As much as I like the wholesomeness of the concepts of upvotes only, I’d love to downvote idiots on other instances
What about showing both the number of up-and downvotes? This concept of ratios as we know it on twitter leads to the supporters only upvoting the post, but people disliking it upvoting the comments, which means the top comments always disagree. This fosters a climate of rage because the majority of intercations are negative this way. I’d rather just downvote and move on.
You make a fair point, but if the replies to a Lemmy post are overtly hostile, I see that as a failure of moderation rather than of the system itself. Twitter has long been an “almost anything goes” sort of place and was never purposely designed for community-oriented discussions. It’s a microblogging site with discussion features grafted onto it — way back in the day, the Tweet box literally asked “What are you doing?” and there was no reply function so people posted their own “top-level” (there was no other kind) Tweets along the lines of . “Lorem ipsum dolar” My opinion is blah blah blah but that wasn’t automatically shown next to user_xyz’s Tweet for all to see.
Also, I’m not certain of this, but I think displaying downvotes without enabling them would require a software patch. I also suspect it would be confusing to many users and lead to a lot of bug reports.
Moderators can’t do anything here, this system just means that there will be a lot more arguing because the replies will be negative, reagardless of the overall toxicity level. Enabling users to display their disagreement with a comment directly has many benefits, how that effects how many people will see the comment is something else, but this is one of the things I really liked about reddit. You can still discuss if you want, but often you don’t wanna waste time and/or get drawn too much into it. It is a more accurate measure of what people think about a comment.
