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Should I disable downvotes? (yiffit.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It often makes me sad seeing some posts receiving downvotes, even though I know it's from random people across Lemmy instances who probably aren't furries.

I could disable downvotes which would make it so that they're ignored by the instance and the count would only reflect the amount of upvotes. But, that also means that Yiffit users wouldn't be able to use downvotes anywhere else.

What do you think?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

So I've been thinking about this more and... I think I'm starting to come around to disabling downvotes, at least for Yiffit communities.

IMO, downvotes should be exclusively used to mean "This content does not belong in this community" rather than "I don't like this!". It makes sense for larger communities and subreddits where the user isn't really expected to read everything, and so it provides an algorithm to get the "most appropriate" content to users. But here, where communities have maybe 5 posts a day at most, that doesn't seem necessary.

Guaging popularity and "hotness" can be just done by just counting upvotes, and "this doesn't belong here" can (and perhaps should) be done by reports. I think I've only seen one or two posts here that I've downvoted legitimately, but I've seen so many posts that I know are appropriate to their communities that have been downvoted by the "downvote = dislike" brigade.

Although, full disclosure, I only use this account for Yiffit, and have another account (that has downvotes enabled) for most of my Lemminging.