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?

  • Shae
    36·
    2 years ago

    Is it possible to have no downvotes on Blahaj, but do have downvotes on federated communities?

    This would give Blahaj users the same perception of federated communities as other instances have and give us a safe space in Blahaj. It also means we can sort federated communities like normal and see what everyone else sees, while still having downvotes nonexistent in Blahaj communities.

    I’ve never really wanted downvotes in Blahaj, but I’ve worried about not having them for other instances. It feels like I’m not on a “level playing field” when I can be downvoted by others on a federated communities, but can’t downvote anything myself. I’m also worried that with downvotes = 1/5, it would result in a skewed perspective of federated communities if Blahaj sorts federated communities that way too.

    I don’t know what the code looks like (yet?) but I feel like denying downvotes only on local communities wouldn’t be a hard change to make.

    Edit: I also wouldn’t mind if downvotes were 1/5 on Blahaj but 1=1 on federated communities, but I can see that being a harder change to make.

    Edit 2: if this is a straightforward change I wouldn’t mind implementing it when I have time. I have some familiarity with Rust, TS, and JS so it wouldn’t be difficult to jump into.

    • Paige (she/her)English
      12·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, I’d like it if other instances were treated “as is” and that their individual policies on voting were respected when displayed to blahaj.zone users. Although, I do not know if it is possible to have two separate policies depending on whether the user is in their home instance.

      • guildzEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        All this change would do is alter the weighting downvotes have in the sorting algorithm, I dont think it is possible without big changes to alter the displayed score. In anycase the downvotes are still being stored, so anywhere without these changes are unaffected

    • Jon
      3·
      2 years ago

      Good suggestion, I like this idea too