I see the downvote button as serving at least one essential purpose: it sends bad content into obscurity quickly, where it won't be seen and won't generate further engagement. This matters becasue engagement on bad content tends to also be bad: arguments that are either vicious or go in circles, dogpiling, etc.

Have you ever seen threads that seem to never die on traditional forums, where people keep joining in an argument that goes nowhere becasue the thread is always visible, and the thread is always visible becasue people keep joining in? That's one of the major downsides of sorting by engagement. Reddit-likes not only don't do that, but with downvoting can do the opposite of that.

I've also observed that downvoting tends to be a substitute for making an angry reply - not just becasue it makes the content less visible, but also becasue it serves as an outlet for the human desire to to something to solve the "problem" that the bad content represents for the community.

Getting downvoted sucks, but I'd rather see that than a dogpile any day.

Downvotes ensure reaction-bait posts don't dominate the platform. Look through LinkedIn, FaceBook or Twitter: it's all garbage because any engagement is a "positive" metric. If there's a desire to differentiate Reddthat from Reddit then at the very least take the YouTube approach and conceal the score while taking it into account for sorting algorithms

Or more bluntly: what is cancer if not unchecked growth?

The ability to up and downvote is critical to lowering influence by knowledgeable against incorrect information. I know this is a touchy subject and can be abused, on the other hand there will be no proactive way to balance the system by the users.

Secondarily one thing reddit has done right is using analysis of up and down voting patterns to help do more automatic moderation. Obviously it has not been as effective as it grew exponentially and the bad elements became better, but it is still a good metric to monitor. HIGHLY recommend leaving it.

Not to mention it gives a sense of control and ownership to the user base.

I am a bit torn on the subject. On one side, downvotes are part of community-moderation, where content users don't like or want is pushed down and moderators don't even have to do much there.

On the other hand, it encourages hive mind behavior. You can see this commonly in comment threads on reddit, where if it's a "I disagree with you" translates to downvotes, even if the person presents a sound argument worth responding to.

You can simply just not upvote a post, and that is sort of like down voting it. I feel like maybe keeping downvotes off is better for this reason. But I'm torn.

I think the need for downvotes will become more crucial the more Lemmy grows, but waiting to make this change later will annoy people more (since we all know how people usually hate change).

The inclusion of downvotes have always been a double-edged sword. Remove them and the bad gets mixed in with the good. Add them and you introduce brigading and hive-minds. However, I still think the addition of downvotes outweigh the negatives. Not having a downvote means the only way for "bad" things to "move down" is for other posts/comments to be voted up so that might just force people to vote-up mediocre posts just to subdue the bad stuff - it would feel like a sub-par workaround. And worse than that, Lemmy will be littered with some really "bad" stuff that will undoubtedly have some upvotes. All you need to do is look at YouTube (without the "return dislikes" extension) and you'll see how bad it can get.

I think we should leave it as it is. I dislike the downvote button because in my experience it leads to many valuable opinions and content disappearing or not being posted in the first place, because users rather not be downvoted. We all have different opinions about all kinds of topics, lets have a little bit of tolerance and respect for each other and not downvote.

EDIT: Ironically, I would have never given you feedback on Reddit in a thread like this, because it seems like in this comment section there are a lot of people with opposing opinion to mine - which would probably lead to this comment being downvoted to hell on Reddit.

Downvoting is a method of moderation. If a community chooses not to allow downvotes, it had better have plenty of attentive and levelheaded moderators to make up for it. The power of downvoting as moderation scales with the activity and population, making it an indespensible tool the larger a community gets.

Still, whether or not to have downvoting should be the choice of the community. Reddthat ought to be able to make the choice not to have it, if they are willing to put in the work of manual moderation. However, disabling users from downvoting in other instances' communities means taking away that choice from those communities. As things are, I (a Reddthat user) cannot become a fully contributing member of a large community elsewhere, if that community relies on downvotes to help moderate.

Downvoting can be abused, but then again so can upvoting. If I choose to make a community on Reddthat, I'll say that I would prefer to be allowed to use downvoting to help moderate. My feelings are much stronger when it comes to downvoting on outside instances: if Reddthat prevents users from participating in outside communities, those users will have no choice but to find another home for their Lemmy account. And since users can only create communities on their home instance, that bodes unwell for the growth of Reddthat.

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.

With how small Lemmy is, I browse by "all" not just posts to this instance.

So not having downvotes here isn't a big deal. But in a lot of other instances where downvotes are allowed, I still can't downvote because I signed up through here.

I haven't seen anything on this instance worth downvoting, but I've already seen bigoted comments in other instances, and I'd like to downvote those so they're not the top comments.

It's not a big deal though, I can always just sign up under one of those that allows downvotes and abandon this login.

I rarely downvote unless someone is being a literal idiot, and I like to see those comments being down and hidden with downvotes instead of letting them stand out like a normal comment. But that's for the really stupid comments.

