I was reading the rules of Beehaw.org and they opted to disable downvotes, and I see other instances doing the same.

The main reason is that often the downvote is used as “I don’t like it” instead of “This is not relevant to this community”; in the latter case, I think the “report” button is the correct action to perform.

What are your thoughts on this?

  • Mcuglys@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I think downvotes give core users of a community a chance to slow down low-relevance posts, and reposts, which might otherwise hit the main page and get upvoted by people who don’t really look at the community name. So, I like them for that reason. In other circumstances they’re a bit of a net neutral option compared to simply not upvoting.

  • willow@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I think downvotes are important; they complement moderation and add a degree of QC. Furthermore, the possibility of occasional misuse is not a strong argument for taking away core functionality of the platform. If I didn’t want downvotes, I’d go on mastodon.

  • LeftyAutisticKinkyMemer@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I don’t agree. Downvotes might be not relevant and counter productive in general discussions, but in porn communities I think they’re critically important. If there’s no downvotes, spam bots or trolls will overtake communities. Mods can only get to things so fast.

  • Nubbly@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    I think things can still be relevant to a community and be disliked. At the moment this is mostly an art sharing community, but I saw some talk about creating subcommunities revolving around nsfw discussions and recommendations.

    While I doubt downvoting would be used much, I can see it filtering out low effort content or show disagreeable ideas in discussion based communities. Because of that, I dont see an immediate reason to remove this feature.

    I also like the idea of a community having slight self governance to take some of the burden off the mods.

  • aspseka@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Fantastic idea to put the load to decide about relevance to the mods instead of community solving it. /s

    • SushiMage@lemmynsfw.comOP
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      1 year ago

      I see your point, but the mods are there literally to keep the community coherent with its intended scope. If a submission is in topic with the community but no one likes it or agrees with it, it simply remains a 1 and that’s it imho

  • pawukon@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 year ago

    Being downvoted on OC is pretty sad. A lack of upvotes is enough to signal disinterest.