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Lemmy.world down, probably following the upgrade. A reminder to move to smaller instances for a better experience
(files.catbox.moe)
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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I don't understand the appeal of no downvotes. Do you really think it's a good thing that trolls, bigots, dangerously wrong answers, general assholes, spam, etc can't be downvoted? I won't pretend downvotes aren't misused sometimes, but their existence is critical for quality control.
Edit: wait, I just saw you post in another thread as an "enlightened centrist", so I guess that explains it.
I saw it being misused on reddit a lot so I like it. It was common for people to use it as a "i disagree" button, which created a big echo chamber. I read that many people felt that there was no point even posting to a discussion since they knew they would be downvoted.
I think reddit really turned to shit, and I was hoping Lemmy could take another direction here. You can still upvote to support your opinions riding to the top without needing to downvote someone.
I understand this is a hot topic for many though. I guess it depends on what your previous experiences at reddit has been.
And also you mention the word quality control. I'm not sure the majority is some kind of a quality control. I rather hear people's opinions and make up my own mind. It would feel weird to have other people push down comments I may want to read.
Not to mention the other instances have it enabled. So anytime federated with them can downvote them, but they can't downvoted each other.
I can't seem to find the source right now (so take this with a grain of salt), but someone did check the Lemmy codebase to look into this scenario - if an instance has downvotes disabled, it won't propagate incoming downvotes.
I know that on my instance which does have downvotes enabled, if I check out any post from Beehaw (who does have downvotes disabled) there are zero downvotes on any comments as far as I can see.
Now I'm assuming this would only apply on communities hosted on that (or any downvote-disabled) instance, using my previous example if someone from Beehaw were to comment on a community originating
lemmy.ml, I believe they could still have their comments downvoted sincelemmy.mlwould be "hosting" the comment, so to speak.