As you might have noticed, there is currently no option to down-vote posts here.
When Lemmy was much smaller there were some bad faith actors organizing down-votes on posts they didn’t like and because a few down-votes already meant a lot this was quite effective (from their perspective) to shape the discourse to their liking.
These days our instance is bigger and we have also blocked the worst offenders (and will continue to do so), so I am wondering if we should re-enable down-votes?
Personally I think they are useful in some cases, but ideally the down-votes would not federate to other instances. This option however is not available in Lemmy, so it is either on or off.
I will make three comments below this, one you can up-vote if you are in favour of enabling down-votes again, one if you are against it and one if you abstain from making a decision on this.
Note to non-slrpnk.net members: please don’t up-vote any of the below comments I make.
I’ll leave this vote open for some days… and anyway: no decision is final and if it becomes a problem again it is easy to disable it.
Edit: If you have for some reason a strong objection and want to veto this, please comment below.
Edit: I enabled down-votes with the upgrade to Lemmy version 0.18. At the time of writing this it is 45 votes for enabling down-votes, 32 against enabling them, and 10 abstentions. Lets see how it goes.
I think that replying to a wrong answer with its correction or a reason why it is wrong should do the trick in your scenario. I don’t think most people write a wrong reply knowing it is wrong (In which case it is the moderator’s job to act upon misinformation), and not being able to downvote them spares them of the unnecesary -100 votes to a mistake. This works much better here than in Reddit, since the communities are not that big and these sort of comments would not be swallowed by the rest, but even in Reddit, what made me realize comments were wrong was the replies to them, and not necessarily the downvotes.
And as for personal oppinions, I feel like in real life we don’t use “downvotes”. If I like what you say, I hang out with you, if I don’t, I simply won’t be around you, I don’t go tellig other people “beware of that person”. So I don’t see the need to bring that to an online community.
But again, you probably have more experience in the matter, so take my opinion with a grain of salt :)