As you might have noticed, there is currently no option to down-vote posts here.
When Lemmy was much smaller there were some bad faith actors organizing down-votes on posts they didn’t like and because a few down-votes already meant a lot this was quite effective (from their perspective) to shape the discourse to their liking.
These days our instance is bigger and we have also blocked the worst offenders (and will continue to do so), so I am wondering if we should re-enable down-votes?
Personally I think they are useful in some cases, but ideally the down-votes would not federate to other instances. This option however is not available in Lemmy, so it is either on or off.
I will make three comments below this, one you can up-vote if you are in favour of enabling down-votes again, one if you are against it and one if you abstain from making a decision on this.
Note to non-slrpnk.net members: please don’t up-vote any of the below comments I make.
I’ll leave this vote open for some days… and anyway: no decision is final and if it becomes a problem again it is easy to disable it.
Edit: If you have for some reason a strong objection and want to veto this, please comment below.
Edit: I enabled down-votes with the upgrade to Lemmy version 0.18. At the time of writing this it is 45 votes for enabling down-votes, 32 against enabling them, and 10 abstentions. Lets see how it goes.
I’m new but I think downvotes are an important function for some topics. In particular when the topic is a factual question and an incorrect answer is receiving upvotes because it may sound reasonable to the general public. As an expert on the topic it was helpful to reduce the prominence of incorrect answers.
That said I share concerns about its use as a disagree button, particularly in politics. I wish there was a way to moderate the use of downvotes somehow but in the meantime I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. It might be useful as a community to discuss when it is or is not appropriate to use them even if it’s just a voluntary community standard. Reddit used to have such a standard but it was largely ignored as the site grew.
This my problem with federated down-votes. Here on this instance we might be able to agree on some community standard, but there is no way the wider Lemmyverse will ever agree on something like that.
I’m hoping people will get in the habit of reading the local rules/guidelines when participating on other instances but maybe that’s unrealistic given the huge number of them.
When browsing “all” (at least on Jerboa) I can’t really get to the rules of an instance when looking at a non-local community (or at least I haven’t figured out how)
I haven’t used jerboa but often they are in the sidebar, though some instances don’t have them there. Can you see the sidebar?
I don’t think so? Occasionally when scrolling a sidebar pops up unexpectedly but I think that’s only on the main menu, containing my subscribed communities.
For instance, from this thread I can click trough to the meta community, and I can see the “info” on this community specifically, but I can’t see the slrpnk.net info anywhere it seems.
That’s a fair point about comments that are factually wrong. But people have been downvoted on reddit numerous times for literally asking questions. It starts with a few people using it as a “I don’t like you” button, and then when the others see a comment with a negative number, they just join in.
Personally, I mend the lack of a downvote button by upvoting more often than I would on reddit. In such a system the “bad” comments would just have a noticeably smaller number of upvotes than the rest. I don’t particularly mind downvotes being an option, I don’t think they’ll destroy the environment or anything, I just think more people would exploit it than use it sensibly.
All good points. I think I stand by my perspective but I’m definitely open to trying without for a while if that’s what people decide.
I think that replying to a wrong answer with its correction or a reason why it is wrong should do the trick in your scenario. I don’t think most people write a wrong reply knowing it is wrong (In which case it is the moderator’s job to act upon misinformation), and not being able to downvote them spares them of the unnecesary -100 votes to a mistake. This works much better here than in Reddit, since the communities are not that big and these sort of comments would not be swallowed by the rest, but even in Reddit, what made me realize comments were wrong was the replies to them, and not necessarily the downvotes.
And as for personal oppinions, I feel like in real life we don’t use “downvotes”. If I like what you say, I hang out with you, if I don’t, I simply won’t be around you, I don’t go tellig other people “beware of that person”. So I don’t see the need to bring that to an online community.
But again, you probably have more experience in the matter, so take my opinion with a grain of salt :)