This post was made by Fediverse gang.
That genuinely sucks and helps misinformation spread. It’s part of the reason reddit went downhill after they did that.
I think they mean you can’t see the results. So you can downvote a post but if you look at a post it doesn’t show you how many downvoted. It only shows you how many upvoted. It makes it impossible to tell if a subject is controversial.
It’s because bigots will blanket down vote any and everything in queer instances.
Try holding a conversation when posts are all sitting in the negatives and nobody sees them unless they go directly to the community and sort by new.
Ok but as someone who used to mod large trans subreddits that’s less what their mo was compared to brigading with posts and comments and sending threatening messages.
Obviously that’s a much bigger problem and I don’t doubt it happened a ton. From the user standpoint of someone trying to just use the community, it’s incredibly disheartening (especially if you have no IRL community to reach out to) to post, have a post go to 0 or negatives within minutes, and then ignored. When I still used reddit I would frequently see posts from people asking why everything was downvoted so quickly, which probably just encouraged the people who were doing it.
That’s the good thing with Lemmy, one instance can disable downvotes to f off TERFs, another has it enables for some civil discussion about bananas.
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lemmynsfw has implemented (or intends to) an interesting compromise, in that you can only downvote posts on that instance’s communities that you’re already subscribed to. Ideally, this means that downvotes are for the quality of the individual post, rather than as a reaction to the type of content.
Beehaw does the same. I’m not sure if that’s been the case in our instance. I don’t inherently disagree, but I’m not 100% sold either.
If there’s a clearly bad/misinformed/rude take, they simply don’t get voted on. They rarely have more than the single 1 vote of their terrible opinion/sharing.
It’s common to see +10 to +30 on a positive comment, with the comment it’s responding to at 1.
I don’t disagree that it could be a bad thing, but I think it’s about the community and its practice surrounding it as well. So far in my experience on the instance I participate in I’ve seen it be effective.
Also I’m not sure if this is a thing on Lemmy but on reddit there were downvote farmers. Downvoting could also actually encourage people to perform these terrible comments to accumulate as many downvotes as they can. Downvoting disabled removed this problem in its entirety. Reddit has this issue long before some of its other problems and it has only grown since, up til I left. I don’t know what the state of it is now, and I’m not sure how big of an issue it even is on Lemmy. It comes down to finding the line between what is preferable.
All in all, I think there are good and bad things about not having a downvote. I do think downvote disabled helps some aspects (engagement, active/trending posts) but it could also negatively influence federated content (spam, bad actors). I don’t think a comment being at -30 is any more telling than the same comment at 1 when it’s surrounded by +30 upvoted comments. However, if someone actively sought out getting downvoted, that can no longer exist.
IMO trading having bad comments be visibly negative in order to prevent the downvote farmers is a reasonable exchange
