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.

  • poVoqOPMAEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    I don’t feel like a downvote necessarily goes against that ethos. If anything, I think it is a slight overreach on personal freedom of expression and a bit stifling to the overall vibe to feel like a downvote is the end of the world.

    Lemmy pre-Reddit exodus was pretty much like this: a groups of well organized HOA supporters starting arguments about why /c/nolawns is really bad and immediately down-vote all the posts on /c/nolawns and any other posts elsewhere that might be interpreted as against well manicured lawns. When calling them out on this, they would get really defensive and ask all their HOA friends to come over and down-vote and argue even harder. When blocking their main HOA instance, they would user their alt-accounts on other instances to continue down-voting anything they don’t like.

    If down-voting was just a number next to the post, you might as well just ignore it, but it also effects the sorting algorithm, thus meaning that if you have a chronically on-line group of people that almost immediately down-vote posts they don’t like, they will disappear pretty quickly from the default “hot” sorting most people use and thus never be seen.