Coming from Beehaw, which always had downvotes disabled, I don’t think downvotes are necessary for a healthy Lemmy instance. More popular content will naturally surface by virtue of having more upvotes; there’s no need to have a mechanism to “pull down” less popular content.

I also think that downvotes are too easily abused or weaponized. It’s trivial to downvote bomb all of a user’s or a community’s posts. Without downvotes, to achieve the same effect, you’d have to upvote every single other post that exists.

I see no real positive benefit to having downvotes. If people like content, then they upvote it. If they don’t, then they don’t. Seems like a much better system that avoids brigading and harassment.

Without downvotes, the trolls are only left with making actual comments for their trolling, which makes it easier to identify (and block) them for what they are. They have to come out in the open for everyone to see.

I personally am in favor of removing downvote entirely.

The downvote was meant to help stop both misinformation, and to help keep a topic on track. Like you start a topic on daily life in the furry community, but then someone brings up a whole offtopic subject about cars in that same topic. The downvote is meant to stop the offtopic post in it’s tracks.

It was never meant to be a tool to show your dislike or disapproval of certain topics or certain subject matter. Like gay furries kissing or 2 ferals doing the deed.

Sadly, to many people today, especially coming from Reddit, they see the downvote button as such a tool. They have weaponized it.

I feel by removing it, it takes away the weaponization. And forces people to do what they should have been doing in the first place. And that is to grow up and learn to ignore the material that offends you and your sensibilities.

I mean, their are something’s I do not like seeing posted, but I am not going to downvote anyone over it just because I don’t like it. I simply ignore it.

I understand the sentiment of trying to build a more positive oriented community by getting rid of something like downvotes. However, that feels almost exactly like what Youtube did in removing dislikes on their site, which was widely unpopular. It’s a great indicator of spam or other undesirable content and removing it altogether might be doing more harm than good.

Plus, if filtering becomes a thing, being able to, for example, ignore posts with less than 5 upvotes would do wonders for some browsing once the site gains more traffic.

That said, I will always advocate for options. If that became a setting in a menu somewhere, I think that could be the best of both worlds.

While it may be a little demoralizing to see a downvote on something you care about, 'tis a part of life. When I see something I posted get downvoted, my first instinct isn’t to assume it’s people being malicious. I take it as an oppurtunity to look at the post and ask myself “what is it about this post that people don’t like?”.

I noticed another person brought up the YouTube Dislike removal thing, and I’d like to add that programmers were rightfully upset to the point of creating a third-party API and browser plugin just to bring it back. That was more in response to the rampant amount of misinformation and scam videos on the platform, but I think it has some resonance here as well. I don’t think taking away a feedback mechanism, regardless of it’s potential for abuse/harassment, is a good idea.

If I may, I’d like to bring in another comparison- E621. Say what you may about E6, but the up/downvote system there works well because some posts just aren’t good. Sure, it may have passed the janitors, but the post itself and/or it’s contents may be objectionable. With E621, you can hide posts that pass a certain score threshold. This is a good way filter out some of the more… questionable things for a lot of users on top of the existing blocklist system they have in place. Some people may try to game the score system to artificially boost or dump a posts’s score, but the admins/moderators are pretty good at nipping that in bud, so to speak.

Finally, I’d like to bring in the (#)fediblock argument. Even if an instance blocks another, it doesn’t stop the offending instance from replying/reacting to posts that it may have discovered through a relay or another instance. All it does is stop the defending instance from seeing the reply/reaction. Disabling downvotes is the same thing. You can just hop to another instance and see if your post was downvoted.

For now, until the lemmyverse becomes a bit more stable, I don’t think messing with any core functionality is a good idea. It is definitely something worth revisiting again at some point. Who knows? Maybe the developers are working on something to address these concerns.

I registered on an instance that disabled downvotes from the beginning (beehaw) and I like it. I’ve seen several (but not a lot, I think 4 or 5 in as many weeks) comments that started along the lines of “well, I would have downvoted your post but since I can’t I’ll comment to tell you why I disagree”.

Probably only a tiny fraction of people react this way, but I think it is one of the things that help having more discussion and more meaningful engagement.