There still are other valid scenarios like disagreeing on an opinion, helps to see where the majority are. (Imagine people not wanting downvotes so they downvote this post. haha)

Personally I'd advocate for downvotes to be there but it's also not the end of the world to not have them.

I downvoted on reddit pretty rarely, so honestly I don't miss the button much - probably wouldn't use it a lot anyway. Having said that, if other people consider it valuable, I'm not opposed to it - in general I believe that more choice is almost always a good thing as long as I'd doesn't force people to make choices they don't want to make.

I don't like the idea of enabling the downvote. Personally I want my Lemmy experience to be substantially different to that of reddit so having a bunch of redditors come to Lemmy and say they want the downvote button because that's what they are used to with reddit doesn't convince me it's a good idea.

This isn't Reddit 2, this is an entirely different platform and I don't think we should be doing things the way Reddit did

I don't really think votes mean anything when the community is still small. There tends to be so few comments, you can actually read all of them.

The problem starts in the hundreds of comments. I'm not going to spend an hour reading one comment thread. If a post explodes in popularity your voice is just a drop in a Olympic sized pool, there is a good chance it won't be seen by another soul.

Once a post hits this kind of criticality, voting is the only way your opinion starts having weight in the discussion. Most communities I use are still small, so either decision will have little impact on me.

I am in favour of having a downvote button, but I also able to understand arguments against.
However, I do think the positives outweigh the negatives.

Sometimes, I just like to sort by controversial. Ignoring things you don't like or disagree with is usually enough, other times it's good to engage and challenge a different point of view, and sometimes a down vote is all the engagement you should give some people while showing solidarity with your community. I think we should have them and leave it to the communities to decide whether they want to implement it or not.

I used Reddit a lot, so my first instinct is to enable downvotes. I used it when someone comes up with a really bad take that doesn't hit the threshold for mod action, spam, or when incorrect information is being given out.

That being said, I've adjusted to not having a downvote button - either way is fine.

I'd rather not have downvotes. Reddit supposedly has them for non-constructive discussion. In practice, it inevitably becomes a disagree or unpopular opinion button.

I've tried. Really I have. But without some form to express my disagreement with what I am interacting with, without having to write and post my disagreement as a reply, Reddthat is little more than another Facebook without all the pictures of babies. Sometimes it's a big "no" in my head, sometimes it's small. But if we are big kids enough to be trusted with creating content, then we should be trusted with the ability to express our disagreement of content presented to us. WHY does Reddthat have to be only ego strokes of Upvotes?

I was attempting to become more active here, but this is just too much of a sticking point with me when it starts to feel like Facebook with headlines.

I'm back to read only mode. It's stupid to only be able to approve when all viewpoints are supposedly welcome here.

Just so long as they are positive to what you see. Otherwise your POV is not welcome.

Up- and downvotes usually mean nothing and are just an indicator for the circle jerk or bot density. Without any practical use, the only use left is its function as a dopamin source to get people addicted. Removing it would lessen engagement in quantity, but highen engagement in quality.

I say, leave it be. Not upvoting is functionally the same to downvotes with none of the negatives.

I'm torn - I do think it's good to being able to decrease the visibility of things that are wrong, unhelpful or too off-topic, but then lots of people misuse it to mean I disagree or I don't like you.

Initially, I do not see issues with the down vote being disabled as initial content is being created and propagated. I think this will change quickly though.

There are some issues that may show up sooner than later. A) Version 0.18 is removing CAPCHA from signing up to accounts. This will make bot armies easier to create. B) As more people move to Lemmy, trolling, bot armies will increase while quality of content will decrease. Additionally, we will start to see corporations try to drive discussions and advertise using LLM AI. Down voting will allow us to deal with that content. If we do not implement it, we will not be able to take advantage of other instances that use it as a community moderation tools. Also, moderation tools are not mature enough for admins and moderators to be completely effective yet, making dealing with that content even harder. C) Many users are probably on Jebora. Jabora currently does not support sorting comments by time, score, it any other metric other than the default. This will for the time being cause it's users not to only see top voted posts. D) Not up voting is half of a down vote. We already use one vote tool to show what consensus is for how good a comment is. Down vote is just a stronger tool in the same vane. E) I expect third party apps, such as the announced Sync for Lemmy, will offer the user to disable down votes in a users view and counts in posts/comments as this data has to be available for instances that do support down vote as well as those that don't.

Personally, I don't feel very strong one way or another as I can always use another account on another server for down vote support. The beauty of federation is that anyone can be a part of any instance, with the settings they prefer, unless an instance is completely un-federated.

I think downvotes are a good way for communities to self-moderate in a way, but it’s not a big deal for me.

Removing options is why I left reddit. Not exactly an auspicious start if this lemmy instance is starting to do acquire a similar attitude, guess I'll have to look elsewhere for my permanent alternative.