You really don't understand how removing the recourse from users to downvote bad content is a negative to any link agregator? Do you just never go to small subs and see less than 5 posts from the last week and not understand that someone could just flood those communities with poor content and the only recourse is for mods to ban that user who could have not even violated their rules? This is to say nothing of how bad nitch communities are already on Lemmy, if we remove the users ability to group moderate it would be even worse.
dmmeyournudes
joined 2 years ago
If you remove downvotes you remove the recourse users have to push down bad content. A bad post with 100 upvotes and 500 potential downvotes should never see the light of day because the community decided it's a bad post. But because no one can push it down and there isn't enough content to push up over it, now a bad post 10 people would have seen and pushed out of the system is now bothering well over 500 more people because you couldn't downvote it.
If you can't downvote bad posts, then you will see a massive rise of bad posts. This is why YouTube removing the dislike button was such an issue.
Because if the only way you can interact with a post is by voting up or voting down, then a few problems occur. First, any instance or app that lets you use the downvotes now has a stronger voice than anyone who isn't using the downvotes. Second, it means users can not push down bad content without a consistent supply of new content to vote over it, a massive problem for small communities. And third, it fragments the community making the service harder to use.
If your instance removed the button, the system will register the votes, even if you can't see it. This is just more fragmentation of the experience for users fostering more confusion and alienation of new users.
Wanna check? Log in though an app and... Ta da, downvotes!
How are you not silenced exactly like you would be on Reddit? People downvotes posts and comments they don't agree with exactly like reddit, but here if the admins disagree they defederate entire instances over it. Hot page is completely useless compared to reddit, so only the most upvotes posts from the most popular subs are visible, and comments have the exact same issues reddit comments had. Nothing about this system is mechanically different from reddits system, baring how votes get totaled because of federation, (also the hot sort is uses).
No instance has no downvotes, they just hide the button in the theme like subreddits would do too. And nothing about this system prevents people from mass downvoting or upvoting a post because of group think, ask me how I know.
The situation I described has been abused in reddit through even the downvote system by various subreddits for everything from memes to pushing presidential candidacy. Imagine the_donald in a world without downvotes.