So, we made the possibly controversial decision to disable downvotes. Let’s talk about it briefly.
Why we disabled the downvote button.
On Reddit, the purpose of downvotes is and always was to make it so irrelevant posts in subs would be pushed down to prop up more relevant content. In practice, they have been used as a flat out “I don’t like this” button, regardless of if the content is relevant or not. We have already started to see this be the case in Burggit communities, despite the posts being 100% allowed on Burggit and being entirely relevant in their respective communities.
It is instead recommended that you use the report button if you suspect something to be spam or irrelevant to a community.
On Reddit, it’s also frequently used to dismiss/silence legitimate arguments and discussion. We’d rather avoid this happening on Burggit, we want this to be a place where people can freely and openly discuss ideas/opinions.
In the end, we couldn’t really find a positive use case for the downvote button. So, we decided to remove it.
just like that?
There are a thousand other communities competing for users. This is an easy deal-breaker. Removing downvotes takes away the ability to hide spam and shitposts. If the users are downvoting “legitimate” discussion, it’s probably because the users don’t think it’s legitimate, and the system is working as intended.
Instead the admin suggests you should “report” them. If this site were ever to gain any traction, there’s no possible way the admin could sort through allll of those reports. That’s the entire point of the downvote: community self-moderation.
At the moment, the community is new and just starting, there aren’t many people posting at the moment. The last thing we need is for the people who actually are contributing content to be discouraged from doing so. Before we removed downvotes we had cases of people making their own communities, making a post in the communities they created and getting downvoted.
Welcome back, by the way. ;)
Beehaw doesn’t have downvotes and look at how they’re doing. Vomit inducing safe space aside, they’ve shown that you can have no downvotes and still do well as an instance. Every community/sub has their own moderators for a reason to take some load off the admins too, so that makes your point about downvoting spam/bad posts kinda moot.
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