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?
In the original reddiquette, it mentions downvotes are not meant to be used as dislikes, but for content that is not relevant to the subreddit (or community in our case) or discussion – if it doesn’t add anything of value. That gives the community the ability to push down and essentially hide things that aren’t meant to be there. A sort of community-powered moderation for things that aren’t entirely rule-breaking.
For example, someone posts a cute cat picture on a programming community. Is it cute? Do I wanna see more? Possibly. Is it relevant to the particular community? No. It could also be useful to hide particularly bad or wrong advice given as a comment.
Unfortunately, as we all know, it doesn’t work that way. Downvotes are used like dislikes. And probably have also been used at reddit heavily by bots to influence what the public gets to see, and what they don’t. I think the mechanism is useful, but it may need to be re-imagined.
I wonder what a downvote system where downvotes require a “Downvotes are used to hide off-topic content, not as a dislike button. Are you sure you want to downvotes?” checkbox would do? Wouldn’t stop malicious actors but it would stop some people who just downvote casually without thinking about it?
Idk though. Pretty much any downvote system will disproportionately affect marginalized folk.