I get that it started for free with less intrusive ads, but YouTube has had a huge impact on the way we all share and consume information. Understanding how much money it takes to run a service with the technology needed to provide high definition videos on a site that is up 99.9999999% of the time, I have no issue paying for a service that has changed my life in many positive ways. Now I do hate price gouging like everyone else, but it’s inescapable from gas & groceries to all streaming platforms.
It’s bothered me but I’m glad you asked.
Shining the best light I can:
Every Lemmy comment as a bad take / disagree button, and it’s the reply to box. You can express whatever opinion you want and anyone who has a problem with it will have to use at least 3 or so taps or clicks to express their disapproval. So no drive by downvoting from people who don’t actually care that much about your comment but saw other people downvoted it and succumb to the herd mentality.
When you use an instance which doesn’t support downvotes, you’ll never visit your profile and see that a bunch of strangers didn’t like something you freely put out into the world unless they offered some feedback beyond a singular thumbs down - unless they reply with a thumbs down emoji, of course.
I would hope that on a platform where downvotes are disabled, when you go into a spicy thread, if 3 idiots posted comments sympathizing with Nazis or something, they would all be at the bottom regardless with 1 upvote each and lots of sarcastic and angry replies.
I still am not sold. But it’s making more sense than before you asked the question.
Thanks. I kinda half-thought some of that myself but you put it way better. I can’t buy into it though. It just stinks of weakness and fragility to me. I still struggle to understand why being downvoted is seen as bad. Is not having people disagree with you a vital part of your personal development as a human being? If your instance is mollycoddling you then you don’t get to appraise your own views vis-a-vis the internet’s moral majority. Seems an ideal recipe to increase the herd mentality of the instance. I don’t know though…