My initial, knee-jerk reaction to this question is a strong no. However, I’ve seen good arguments on both sides. I personally don’t like reporting unless it’s something very obviously and/or egregiously problematic, as I feel that getting admins or mods involved and potentially silencing someone as a result is not a thing to be done lightly. Downvotes provide a bit of granularity here. (Though whether that’s actually needed or if it just makes me feel better is debatable.) If a post does warrant reporting, downvoting it as well can help prevent it from getting more attention in the time it takes the mods to act.

On the other paw, I’m a trans former-Redditor so I know all too well how downvotes can be abused to silence people in favor of bigoted disinformation. A bunch of downvotes early on can prevent a quality post from gaining any traction at all, especially if people gain and use the option to hide posts below a certain karma threshold like some in here have suggested. It may not be much of a problem now, but if Lemmy really grows we may start to have issues with brigading.

So I guess my real answer is a resounding “meh.” Neither option is perfect, and I suspect tackling these problems for real will require more complex solutions.

TBH I’m very very very very surprised no one has done something worse with downvotes at a fediverse-level. Sometimes I refresh new and posts that are 10 seconds old have 2 downvotes on them. All it would take is someone with 5 bots insta-downvoting everything to cause chaos. Tune that power onto specific communities and presto, you can make things disappear.

I don’t think disabling downvotes entirely is a perfect solution, but I wonder if there’s another way to counteract trolls. Disabling downvotes at a community level would be the easiest way, but that still has a minor inconvenience of no longer being able to down-rank bad/offtopic content.

I don’t really like votes in general and never have, because they don’t actually reflect whether something is correct. It often correlates, but it’s usually just tilted to the subject/bias of the forum. (in one “leftist” sub saying russia bad will get you downvotes. in another one wanting gun control will get you downvotes. and in yet another one acting liberal at all will get you downvotes. usually there is someone willing to argue, though, in reddit fashion)

If people disagree vehemently they should state why so people understand. However, downvotes are also pretty good of getting rid of bad faith comments a lot of the time. But someone who is consistently contrarian (when they have a right to do so) will sometimes just end up getting auto-downvoted by all regulars.

I think there’s also a bandwagon effect, even if it’s subtle psychologically. That’s not backed up by anything I have, though.

Well, the decision can always be undone if it turns out we don’t like it. How about a trial period of a week or two to find out if No Downvotes is good for us?

Yes, it is working out great for us over at Beehaw. I think it encourages people to have more productive discussions.

I am personally against disabling downvotes, its the best way to tell content is not popular vs. popular.

I think I’ve seen what you’ve been talking about (not because I’m obsessed with calculating how much imaginary karma I have, sush). What seems to happen is a post gets posted, it gets one or two downvotes probably because it’s yeeted into everyone’s “all” stream, and then it slowly ticks upvotes as the “regulars” see it.

However, I’ve also started paying attention and noticing it on other (non-controversial) communities as well. Random posts that have downvotes for (as I see it) no real reason (although I did notice that someone has apparently made it their personal mission to downvote every meme on !opossums@lemmy.world ) . I guess it’s just “background radiation” of a reddit-like platform. I’m honestly surprised it’s not worse, considering that furry is an, uh, acquired taste.

It’d be nice if Lemmy did it so that people on no-downvote instances could go and downvote on other instances. Or even do it at a community level (so some communities could be no-downvote, even on the same instance), but I think they have a lot on their plate already. I’m not sure where I stand on them being enabled here, although if I could toggle it for my communities I’d probably leave them enabled, mostly because of a lack of compelling reason to do otherwise.

There’s a tagging system. If something is tagged with context I’m not in to, I leave it be. If it’s not, and I end up seeing it, then I see nothing wrong with downvoting. It isn’t a personal attack. That said, tag usage would make my own downvite usage unnecessary because while I have no problems with other people’s tastes, I am not obligated to enjoy what repulses me personally.

Another thing which may or may affect things is that disabling downvotes also seems to grant Yiffit users immunity to them. So if anyone here goes and starts making trouble on other instances, it might be a bad look if other users on those communities couldn’t downvote Yiffit users’ comments.

Or at least I think that’s how it works after doing a bit of testing on a beehaw post in a non-behaw community. Apologies if I’m mistaken.