Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

founded 4 years ago

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I had forgotten how great it is to see the number of downvotes (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been so used to judging a post just by its popularity on reddit, but it's actually so much more useful to have an idea of the downvote ratio. I'm glad we have that here.

It was a scandal when it disappeared from YouTube, but I didn't realize it was missing from Reddit too for much longer!

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Yes, servers can disable downvotes. Beehaw does that, for instance. I'm on lemmy.world which allows both. I prefer both because I think it helps silence bad faith participation with less active moderation, but I respect that some places don't want it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

unfortunately, "bad faith" is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes I wish to very silently express my disapproval without alerting anyone that there has been disapproval. Everyone finds themselves holding a deeply unpopular/controversial opinion from time to time, bc the universe is a complex place. I see it more as doing my part to "slow the angry mob" when the groupthink starts to get out of control

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is there an easy way to check what the "properties" of each instance? Example

- downvote_allowed: true
- max_image_size: 500kb
- community_allowed: false
- no_mail_login: false

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It also enables bad faith participation such as down-vote brigading.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

while that's true, people will always find a way to be jerks. if people can't be jerks with a downvote, they'll express their jerkitude verbally, which is certainly worse. i just wish we could move beyond the point where a downvote (or a bunch) was enough to emotionally devastate a person-- or where people feel the need to do that to others.

this is such a nice place now, but, then again, so was reddit in the beginning.

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

I've elected to hide upvotes in settings, initially as an experiment that stuck because I really didn't feel like I was missing anything without the counters short of prejudging what I was about to read. The area in the center of the Venn diagram of content that's relevant to me and content that's massively upvoted is, well, nonzero. But I'm not exactly going about my life using nonzero chances as my walking stick.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm definitely on the fence about it. I agree about the bad faith participation with downvote brigading, but I also feel that having downvotes is, overall, a good way to gauge community agreement.

I think what I would like the most is a visible upvote/downvote percentage ratio. That way you could see not only the net upvotes - downvotes like on reddit, but the actual participation by the community.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

You can see it by hovering over the counter and looking at the tooltip, but yeah having both upvotes and downvotes prominently displayed could be nice as well.