Do you also downvote publications when you don’t understand them or only when you don’t agree / they don’t make you laugh / they don’t interest you?
What are the reasons for a downvote?
I generally reserve my downvotes for three things. People being jerks, people dishing out incorrect information, and reposts.
But I’m also a beehaw main, and downvoting is disabled for the entire instance. I only downvote on my lesser used accounts for other instances.
I don’t know if Lemmy is got suggested global guidelines or if it’s up for each instance to provide them.
On Reddit, downvotes are supposedly used to mark posts and comments that do not fit the community they’re on, harm the users, prevent discussion or are otherwise harmful (malware, etc). In practice, it’s used as the disagree button.
While Lemmy’s currently smaller community seems waaaay less downvote-heavy, regardless of the intention as it grows the downvote button will be used much in the same way as Reddit. It’s a natural tendency.
No better example than the “UnpopularOpinion” subreddit: the entire goal is commenting an opinion that is unpopular, yet if you did that, you’d be massively downvoted because people disagree with your opinion… I mean yes? That was the point? In theory it should be upvoted for being relevant to the subreddit.
Some instances have downvoting disabled. Beehaw.org for example.
They’re trying to encourage positive communication, so they have it turned off. Upvotes only.
And thats the reason why I chose another instance. I want to be able to downvote when people post terrible things. Who knows how long it will take for moderates to remove something, or if they will at all.
I don’t downvote, I’m on Beehaw where downvotes are disabled
One thing that will most certainly get my downvote is anime I hate anime
Then don’t join and/or block anime communities? I don’t like sports, but I’m not going out of my way to downvote every sports related post.
I’m on beehaw, so not downvoting anything at the mo ; )
if I was on trashy or something, and I hated the post, I’d upvote for visibility, if something was terrible politically etc. updoot so other ppl see even if I disagree