My wonderful co-admin @supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone has made a modification to the downvote system. It’s not currently enabled, but if we were to turn it on, downvotes would be available for use, but they would weigh 5 times less than an upvote.
Which is to say, it would take 5 downvotes to counter an upvote. This would let downvotes have an impact on what appears in the hot topics sort, but hopefully mitigate some of the more negative impacts of downvoting.
Are there any strong objections from Blahaj Lemmy users to enabling downvotes with this modification?
How does this work with communities on other instances? Currently we can’t downvotes those, but would this allow us to?
Anyway, I say either go all in or don’t allow them at all.
Normally, downvotes federate in and out, just like upvotes. Because we’ve disabled them, our instance doesn’t send out downvotes out, and ignores any that come in to us.
I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with allowing standard downvotes without modification. When given equal weight, they further marginalise the already marginalised.