Removing downvoting feels intuitively wrong to me (eg, I believe that dissent is a really important part of a healthy democracy). If all those mega-corp platforms are removing downvoting, then I’m pretty confident my intuition on this matter is correct
The voting will stay but your homepage will be a for you page that selects posts based on your usage data and whatever is trending instead of the votes, in an attempt to bring engagement to a maximum. Just like what’s been happening to Instagram for years.
And it happened right when it became apparent that we were living in the Disinformation Age and every bit of power to flag bullshit content became that much more important.
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.
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.
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 still affects engagement statistics/algorithmic suggestions, and video posters can still see them to help gauge what content is liked or not. It’s just hidden from viewers.
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
how certain are you that this will truly block them all? Many of these things may have a “Legitimate interest” thing going on, and I do not trust those prompts to object to that by pressing “reject all”
legitimate interest is still not a valid legal basis for data collection/tracking in Europe, so it’s not that big of an issue (…but it still allows them to do more they usually can without “legitimate interest”). also most tracking scripts and cookies will be blocked by uBlock anyway
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