Sometimes I see a post that could really use a downvote, but I can’t downvote it. I really think being able to downvote posts that are not great (rascism, tankieism, dumbass takes, etc) is a really cathartic experience and I miss having it from my old instance.

I understand wanting to remove downvotes to combat negativity, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. When YouTube removed dislikes, people missed having them.

Edit: A lot of people are replying to this saying that if someone posts hateful content, I should just block and report them. Which I don’t disagree with, but there’s always content that’s annoying enough to want to downvote, but not bad enough to go against the rules of the sub. I’d rather just downvote that sort of thing and go on my way than leave a comment saying “shit’s cringe, yo”.

    • @germanatlasEnglish
      11•7 months ago

      Because you’re on an instance that enables downvotes. Some instances like lemmy.blahaj.zone have them disabled.

      Upvotes and Downvotes exist separately from each other and when Downvotes are disabled, just the Upvotes are being counted on our clients.

      • First Majestic CometEnglish
        5•7 months ago

        Same with any content that lives on our instance, if a federated user on an instance that supports them downvotes our content their downvotes just don’t get federated, at all. The downvoted contend only recieves a downvote on their instance and all other instances won’t recieve it, though only applies to content where the original is on an instance without downvotes.

    • AdaMAEnglish
      11•7 months ago

      However, because the post was made to a Blahaj Lemmy community, those downvotes will only be visible to folk on your instance, because Blahaj Lemmy just ignores downvotes that federate to us, and doesn’t federate them onwards.

      • @quindraco@lemm.ee
        3•7 months ago

        Interesting.

        So if I’m on the instance “Adama” and downvote a post on “Blahaj”, does someone on “Cremmy” see the downvote or not - will Adama tell Cremmy?

        • AdaMAEnglish
          7•7 months ago

          If the community is hosted on Blahaj, Blahaj won’t federate it to Cremmy

          But if the user is a Blahaj user, posting on a group on instance Django, Django will forward the downvote to Cremmy.

          However, in both of those scenarios, Blahaj itself will ignore all downvotes, meaning that the sorting algorithm for Blahaj users looking at content, local or remote, doesn’t take downvotes in to account