Downvotes are the one thing reddit unambiguously got right. It is impossible to sort content well using only support and apathy. That's just feeding engagemagog.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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Blåhaj Lemmy is a Lemmy instance attached to blahaj.zone. This is a group for questions or discussions relevant to either instance.
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Unless of course you're a member of a marginalised minority, in which case, downvotes will often be weaponised against you, when people who simply don't like you because of who you are, downvote anything and everything you say.
It's that specific aspect that has lead to them being disabled on an instance focused on trans and gender diverse folk
Which they can still do from other instances, apparently.
This is a well-meaning mistake that keeps getting made.
Downvotes are ignored by this instance, wherever the come from. The algorithm that determines display order is calculated independently on each instance, based on the upvotes and the downvotes that particular instance is aware of. Blahaj Lemmy drops all downvotes from all sources, so the feed that our users see, whether the content is originally from our instance or not, is ranked without downvotes being taken in to account.
tl;ldr - People downvoting our content or posts remotely makes no difference to our local users
... then why would it matter if they're allowed? Even if they're like the Close Door button on an elevator. Honestly it could be a per-user option, at least on comment pages.
You're asking the wrong person. That's a question for the lemmy devs, not for the admins of a specific instance.
But you've modified it enough to ignore downvotes globally.
That's out of the box functionality. That's how it works on any instance that disables downvotes
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This feels like we're just halving the influence of user votes. On reddit, I would downvote anything I felt was boring or a subject that I didn't wanna see again. Now on lemmy, I simply mark it as read instead. The effects are the same, causing the post to disappear from my feed without a posing mark.
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Downvotes were often turned against trans folk on reddit simply because they're openly trans. I have no desire to see that repeated here, and so I disabled them when we were setting up the instance.
Given that lemmy still has plenty of transphobes, it's unlikely we'll change it any time soon. Ideally, it would be a per user setting that allows the admins to set the default settings for new users, but that's not functionality that exists at this time.
If you see something like that, it's best to block and report the user.
Downvoting is also inportant. Missing downvotes is what make Twitter and Facebook so annoying. People need feedback for what's socially acceptable, unfunny or unpooular. Also, when you make a troll post, how are you gonna know it hit home 😉
Their feedback is their comment being removed and/or them being banned for a period of time. In most cases said person is acting in a way that is either flat out harmful or disrespectful, downvoting is like booing, you wouldn't boo a person for vandalizing, assaulting, or raping someone, you call the police. Similar story here.
The minor piece is opinions, which honestly, suck it up. This platform doesn't need to and frankly in my opinion shouldn't cater to people who can't handle other's opinions. Lemmy has a problem with apparent issue legitimacy at this time where issues reported aren't seen as valid and that you should just "downvote or block" people, so by weeding out snowflakes and excluding them it makes communities healthier, removing downvotes is one part of that.
Also, when you make a troll post, how are you gonna know it hit home 😉
People will make funny comments (that's what happens in 196), though if you went to far it might get removed, you might get a message from the admins about unacceptable behavior, or you might just find yourself banned for a period of time.
What if someone posts factually incorrect information that doesn't technically violate any community rules? Like, I could just go on one of the casual conversation communities that don't have any "no untrue statements"-type rules and claim something absurd. For example, pretend I stated with confidence that,
"No, exact Euclidean nearest-neighbor searches actually get a lot more efficient as the dimensionality of the points increases because the increased per-point entropy allows algorithms with better time complexities to be applied."
This is complete horseshit and the problem actually gets way harder due to something nicknamed the Curse of Dimensionality (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality), but only people who have actually studied this problem would know that and while you may feel inclined to reply debunking my bogus claim, it would be a lot more effective if you and others capable of understanding your debunk could downvote my comment so it was less likely to appear that I was the one with the votes and you were the one full of shit.
Lemmy just isn't busy enough for that. Unless you're looking at "all" you're going to see pretty much every post in every sub you're subscribed to. And if you're watching "all", then upvotes will curate your experience just fine.
And ultimately, it's a moderation issue, not an admin issue. It's certainly not something I'm going to turn on, opening our trans users to revenge votes, just to avoid a questionable niche scenario
It definitely makes more sense if it's also preventing downvotes in communities on Blahaj and not just stopping its users from downvoting elsewhere, given the marginalization of Blahaj's main demographic.
