It's not popular as evidenced by people restoring down votes to platforms like YouTube.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Removing downvotes does not improve the experience other than giving the illusion that nobody disagrees with anyone else. Unless your instance has some very weird need to maintain a false sense of positivity, downvotes should be enabled.
In the beginning on Reddit at least it felt like the votes worked as a validation of the argument. But as the site grew it was impossible to convince people, that even if you disagree, a comment can be valid and worth your upvote.
And when enough people give up and downvotes based on whether they agree or not, you basically get an echo chamber of popular opinions.
I have my own little rule. If I make a comment I have to upvote the post or comment that I’m replying to, since it somehow gave me reason to spend time thinking about and commenting on.
Reminder: YouTube hides dislikes. I liked using dislikes to figure out if a video was likely just a troll or fake quickly.
Thankfully the ReturnYoutubeDislikes extension works to fill the gap.
Similar logic for high amount of downvotes vs upvotes.
Downvotes give you additional information. This can be:
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OP is posting crap that the mods haven't spotted
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OP is just plain wrong.
- They could be intentionally or unintentionally spreading misinformation. Lies should be squashed. (Although, I believe people who unintentionally spreading misinformation should be given an opportunity to correct themselves. Which can happen in replies.)
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There is community disagreement with OP
- I try not to use downvotes like this. But some people do, and it should be noted.
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OP's position is controversial, i.e. upvotes and downvotes are split around 50:50.
One consequence of removing downvotes is crap can appear to have more support because it can rise above the mediocre. I'd rather see the mediocre than the crap.
In all these cases it does require reading in-between the lines to figure out what is going on, but again I'd rather have the downvote signal than not have it.
I think downvotes are important to social media. Without them, trolls have a much easier time rising to the top, as they get lots of upvotes but no downvotes to balance it out. This is why the most-followed content on sites that don't have downvotes like "Twitter" is some political bullshit. So yeah, I think downvotes are crucial.
I like downvotes. While I see your point about conformity, the other side of that is it allows for community moderation of low-value, offensive, or unwanted content. And without karma to farm, I don't think it has much impact on people being themselves. Besides, there are plenty of other instances out there where they don't allow downvotes if that's more your speed.
the other side of that is it allows for community moderation of low-value, offensive, or unwanted content
Beautiful thought but you know very well that's not how people use the downvote button. There's plenty of content that is not low-value, offensive or unwanted that gets downvoted.
Downvotes are critical, in my opinion, especially for recommendation posts. It’s a good way to combat astroturfing and let genuine discussion rise to the top.
As long as we can see upvotes and downvotes separately and understand they are not canceling each other - - that they are different things ; downvotes are really useful ...if it was only to show what's controversial and what's mhee.
I’m glad KBin and Lemmy have gone to showing both. The net score on New Reddit is less informative.
Heavily-downvoted posts are very often posts that are also in violation of community or instance rules; e.g. non-news posts in a news forum, or bigoted posts on an instance that forbids them.
The people have spoken I guess
Not the biggest downvote fan myself either but remember, if you ever express this opinion whether on Reddit or here, you will always get downvoted xD I wish people wouldn't use the downvote button on comments that, while they might disagree with, still add to the conversation and are not spreading misinformation or anything like that. But unfortunately, people treat the up and downvotes as like and dislike buttons.