Feedback: Downvote Button - Yes or No
Feedback: Downvote Button - Yes or No
As part of a comment chain here a couple of users have expressed that they would like the downvote button back!
Background:
I think it was one of those things that was either the Default option, or when creating the server I looked at a few of the other instances and saw they were all leaving downvotes disabled, and left it like that too.
This was my initial thought process and in the spirit of making a community, only voting up seemed on the surface to be a nicer option.
Thoughts on federation & voting
As I've been on the fediverse for a while and was not a huge reddit user. So the concepts of resharing and liking a post was enough for everyone to get along and relevant to me. There was no concept of voting, you received a like if someone enjoyed your "toot", and if someone really liked it enough they'd reshare it to all their followers.
Obviously this use-case is redundant in the Community-verse style where, one is you follow people, the other is communities.
If you didn't like a post, you clicked hide or just let it be. And after 5-10 minutes it is probably gone from your feed. This concept of hiding posts, and "spoiler" (content warnings), is not actively used by Lemmy communities.
For example, did you know that you could even make a spoiler? (Click this line to expand it)
Yeah this is what it looks like. Not very intuitive, but something people could/should be doing! And the formatting after this spoiler sucks so hard, no matter how many spaces I put after, it puts the next paragraph on the immediate next like. Which makes it hard to even read a spoiler in text. đ
A user does not have the ability to hide posts or block instances, only communities and users. Blocking a user for 1 bad comment seems like overkill, especially on Reddthat. If it's really that bad, you should be clicking the report button as well as the block button. So I can enact on banning that user from interacting with us again. (Especially if that one comment was enough for you to report/block them!)
So what could the downvote do?
As described by one of our users (thanks!)
- it makes it feel like your vote counts more, as not doing anything with a bad/unfit post sometimes doesnât feel like enough
- seeing a post or comment downvoted to oblivion shows the opinion of the community better than it just having no upvotes, as that can also be seen as the thing not being seen
- not having the option to downvote could skew peoples judgement on some bad posts, as any postâll get upvotes regardless of how bad it is, and downvotes would balance that a lot better.
What it can provide is an option to self-moderate in some regard but I think Lemmy misses a way to benefit from that outcome. Sure a post or comment could be downvoted but without a way to filter based on that, it would still be seen. The value of a downvote is enriched when you can sort by "highest" or have the ability to hide content that does not meet a required vote number.
Currently Lemmy only has "Top Day/Week/etc" which would fit that criteria, all other "regular" post sorting options would not account for that.
Federation with Downvotes
With federation, if an instance has downvotes disabled, we do not accept any downvote that is received from another instance, nor allow our users to downvote on other instances which have it enabled.
What are our thoughts?
What is everyone else's thoughts? Should we enable the downvote button, or leave it as it is?
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Initially, I do not see issues with the down vote being disabled as initial content is being created and propagated. I think this will change quickly though.
There are some issues that may show up sooner than later. A) Version 0.18 is removing CAPCHA from signing up to accounts. This will make bot armies easier to create. B) As more people move to Lemmy, trolling, bot armies will increase while quality of content will decrease. Additionally, we will start to see corporations try to drive discussions and advertise using LLM AI. Down voting will allow us to deal with that content. If we do not implement it, we will not be able to take advantage of other instances that use it as a community moderation tools. Also, moderation tools are not mature enough for admins and moderators to be completely effective yet, making dealing with that content even harder. C) Many users are probably on Jebora. Jabora currently does not support sorting comments by time, score, it any other metric other than the default. This will for the time being cause it's users not to only see top voted posts. D) Not up voting is half of a down vote. We already use one vote tool to show what consensus is for how good a comment is. Down vote is just a stronger tool in the same vane. E) I expect third party apps, such as the announced Sync for Lemmy, will offer the user to disable down votes in a users view and counts in posts/comments as this data has to be available for instances that do support down vote as well as those that don't.
Personally, I don't feel very strong one way or another as I can always use another account on another server for down vote support. The beauty of federation is that anyone can be a part of any instance, with the settings they prefer, unless an instance is completely un-federated.
Yeah I saw the old captcha removal. If 0.18 is pushed without captchas I'll cherrypick the removal commit and build it myself, 'cause that was a silly removal. We won't be having huge amounts of bots here.
That is a valid point for extra advertising items, and 3rd party apps. I agree that 3rd party apps will be a major use for our user base, and will probably be the first ones to fix the issues with UI. Enabling proper sorting / etc.
Thanks for your thoughts! At the end of the day I'm one way or the other as well. So we shall see what people think.
Have a look at this comment. It doesn't look like it's going to be as easy as reverting a commit, the captcha functionality depended on the websocket stuff that was removed, so the captcha stuff will need to be massaged to use the database instead.
Thanks for pointing that out, I've already got some backup ideas regarding that, especially if we end up being "forced" to update without a captcha service being in place.
I'd moving to the application system, which honestly might be a better system anyway. As then we could modify how the "signup process" works, and write more things about this instance, what it stands for, it's features, rules, funding, that NSFW content is enabled in some of our communities, etc etc.We could then either have an automated approval system (ref: bot), or I could enlist some help from some of the friendly people here to help weed through the applications.