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.
Would there be any chance of downvotes coming back for posts if the community grows large enough that they make more practical sense or if Lemmy ever easily allows playing with the downvote weights for posts/comments? The main usecase I found for downvotes on reddit were situations on large subs where irrelevant posts would clog up the feeds before they get removed or by just barely being relevant enough to not get removed they’d flood the feed and make the more relevant posts more difficult to find.
We’d definitely consider bringing them back if the weights could be adjusted, and we reached a certain level of users. Though, I would rather not make any promises. But we’d definitely reconsider our decision if we felt downvotes could provide an actual positive use case. One thing that might be nice is if lemmy added the ability to set an instance wide default, and then communities could kind of decide for themselves if they wanted to have downvotes anyway. I think that would probably be ideal.
So, yeah, it’s possible we could bring them back if we felt they could benefit the platform and it’s users positively.