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”.
Downvotes are the one thing reddit unambiguously got right. It is impossible to sort content well using only support and apathy. That’s just feeding engagemagog.
Unless of course you’re a member of a marginalised minority, in which case, downvotes will often be weaponised against you, when people who simply don’t like you because of who you are, downvote anything and everything you say.
It’s that specific aspect that has lead to them being disabled on an instance focused on trans and gender diverse folk
Which they can still do from other instances, apparently.
This is a well-meaning mistake that keeps getting made.
Downvotes are ignored by this instance, wherever the come from. The algorithm that determines display order is calculated independently on each instance, based on the upvotes and the downvotes that particular instance is aware of. Blahaj Lemmy drops all downvotes from all sources, so the feed that our users see, whether the content is originally from our instance or not, is ranked without downvotes being taken in to account.
tl;ldr - People downvoting our content or posts remotely makes no difference to our local users
… then why would it matter if they’re allowed? Even if they’re like the Close Door button on an elevator. Honestly it could be a per-user option, at least on comment pages.
You’re asking the wrong person. That’s a question for the lemmy devs, not for the admins of a specific instance.
But you’ve modified it enough to ignore downvotes globally.
That’s out of the box functionality. That’s how it works on any instance that disables downvotes
Fair enough.
This feels like we’re just halving the influence of user votes. On reddit, I would downvote anything I felt was boring or a subject that I didn’t wanna see again. Now on lemmy, I simply mark it as read instead. The effects are the same, causing the post to disappear from my feed without a posing mark.
Would an instance be able to collect downvotes to blahaj posts from other instances? Or do they treat blahaj as the definitive source, and only collect them from their own users?
I prefer not having downvotes. But it worries me if the instances that have them enabled all see a blahaj post with 50 downvotes, that it’s still having the same marginalising effect. While that is then hidden from the blahaj user.
An instance is aware of downvotes from two sources.
Firstly, instances know about downvotes made by its own users. It doesn’t matter what those users are downvoting or what instance it comes from, by definition, the users instance needs to know about the downvote so it can forward it on
Secondly, instances know about downvotes that federate to them. Votes federate in one of two ways. (For these example, A B and C are all separate instances)
i) Direct downvotes. If user A downvotes another user, user B, that downvote is federated to instance B.
ii) Indirect downvotes. This is when groups “boost” downvotes to instances that have users that subscribe to the group. So normally, if user A downvotes user B, instance C won’t know about that downvote. However, if the downvoted post is made to a group that user C is a member of, then the downvote is boosted to instance C.
Instances with disabled downvotes don’t boost downvotes for communities hosted on them, and don’t accept downvotes for any content that federates to it.
If the community is hosted on blahaj, then this can happen, but it’s not a huge issue, because the only people who will see any particular downvote are other users on the instance of the person that made the downvote. These downvotes don’t federate anywhere.
However, if the community is not hosted on blahaj, then what you’re describing can happen. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done about that. The best we can do is ensure that downvotes driven by bigotry don’t hide content from our users.
Yeah that behaviour sounds fine to me then. I was worried that there would be a federated downvote score amongst other instances for blahaj posts.
Personally I’ve really enjoyed not having to think about downvotes. Yeah I sometimes see terrible opinions that have an upvote or two, but generally the person they’re replying too has far more votes anyway. On reddit I always felt compelled to have to downvote people like that. It meant that I’d end up dwelling on transphobic comments longer, rather than just moving on. I super don’t miss being able to sort by controversial either.