I’ve seen a good bit of debate on Kbin surrounding downvotes, so what are your thoughts? Should they exist? Should they be shown separately? Should you be able to see who downvoted?
I personally like downvotes and especially like that they’re shown separately. You’re able to get a much better idea of how people feel about something, and you can more easily express a minority opinion. Of course, there are downsides (e.g., brigades), but I think the pros outweigh the cons.
Let me give you an example from a different site: youtube.
Rockstar recently released a video advertising Red Dead Redemption for the Switch, and I have to admit, it does look neat at first glance. The video even has 40k “Likes” and to someone who is used to much smaller numbers, this seems like a LOT of positive feedback. Cool game, eh?
The same video also has 304k Dislikes, more than seven times the amount of Likes, and that’s the sole reason why I took a double take and tried to find out what the heck was wrong with this game that people hated it so much.
Now, on the Fediverse, the entire upvote/downvote thing is a whole lot smaller - no multimillion dollar companies trying to sell stuff, but private people discussing opinions and sharing memes and the like … but the core concept is the same. If someone is behaving like an asshole and gets 20 upvotes every comment, then they might feel vindicated with their shitty opinion because it looks like a lot of positive feedback.
If the same comments also get 150 downvotes at the same time, the statement from the community is suddenly completely different. But this can only happen IF there is the ability to downvote stuff.
Is is a perfect system? Far from it. But I’d still rather keep the ability to downvote for situations like these.