Downvotes can be a useful tool to shape a community, but one of the main issues brought up in the post I made is when several people start downvoting communities they don’t even participate in. Which I want to emphasize is NOT the correct way for downvotes to be used.
First id like to start off with an apology to those who are upset about them being enabled. It may seem very clear to you that downvotes weren’t wanted, but as an admin I get complaints for basically every decision made on this site, so what the “right” choice is, is sometimes hard to determine.
I’ve been getting complaints about downvotes being disabled for awhile now, so it wasn’t clear to me. Even now, the opinion is still very split. Which is why I enabled them quietly to see if it would cause any issues. It did, so I made the initial post to see if people think the issues created by downvotes outweigh the benefits, and what peoples’ other opinions about them are.
This is my opinion based on what I’ve read and the results of the poll:
I think at a later time when lemmynsfw is larger, downvotes may be viable, especially if lemmy implements a custom home feed so that not everyone sees the same posts. This would help mitigate the issue of people not in communities downvoting posts. But as it stands I think the best option is disabling them again. Frequent posters, which are kind of needed for this site to survive, don’t seem to like them, and the poll is split almost 50/50. I have to try to balance enjoyability of posting and enjoyability of consuming content on the site, and it just seems like downvotes really hurts posters and only marginally helps consumers.
So with all that said, downvotes have been disabled again. Sorry for all the confusion and back and forth.
yes, I personally want to agree, freedom and smarts and such.
I’ll try to explain it to myself, as I’ve come to understand it, after watching the discourse in apropriate places, and you may listen:
I’ve been a lot on the internet again and I must say that all humans are stupid, depending on different contexts. And sometimes you’re not dealing with friendly people talking about trains and locomotives, but things with more of a personal touch, like watching porn, being trans, being religious, having a scientific view… and then suddenly you don’t have to only deal with some spam-bots that post everywhere, but horrible-asshat-people coming out of the woodwork and wanting to shit in your safe-space.
Imagine 20% of a population suddenly having to deal with a new thing, because the internet has shown it’s existance to them for the first time (like getting a huge reaction and getting to the front page of r**dit, or just in the all-tab on Lemmy).
The natural reaction would be fear, disgust, or even just asking some stupid questions. (which individually is fine, but having it happen ten times a day, under every post, is just too much (similar discussion with software-support and the RTFM-mantra.)) And thats just reasonable people, unreasonable people have macedonian bot-farms to spam your comments with helpful "I don’t like you"s or invite their online-only-friends over from discord to “own the libs” or something.
Reddit has downvotes yet has this more than ever.
This place, as long as downvotes aren’t there, not really seen anything of the sort and volume will be low for the ones which are there. Many have determined that is due to low user volume. Haha. As if. The proportion itself is much lower, non-existent compared to those which have downvotes.
At some point people need to go that extra mile and start thinking the reason for things. Like, ironically as I say right now will happen, will the existence of downvotes attract these people to the instance? Rather than deter them?