I started seeing a weird trend on Lemmy that I cannot understand.
Weeks ago, posts used to have downvotes and upvotes in the semi-rational range you would expect.
Out of nowhere, it seems like almost all the posts I see now have zero downvotes with some exceptions.
What is happening here exactly?
For mental health reasons I’ve set my client to display the vote total, rather than independent up and down votes.
That’s a good one, I also like instances that disable downvotes. Forces interaction rather than silent dogpiling.
The flipside of this is that sometimes a response is just plain wrong and a dogpile of down votes shows that to the rest of the community, so disabling down votes is not the cure for everything.
Yep, it’s definitely a tradeoff, but in my experience someone absolutely ratioing a comment, rather than leaving it uncontested, is far more effective. For genuinely bad content with no merit, mods can still remove comments.