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.

How ironic that meaningless scores are seen as an offence but removing people's ability to participate is totally fine.

If it's meaningless why does it matter if someone can't do the meaningless thing anymore?

Problem solved.

Now you got another problem: people using cringe emotes instead of downvotes. Except they highlight bad content instead of sinking it.

Hi! I'm the guy.

It wasn't just a single downvote, but that is a factor be to taken into account, the downvoting account gets examined and if it's only downvoting everything, or is used for strategic voting, or is actually more then a single downvote that establishes a pattern.. they would get removed from the community for being a bad fit

My full philosophy https://hackertalks.com/post/13884733

If you're modding a small community trying to get off the ground and you're suffering from downvoters who aren't participants in your comm, ban the downvoters.

Edit: Hilarious that I got downvoted by an account with 0 comments

I'm on Beehaw. I don't see down votes. Blissful ignorance.

I worked at a site with a karma system years before reddit and the like ever came into being. There will always be people who just downvote anything they don't like. Unless you start finding and removing those users, nothing is going to change with them. And if you start removing chunks of your community, you have fewer posters, less interaction, etc.

A basic question about your position hurts your brain? Really?

Though, given that more than a few moderators have chimed in, I can see why.

Is this the typical behaviour of fediverse users? Posts in Apple and Nintendo communities immediately get downvoted by people disliking the companies. Can’t they just block the communities? - Hacker Talks

Lemmy

(hackertalks.com)

Expanding on what I said to another user. The problem with simply removing downvotes is that people still find low-hanging fruits to voice disagreement through, often worse than the downvotes. Then there are two choices:

• let them be. Hexbear does this, and its users use emotes instead, that increase the visibility of bad content.
• moderate against it. Beehaw does this, and it burdens its moderation team further.

Note mod burden is the major reason Beehaw is not federated with LW or SJW, even if its admins would be otherwise OK with those two.

It's things like this that make me think we (people discontent with downvotes) are a bit too eager to throw the resource away because of its flaws, instead of trying to address them.

Valve is exempt from this for some reason however. It’s more like stereotypical basement dwellers treat this like a game where you win by accumulating more imaginary internet points. This kind of tribal behaviour is why threadiverse seems to be failing but at least some people get to feel superior to others in the meantime.

That sounds like a you issue, not the comparison's.

If we’re using votes to rank content then downvotes are redundant because now you have to upvote „right” stuff and downvote „wrong” stuff. Assuming everyone is waging the same kind of information warfare then downvotes won’t anything… but we’re not. 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. You’re not responsible for safeguarding users from „wrong” content unless you’re reporting rule breaking one. If you 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.

Tildes solved this already. They have regular upvotes and they have labels for offtopic/noise/malice. Being able to use labels is reserved to users with good standing and can be applied once only. Noise downranks things without removing them, malice is essentially same as reporting them. Notably, there is no label for „wrong”.

Avoid „default” communities and instances, they tend to bring the worst of Reddit to Threadiverse. It’s slightly less of an issue if you stick to places that try to be different. You won’t avoid drive-by downvotes from /all but I don’t think it’s that much of an issue (there’s just too much crap there for anyone to browse it by time of posting).

I always browse by "new" but only with the subscribed communities. I see a pattern that some of my subscribed communities keep getting downvoted

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

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. Several instances already have downvotes disabled. I don't see any complaints from their users about "bad" content having the same scores as "good" content.

lemmynsfw had to disable downvotes because gay content posted in gay communities was being downvoted. It wasn't being downvoted for quality, but for not being what the majority of users wanted to see. That doesn't mean all users now have to see gay content they don't like because they can't downvote it. It's still easy to filter using the block feature. Again, I've never seen users there complaining about being unable to filter good from bad because they can't downvote.

if you don't reduce its visibility, some clueless muppet is bound to interact with it, usually generating more bad content.

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.

Either way, giving people way to say "I disagree!" without interfering on the main purpose of the button - sorting content.

The way to say "I disagree!" is with the reply button! Votes don't prove who is right and who is wrong. I've never changed my opinion because of downvotes. Sometimes I even agree with a downvoted comment because I form my opinion based on arguments, not votes.

I also like seeing different opinions. Yours gave me a lot to think about! It'd be a shame if people didn't post their thoughts because they feared being downvoted for it.