Really loving the new experiences here on Lemmy.one. But I’m seeing many subs with off-topic posts. Community downvotes will help overworked mods find and remove such posts. I understand no one likes to be downvoted but it’s a necessary tool for our community and only helps users understand and refine what and where they are to be posting their content.
Vote counts are a great way to measure public sentiment at a glance. It’s also mostly (but not always) correlated with the quality and/or accuracy of the post. If people only judge a post based on that number, it’s a problem with the people and not the voting mechanism.
I recently had the experience where I was looking for a squid farm design in Minecraft. A Youtube video came up that explicitly said it worked with my version. As you probably know, Youtube recently decided to hide all downvotes. But the video had a few thousand views and ~50 upvotes, so I spent 3 hours collecting the resources and building the farm in my world. And then it didn’t work at all. There wasn’t even an adjustment I could make to fix it. If I could have seen the probably 100+ downvotes, I would have known to look into it more and not waste my time and effort on that stupid design.
I agree with this sentiment, however wouldn’t an actual text post saying it doesn’t work with your version have been more beneficial than downvotes? I think that is a good example of why downvotes are, to me, the “lazy” option. Not having them means more direct engagement is required.
It’s a question of time and effort to obtain that information. Without downvotes, you’d need to read each comment, categorize it as positive or negative, and then add them up yourself. With potentially thousands of comments in potentially multiple languages, that would be very impractical (if not impossible) to do.
You could probably save a lot of time by setting an absolute acceptable threshold (i.e. “if this has at least 8 negative comments”), but the entire practice is unnecessary considering that there’s a native function to do all of that.
you would never know if the downvotes are because of video quality, someone not liking the narrator’s voice (or the content creator itself). As someone else mentioned, an actual comment saying it doesn’t work on a version is way clearer
it hasn’t been my experience in quite a few communities. People will downvote things they don’t wanna hear, even if it’s the truth, or just an opinion.
You’re right that people may downvote for a variety of (possibly bad) reasons, which is why that metric shouldn’t be the only one you use. In addition to just being interesting and informative, I see overall negative sentiment as an indication that the content deserves more scrutiny. Not to discount it, but maybe verify claims that I would have otherwise taken at face value.
Also, the process of manually reading and categorizing comments as positive or negative and then adding them up is much more labour intensive than just looking at a number. I can appreciate that there are some benefits to that approach, but I don’t think it’s worth it considering that there’s a native feature specifically for that purpose.
I guess people in general prefer this way - which is probably why 99% of Lemmy instances have downvotes enabled. You can choose any one of them :)
For me, it makes me more stressed about posting stuff, specially since you can be downvote bombed just for saying you didn’t like X book, or whatever.
It also makes me more stressed when reading comments, for some reason. Either when I see an innocent random comment with negative points - I feel bad for the commenter - or when I end up using it as a disagree button and get more stressed. IDK why.
So for me, not having it is way better. Otherwise I maybe wouldn’t even have created a Lemmy account, and used the “opportunity” (Reddit down in flames) to be less online - which I guess would also be a great outcome.
TLDR: some people prefer no downvotes, but most instances allow them. Your user is already on lemmy.ml, so why do you care?
I actually agree that people should just join an instance that best fits with their goals rather than trying to change an existing instance (assuming that things were always that way). I’m only arguing about the benefits of downvotes in general.
I care because I think most people are better off with downvotes enabled; it would be in the best interest of the majority of people if they supported downvotes. I also support the existence of instances with downvotes disabled, I just don’t think that most people should use them.