By advantage I mean posts from those instances receiving more visibility than others on feeds that sort by score (active, hot, top).

There seems to be at least two ways in which posts from instances that don’t allow downvotes receive an advantage:

  • They don’t federate downvotes. That means other instances only count downvotes from their own users but not from the rest of the fediverse.
  • A downvote sometimes can be counted and federated as an upvote. This happens when you first upvote a post and then change it to a downvote.

Let’s see an example. Suppose we are a user from instance A that allows downvotes and we want to vote a post on instance B that doesn’t allow downvotes. Watch what happens on instance C that also allows downvotes.

  1. Before the vote this is what users from each instance see (upvote - downvote = total score)
    A: 10 - 0 = 10
    B: 10 - 0 = 10
    C: 10 - 0 = 10

  2. Now we upvote the post:
    A: 11 - 0 = 11
    B: 11 - 0 = 11
    C: 11 - 0 = 11

  3. We misclicked, we meant to downvote the post:
    A: 10 - 1 = 9
    B: 11 - 0 = 11
    C: 11 - 0 = 11

If the post was hosted on an instance that allowed downvotes users from instance C would see a total score of 9.

  • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    This is nonsense.

    Instances without downvotes can not downvote you. You CAN downvote them from your instance though.

    This is clearly about Hexbear. Your downvotes from lemmy.ml work against Hexbear comments, Hexbear users on the other hand are absolutely not downvoting you.

    Hexbear is just a very active instance. Up until a couple weeks ago hexbear was 25% of all Lemmy content, and before the reddit waves it was the largest instance.

    • ramOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      11 months ago

      This is clearly about Hexbear

      This is not about Hexbear

      Your downvotes from lemmy.ml work against Hexbear comments

      This is not about comments.

      Read the post.