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.
Downvotes are a double edged sword IMO. One one hand they help reducing the amount of actual shitposting and bots. On Reddit I mostly saw it being abused as a “I disagree” button. The problem is that there isn’t any middle way. You either downvote or upvote.
I also visit websites that have a “point system” starting from -1 (shitpost, flamebait) 0 (irrelevant), +1 (informative) and +2 (insightful). It works much better imo but I’m not sure if something like that would be possible on Lemmy. Obviously falsely mislabeling still happens but people who do that get a warning.
Exactly! And yeah, currently it is not possible to have such a system on Lemmy, @Kumo@burggit.moe asked if we’d be willing to reconsider if lemmy implemented a few features to help make downvotes more useful (such as the ability to adjust weights.) Here’s that comment and you can see my response here.
TL;DR we’d be willing to reconsider if Lemmy implemented some more options when it came to voting and how it works. But in it’s current state it has the same problem that the hard R (reddit) has, except we don’t have enough users to outweigh the negatives.
I think a good solution is to have downvotes have less weight than upvotes. So if a post has 5 upvotes and 5 downvotes, it would receive a score of 7.5, because each upvote is worth one point and each downvote is worth half a point. This way, something would have to be disproportionately downvoted in order to get buried.