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.
The only problem with having downvotes disabled is that users from other instances can still downvote stuff here. Downvotes on hexbear have been disabled for ages and I think it’s generally a good thing, but only because they’re disabled for everyone.
If/when we get the power to actually turn off downvotes instance-wide, definitely do that. So posts here can’t be downvoted. But if some people are down voting it everyone should have the option.
I don’t think it really matters that people from other instances can still down-vote as it does not effect how these posts are displayed here at all.