I’ve mostly been using the Sync app (which shows a downvote option everywhere), so I didn’t notice the lack of downvoting until I was spending a lot of time on desktop yesterday and saw there are actually no downvote buttons anywhere 😮 on Reddthat.
I’ve since tracked down what seems to be the Reddthat policy discussion around this issue, which also made clear that even if I downvote content from another instance through a 3rd-party app like Sync, because I’m doing it from an account on Reddthat (which has downvoting disabled), my downvote doesn’t go through!
This sucks. 🙁 Downvoting is an essential tool for users to help keep their communities on-topic and discourage bad behavior. It lets people take action against ignorance or bigotry without feeding the trolls; minimize people trying to derail discussions or be obnoxious in the comments; and prevent memes, sensationalism, and low-effort posts from flooding communities meant for thoughtful discussion.
It’s unfortunate that lemmy doesn’t support disabling downvotes just within specific communities yet, so this wouldn’t have to be such an all-or-nothing policy, but as-is this means making Reddthat my home instance has restricted my options and given me less of a voice everywhere within the lemmyverse.
@[email protected], is there any chance this policy will be reconsidered? So many comments in the previous discussion seemed to agree that downvotes are a valuable and desired feature. It doesn’t seem like that feedback has resulted in any kind of policy change yet though. Was a specific decision made after that discussion to keep voting disabled, or has it just been stuck in a wait-and-see state? Would it be possible to change this?
I actually like having the downvotes disabled. I saw a brigade of comments that I didn’t agree with on a large post, but didn’t want to have to refute each and every one… so I instinctively went to downvote (because they were misinformation comments that can be dangerous). But alas, I had forgotten that I couldn’t and had to rethink what I was trying to do.
So I refuted several, but that’s tiresome. I agreed with others and upvoted their comments as well. And that’s when I realized that the people I agreed with were really the only ones with any upvotes. The brigade of misinformation comments were hardly being interacted with at all.
And I liked it for myself, because I couldn’t just mindlessly downvote… I had to interact to refute, or simply not entertain them at all. And I realized that nobody was entertaining them; they were just a “loud majority” at the time, while the more productive comments were being upvoted, even if not responded to. And I suddenly felt less isolated in the thread, with all the misinformation comments flooded around.
So then I made my own comment to the topic. Engagement I probably wouldn’t have made before. And my whole process of thinking about how I engage and interact here kind of changed. We don’t need downvotes at all, there’s plenty of ways to disagree already. No need to “downvote to hell” if they have an opposing opinion. Downvotes can just lead to unintended consequences and just really aren’t needed, in my opinion
If there’s something to report though, make sure to do that. Plenty of options though, no downvotes required