Far too often, lately, I see lots of people worried about the number of downvotes, or making preliminary justifications and requests to not downvote particular posts.
Me? I don’t have to think about any of that. The content of the posts and comments determines their quality, not some artificial number that only represents whether people dis/like something.
Edit: Wow, a lot of people from other instances seem really offended that I don’t like downvoting and seem a bit confused that I’d be thanking my admins for something I appreciate.
If you like downvoting, you don’t have to move here. Enjoy your instance’s features. Welcome to the Fediverse.
Exactly.
No it’s not. Downvotes only matter if the person cares—not even if they’re arguing in good faith or not. If I literally don’t care what my vote count is, having a negative number won’t change that.
All it proves is a mob can vote together. It doesn’t prove why the comment is bad, because it could be a very reasonable comment that people simply don’t like. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of times where someone throws cold water on a topic, but the substantive pushback comes from other users debating the claims, not attaching a negative number to it.
Likewise, bad-faith actors should be moderated by actual moderators, not general users—and unlike Reddit, you not only have community mods, but you have instance mods who aren’t (usually) beholden to corporate interests.
While I can appreciate that people like to be able to sort by vote count, I believe all that does is create artificial bias. If a comment is truly that bad, a moderator should probably be looking at it, anyway.
Ultimately, this is Lemmy. We have the opportunity to create something better than Reddit that fosters better discourse.
Downvotes keep assholes hidden whether or not they “care.” They protect you from exposure to the worst loudmouths, before the moderators are even awake.
And I’ve seen moderators erase stuff they “simply don’t like.” People are people. Downvotes are at least a democratic form of exclusion, and have softer consequences than outright censorship. You are free to scroll down and expand where someone’s taking a kicking for a presumably-awful comment. But Lemmy severs whole subthreads when one comment gets removed.
Why do even you care if a comment’s been downvoted for mere disagreement, if you don’t think getting buried matters?
That selection is the central function of this sort of website. The front page is not a chronological feed of what everyone posts, or a true-random potpourri of the last twenty-four hours.
The whole friggin’ idea is relying on crowds to sort things.
Otherwise - why have votes at all? Why not get on your admin’s case for allowing upvotes, the way you’d apparently chide them for considering downvotes? Feedback is necessary. The use of feedback is why reddit mattered, and the absence of negative feedback is why competing sites sucked. Twitter is a harassment engine where the only response besides engaging with trolls or silently taking abuse is to report someone and cross your fingers. Facebook is a disinformation hugbox, by design, openly encouraging group owners to be heavy-handed petit dictators. TikTok is a firehose of sludge that does not give a dang whether you like it.
Seeing these posts celebrating the lack of a crucial feature is like finding out some instances are flat forums. Like you’d have to scroll through seven pages of signatures and block-quotes to get this reply. Reddit’s only good decisions were downvotes, nested comments, and compartmentalization, in that order, and it is bizarre how many people want their choices limited to even less than that.
It also keeps people that don’t subscribe to the circle jerk opinion hidden, creating an even bigger circle jerk like most of lemme already is.
The voting system has been shown to be too easy to brigade/manipulate and to just create endless circle jerks.