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?
I personally think downvotes are unnecessary, because if there’s any constructive disagreements to be discussed, it’s better to get people talking rather than downvoting. Not upvoting is basically the new downvote, which would make sense if someone is flaming or trying to sow discord, they are basically ignored. Negative attention is still attention, and those types don’t deserve any.
Edit: To clarify, I think downvotes aren’t a good idea for blahaj but, as others ITT said, will put us at a disadvantage if other instances have downvotes enabled.
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.
Plenty of accounts on reddit just existed to see how much they could get downvoted by picking fights and spreading hate for fun, I don’t want to see any of that here
Exactly, downvotes are another way of feeding the trolls
I concur, I actually really like not having downvotes at all.