Depends on how the Blahaj admins feel about misinformation, but in general misinformation is pretty bad and if you are operating in bad faith you will likely be actioned, especially since reports aren't like Reddit where they target specific rules, they are a written response. basically anything that operates as bad-faith is getting the axe here, there's extra incentive for it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that malicous actors can give themselves fake upvotes if they have multiple accounts of different names. In that case it's best to not even bother with Booing them and just get to giving them the boot (ban evasion can't be proven so actioning upvoting accounts only when you can prove a correlation between them, oherwise you'll ban people who simply upvoted them).
I'm not really talking about people who seek to abuse Lemmy for profit (see: misinformation VS disinformation). I mean more just the people who are confidently incorrect and talking out of their ass. Some of these things would be very hard for a mod to definitively fact-check without field-specific knowledge and understanding. Also, even if Blahaj has anti-misinformation policies, the fediverse is a big place. I'm arguing against disallowing downvotes on an instance I'm not even on because we're federated and a portion of Lemmy's population not being able to downvote makes things a tiny bit worse for everyone, not just them.
yeah, I think it's a significant problem that I can't downvote in places where other people brag about downvoting.
Isn't having their content removed a lot more effective than downvoting at letting them know it's not acceptable?
IIRC the idea is that hateful content should be reported so it can be removed.
Yeah, but there’s always content that’s annoying enough to want to downvote, but not bad enough to go against the rules of the sub.
This is a dronerights alt BTW
[I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can't see this comment anymore]
Yeah, Blahaj specifically has downvotes enabled. It feels like most of the queer friendly spaces do. If you find a queer instance with downvotes enabled, could you let me know?
Yiffit.net
I'veen doing fine w/o downvotes. Reddit had too many spam bots that instantly downvote things anyways. Makes it too hard to get out of New
What's a tankie? Never encountered this word before Lemmy and now every other meme is about tankies
A tankie is an apologist for murderous authoritarian leftist, it's a reference to the Soviet & Chinese government's use of tanks against protesters. Tankies will generally deny, downplay, &/or justify genocide & political mass muder.
I think Ranger has a really good reply, I just wanted to add:
Other places on the internet/IRL don't really differentiate between groups of leftists (because leftists = evil communists always). A lot of us here are pretty left and don't tolerate apologia for totalitarian, oppressive governments just because they attempted to distribute wealth more fairly than American/Western capitalism.
There are many flavors of left. No need to tolerate mass killings and genocidal behavior. Abolish unjust hierarchy, in all forms.
Sounds like a client issue. I have a working downvote button on this very post.
Because you’re on an instance that enables downvotes. Some instances like lemmy.blahaj.zone have them disabled.
Upvotes and Downvotes exist separately from each other and when Downvotes are disabled, just the Upvotes are being counted on our clients.
Same with any content that lives on our instance, if a federated user on an instance that supports them downvotes our content their downvotes just don't get federated, at all. The downvoted contend only recieves a downvote on their instance and all other instances won't recieve it, though only applies to content where the original is on an instance without downvotes.
However, because the post was made to a Blahaj Lemmy community, those downvotes will only be visible to folk on your instance, because Blahaj Lemmy just ignores downvotes that federate to us, and doesn't federate them onwards.
Interesting.
So if I'm on the instance "Adama" and downvote a post on "Blahaj", does someone on "Cremmy" see the downvote or not - will Adama tell Cremmy?
If the community is hosted on Blahaj, Blahaj won't federate it to Cremmy
But if the user is a Blahaj user, posting on a group on instance Django, Django will forward the downvote to Cremmy.
However, in both of those scenarios, Blahaj itself will ignore all downvotes, meaning that the sorting algorithm for Blahaj users looking at content, local or remote, doesn't take downvotes in to account
Interesting, thanks for explaining.
I am unable to see any of the replies to this post's comments except for one reply. Is that a byproduct of moderation?
I don’t know, but something similar has been happening to me, where I can see a thread of replies to some comment, but I can’t see the original comment. It could be moderation, or it could just be the client that I’m using.
It's likely because you haven't set the languages correctly in your preferences. You need to make sure you have "Undetermined" selected in your preferences, as well as English and any other language you speak.
It's likely because you haven't set the languages correctly in your preferences. You need to make sure you have "Undetermined" selected in your preferences, as well as English and any other language you speak.
yeah, adding English to the list of checked checkboxes fixed it for me. Undetermined was already checked.
You can from other instances.
…I know. That’s the point.
I am talking about a problem with my instance, on a sublemmy specifically for talking about this instance.
sublemmy
It's called a community.