Do posts from instances that don't allow downvotes have an unfair advantage?
By advantage I mean posts from those instances receiving more visibility than others on feeds that sort by score (active, hot, top).
There seems to be at least two ways in which posts from instances that don't allow downvotes receive an advantage:
They don't federate downvotes. That means other instances only count downvotes from their own users but not from the rest of the fediverse.
A downvote sometimes can be counted and federated as an upvote. This happens when you first upvote a post and then change it to a downvote.
Let's see an example. Suppose we are a user from instance A that allows downvotes and we want to vote a post on instance B that doesn't allow downvotes. Watch what happens on instance C that also allows downvotes.
Before the vote this is what users from each instance see (upvote - downvote = total score)
A: 10 - 0 = 10
B: 10 - 0 = 10
C: 10 - 0 = 10
Now we upvote the post:
A: 11 - 0 = 11
B: 11 - 0 = 11
C: 11 - 0 = 11
We misclicked, we meant to downvote the post:
A: 10 - 1 = 9
B: 11 - 0 = 11
C: 11 - 0 = 11
If the post was hosted on an instance that allowed downvotes users from instance C would see a total score of 9.
I think there should be an option (unless there is) for mods to turn off (or hide) voting as needed. That might be an effective way to cancel any downvote brigades. Lemmy really doesn't have the population for mass vote manipulation now, but it will soon enough.
Hiding all votes can also help mitigate some superficial bias, but not all. I believe that if a person sees a comment with a few dozen downvotes first, they tend not to read the post objectively. After being on Reddit for such a long time (12 years or so), I found that it was super easy to manipulate voting trends if I caught a post or comment at just the right time.
Hiding only downvotes is just silly though. Some register of public opinion, positive or negative, still has its uses, IMHO.
I dont see any issue with the user choosing weather upvotes or downvotes are visible or not. Not in favor of moderators or admins having a choice on this matter.
It seems odd to me that we would federate with instances lacking such basic functionality. Not allowing their users to downvote is one thing, but if they don't recognize downvotes from other instances, that sort of ruins the whole upvote/downvote dynamic for everyone.
I was on Beehaw and they block downvotes. I didn't think much of it until I went to a federated channel with low participation (it was a new channel) and I wanted to downvote some bot-spam... but couldn't cause Beehaw didn't allow it.
I understand (but don't agree with) the site operators intention, but their rational breaks down if you view the fediverse as something more than the single instance you're registered with.
If I understand the rules correctly, the problem is that voting with your feet doesn't work because trolls can use no-downvote instances to do some major trolling.
I have a very controversal piece of software for managing Lemmy that I posted about. It's mainly for personal instances to sync defederated lists from larger entities. I.E. I want to own my account (or small group), and while I would use this larger site, I will use my own to spread the load, but trust the admins' judgment.
If it weren't for down votes, from the post listing page users would think it was a huge hit, and not realize there is a healthy debate about how to use it, why, and when.
IIRC the removal of the upvote is also federated.
When you change it to a downvote you first need to remove the upvote, that's why it changed from 11 to 9.
So, in instances B and C you'll end up with 10 score.
Yes, but if you then downvoted the post it would still show a score of 10 in B and C instead of 9. This is the first of the two advantages I described. Even worse, if the post received 2 downvotes from ten different instances it would still show a score of 10 or 8 instead of -10.
Keep in mind that not everyone is using the upvotes weighting, so it's not just about "those who allow downvotes and those who don't".
Personally, I find the whole upvoting/downvoting thing to be a very toxic feature that encourages hive mind and blaming divergence, so I hide scores and I sort posts and comments by chronological order. I would not use Lemmy if I was forced to be under the influence of social scoring, so defederating from instances which do not apply the same rules on downvoting would feel very detrimental to me.
Upvotes/downvotes were implemented by websites like Reddit as a scaling trick, so they can get millions of users without the need to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators. But it turned out that adding subreddits with volunteer moderators worked better anyway, and this is already what we have on Lemmy, with instance owners and community moderators, so there is really no need for some dystopian scoring of everything someone says.
I've been coming to realize how much votes affect the way I interact on Lemmy (and not in a good way). They have their utility of course, but if you're sorting by new anyway they don't really have an effect other than, like you said, giving a score to everything everyone says - which I'd really rather not be a part of my interactions as I find it does more harm than good. I hadn't considered just hiding them entirely though, thanks for bringing that up as a possibility. What do you use to do that? Don't suppose it's anything that would work on mobile too?
You're welcome. I don't use mobile myself : do you use an app, or it's just about opening your Lemmy instance url in a browser? If it's the later, you can go in the settings and there is a "Show Scores" checkbox. Just uncheck it, hit the "save" button and you're done. :) This is also where you find the "Sort Type" select box which allows to define default sorting and put it to "New". It only works for posts on the homepage, though, you have to take the habit to manually click "new" after reading a post to sort its comments (I could have swear it was using the "Sort Type" option before, or maybe just remembering last sort, but it's not the case anymore).
Odd request, could you please downvote the hell out of me? On kbin.social, only certain instances federate their downvotes and I’m curious about which ones they are.
Edit: just checked from lemmy.world and found 37 downvotes. Only 4 are visible when viewed from kbin.social, and all of them from kbin.social users like myself. I’ve definitely seen downvotes from lemmy users, which makes this a bit puzzling.
I had to make a third fediverse account to reply, between lemmy.world being down and kbin.social no longer federating my edits and replies. Upvotes federate fine but none of your downvotes federated. Thank you all for your help!