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.
Great! I don’t think downvotes are conducive to actual discussion and expression - if you don’t have the courage or ability to actually verbalize your distaste then your opinion is worthless.
I’m fairly left-leaning and I want to be able to have actual discussion, not be downvoted to hell or see people who disagree with me be downvoted to hell.
Agreed. Downvotes just lead to a loss of nuance.
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.
aaaaand I’m out…
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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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.
Makes sense.
The positive use case is when a user is latching onto a higher post for visibility, but not really posting something the community considers useful. 5 to 10 downvotes and they’re gone from the collective awareness.
But you can always just ratio those fools with a response until it reaches the point you’re not even posting actual content to the next fools, the response gets progressively so dumbed down that a simple “____ __!” will let all the regulars know what you’re saying, and done, no mew dumbasses will dare post that shit anymore.
Which hey, may sound like a more aggressive way to downvote, but at least they know why they’re getting rejected.
That sounds like it would make an obnoxiously insular circlejerk.
100% agreed. I always disliked how much downvotes game-ified discussions. If there’s a response to a topic I most agree with, technically the most optimal way to boost its visibility is to upvote it and downvote everything else. Obviously most people don’t do this, but as a consequence the people who do do this have a louder voice than others, which never jived well with me.
Even in upvote-only communities this is still a potential pitfall thanks to alt accounts, but at least it’s a step in the right direction and raises the barrier of entry to that kind of behavior.
Alt accounts are slightly less of an issue, at least on Burggit because we have to manually approve each user, Not saying it’d get rid of alts entirely, but it does reduce them slightly.
Completely fair point. Although, my singular anecdotal data point of having gotten in with a three-word application reason suggests that it’s not exactly a high bar to meet. 🤣
Also, I hope I don’t come off as implying I think something more should be done about alts. I think that’s a pretty intractable problem without foregoing privacy ethics. IME, the appearance of bad actors of this nature is more a function of community size than the amount of preemptive moderation effort put in.
Oh crap that’s right. guess we have to deny you now. Kidding, ofc. 😆
I mean my account is a alt because my “home” instance blocked you for being undermoderated (the stuff that gets posted here might cause legal troubles where the server stands)
I kinda like to down vote people i don’t agree with because they usually are cringe.
But ok. I guess i can work with that.
