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?
Here you go, a down vote from me just to see if the down votes still work.
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.
Don’t worry I gotcha covered
The girls have picked them every one, oh when will they ever learn when will they ever learn
It’s user instance specific. lemmy.blahaj.zone, for instance (where my account is from) has downvotes disabled entirely - I can’t add them nor view them.
It is a bit of a pain to be honest, since my old lemm.ee account allowed me to do both. I suppose I could email my instance admin to ask for clearance or an explanation, but I think that’d border on unnecessary nagging. I can still see the total regardless.
I believe blahaj has similar reasons as Hexbear.net for why they both disable downvotes, downvotes have been documented as especially targetting queer folk, especially trans users. Removing downvotes removes that visibility. In Hexbear’s case, it’s also to promote discussion, not sure if blahaj has similar aims on that front.
Idk what you’re talking about. More often than not when I talk against hedonism, ‘sexual liberation’ and moral relativism I get a good chunk of them… 😅 The day that changes Imma have to leave Lemmy and go yap somewhere else!
Some instances turned off downvotes. While on the other hands some accounts are mass down voting. For reason I don’t get, upvotes are public but downvotes are private. IMO downvoters name should be available too
People are mostly cowards/can’t handle disagreement and criticism and they don’t wanna drive engagement down? 🤔
