As part of a comment chain here a couple of users have expressed that they would like the downvote button back!
Background:
I think it was one of those things that was either the Default option, or when creating the server I looked at a few of the other instances and saw they were all leaving downvotes disabled, and left it like that too.
This was my initial thought process and in the spirit of making a community, only voting up seemed on the surface to be a nicer option.
Thoughts on federation & voting
As I've been on the fediverse for a while and was not a huge reddit user. So the concepts of resharing and liking a post was enough for everyone to get along and relevant to me. There was no concept of voting, you received a like if someone enjoyed your "toot", and if someone really liked it enough they'd reshare it to all their followers.
Obviously this use-case is redundant in the Community-verse style where, one is you follow people, the other is communities.
If you didn't like a post, you clicked hide or just let it be. And after 5-10 minutes it is probably gone from your feed. This concept of hiding posts, and "spoiler" (content warnings), is not actively used by Lemmy communities.
For example, did you know that you could even make a spoiler? (Click this line to expand it)
Yeah this is what it looks like. Not very intuitive, but something people could/should be doing! And the formatting after this spoiler sucks so hard, no matter how many spaces I put after, it puts the next paragraph on the immediate next like. Which makes it hard to even read a spoiler in text. 🙁
A user does not have the ability to hide posts or block instances, only communities and users. Blocking a user for 1 bad comment seems like overkill, especially on Reddthat. If it's really that bad, you should be clicking the report button as well as the block button. So I can enact on banning that user from interacting with us again. (Especially if that one comment was enough for you to report/block them!)
So what could the downvote do?
As described by one of our users (thanks!)
- it makes it feel like your vote counts more, as not doing anything with a bad/unfit post sometimes doesn’t feel like enough
- seeing a post or comment downvoted to oblivion shows the opinion of the community better than it just having no upvotes, as that can also be seen as the thing not being seen
- not having the option to downvote could skew peoples judgement on some bad posts, as any post’ll get upvotes regardless of how bad it is, and downvotes would balance that a lot better.
What it can provide is an option to self-moderate in some regard but I think Lemmy misses a way to benefit from that outcome. Sure a post or comment could be downvoted but without a way to filter based on that, it would still be seen. The value of a downvote is enriched when you can sort by "highest" or have the ability to hide content that does not meet a required vote number.
Currently Lemmy only has "Top Day/Week/etc" which would fit that criteria, all other "regular" post sorting options would not account for that.
Federation with Downvotes
With federation, if an instance has downvotes disabled, we do not accept any downvote that is received from another instance, nor allow our users to downvote on other instances which have it enabled.
What are our thoughts?
What is everyone else's thoughts? Should we enable the downvote button, or leave it as it is?
In my experience (midsize to smaller subreddits mostly) downvotes were fairly effective at identifying and weeding out comments and posts that were off-topic, mean-spirited, promotional, or just incoherent. Reports I personally try to save for clear violation of the instance rules, but downvotes can be a softer way to filter out low quality content. With that being said, at the current community size I haven't really felt any reason to downvote anything, but as the community grows I think it will be useful.
Reports in Lemmy are weird to me and it's something Lemmy as a whole probably needs to address.
I'm sure there is logic but I can't make heads or tails on it.
A user on our server can report a post in a federated community (one that's home server is not ours) from a user on another different server, but I see the report?
And then if I, as the reddthat instance admin ban that user because of spam, does that block them from the instance or completely disable their account?
A few unknowns with reporting that makes downvotes more appealing
My understanding is: as admin of this server, you would have the ability to block that specific post, and/or user from this server. The report to you relates to its propagation to users feeds on this server, and to feeds of accounts on this server.
If you ban the user, it will ban them from propagating posts and comments here, but will not affect their use of other servers, including their home server. Banning the user will result in reddthat users loading posts to this instance from other instances through federation being unable to see the banned users comments in foreign instance posts, possibly resulting in comment chains that do not make sense as users of other servers will be replying to the banned user, but reddthat users will not have context.
I have not tested personally, but that seems to be the consensus of what I have seen. Hope that makes sense.