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Reddthat Community & Support

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I realized late that Reddthat has downvotes universally disabled, and now I'm regretting choosing it as my home instance. 🙁 Is the lack of downvoting permanent? (reddthat.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've mostly been using the Sync app (which shows a downvote option everywhere), so I didn't notice the lack of downvoting until I was spending a lot of time on desktop yesterday and saw there are actually no downvote buttons anywhere 😮 on Reddthat.

I've since tracked down what seems to be the Reddthat policy discussion around this issue, which also made clear that even if I downvote content from another instance through a 3rd-party app like Sync, because I'm doing it from an account on Reddthat (which has downvoting disabled), my downvote doesn't go through!

This sucks. 🙁 Downvoting is an essential tool for users to help keep their communities on-topic and discourage bad behavior. It lets people take action against ignorance or bigotry without feeding the trolls; minimize people trying to derail discussions or be obnoxious in the comments; and prevent memes, sensationalism, and low-effort posts from flooding communities meant for thoughtful discussion.

It's unfortunate that lemmy doesn't support disabling downvotes just within specific communities yet, so this wouldn't have to be such an all-or-nothing policy, but as-is this means making Reddthat my home instance has restricted my options and given me less of a voice everywhere within the lemmyverse.

@[email protected], is there any chance this policy will be reconsidered? So many comments in the previous discussion seemed to agree that downvotes are a valuable and desired feature. It doesn't seem like that feedback has resulted in any kind of policy change yet though. Was a specific decision made after that discussion to keep voting disabled, or has it just been stuck in a wait-and-see state? Would it be possible to change this?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately I think you're making a mistake in blanket-characterizing downvotes as "disagreement."

Disagreement shouldn't mean a downvote

I think our points got crossed. I believe disagreement shouldn't result in a downvote but if they are adding to the conversation it can/should still be upvoted. Regardless of disagreement.

Either way. As discussed in the original thread, I disabled downvotes as that is what the (at the time) big instances did before people barely heard of Lemmy. I liked that idea to not have downvotes on Reddthat. Unfortunately a side effect was that it meant any user on Reddthat couldn't downvote on other instances. At the time if I had known that I probably wouldn't have made the no down vote! Even I find myself at the behest of this feature and find myself interacting more often instead of blanketly disregarding something (via downvoting).

I find it very interesting that your perception only changed once you made the move from the web to the app which showed a down vote button. If you had chosen one of the other applications, such as Jerboa, Eternity or voyager. I wonder if we would have had this conversation.

At the end of the day I hope you will come back but by no means should you feel obligated to stay.

Cheers!