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.
What will the etiquette be for down votes? On reddit, they’re supposed to be used for flagging things as irrelevant to the discussion at hand. But they’re often used more closely to how the function on YouTube, in that they act more as a meter of popularity. More than relevance to the discussion, if the comment’s something that’s inappropriate/offensive to whomever reads it, it’ll tend to be down voted. This even seems to happen if it’s a respectfully written, well thought out, disagreeing opinion.
As it stands, I would like to see how things progress with only the up votes enabled. If it turns out that what should end up being commenter-detritus does not actually sink, then I’d be willing to try the down votes.
So I initially voted to keep down votes disabled, but now I’m thinking about switching my vote.
My initial though was essentially everything you just said. But now I’ve noticed a few comments that are just sort of negative in spirit, negative sarcasm, or basically just not a very kind. But they are reply’s to a parent comment that is useful. I feel bad for the parent comment, because someones reply is just mean spirited. Will those kind of comments actually sink? maybe downvotes are useful to show that you appropriate the top comment but not the sarcastic reply?
I dunno just thoughts.