The ones that actually have interesting stuff seem to just live with the votes.

I don't mean ban every downvoter, but ban repeat downvoters. People who are clearly downvoting most things posted without any pattern.

I feel like you're being willfully obtuse pretending not to understand the difference between being a Nazi and liking Mario Kart.

You're on a no-downvote instance.

I still think downvotes (and upvotes!) should count for more when they come from subscribers. At least for sorting within the community

That's rich coming from you mister "would you report Mario Kart to instance admins."

Anyway, this is getting tiring, so bye.

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.