Should I disable downvotes?
Should I disable downvotes?
It often makes me sad seeing some posts receiving downvotes, even though I know it's from random people across Lemmy instances who probably aren't furries.
I could disable downvotes which would make it so that they're ignored by the instance and the count would only reflect the amount of upvotes. But, that also means that Yiffit users wouldn't be able to use downvotes anywhere else.
What do you think?
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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 [email protected] ) . 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.
So I've been thinking about this more and... I think I'm starting to come around to disabling downvotes, at least for Yiffit communities.
IMO, downvotes should be exclusively used to mean "This content does not belong in this community" rather than "I don't like this!". It makes sense for larger communities and subreddits where the user isn't really expected to read everything, and so it provides an algorithm to get the "most appropriate" content to users. But here, where communities have maybe 5 posts a day at most, that doesn't seem necessary.
Guaging popularity and "hotness" can be just done by just counting upvotes, and "this doesn't belong here" can (and perhaps should) be done by reports. I think I've only seen one or two posts here that I've downvoted legitimately, but I've seen so many posts that I know are appropriate to their communities that have been downvoted by the "downvote = dislike" brigade.
Although, full disclosure, I only use this account for Yiffit, and have another account (that has downvotes enabled) for most of my Lemminging.