I am predicting that before the company goes bankrupt, Reddit will remove downvotes in an effort to prevent users from expressing negative sentiment. This happened a few years ago on YouTube after YouTube Rewind became the world’s most disliked video, several years in a row. This was embarrassing for the company because it revealed the discontent of the userbase.
Since expressing discontent is bad for their reputation, and manually removing dislikes is a time consuming task, removing the downvote button altogether for the sake of “preventing bullying” is likely the next step for Reddit.
I guess I’m a pussy but I’ve never been a big fan of the upvote-downvote system. It can be useful if someone comes in spouting some straight up nonsense, but people typically also downvote posts and comments that don’t have anything wrong with them for petty reasons. And I tend to feel hurt by that lmao
Sounds like the beehaw.org instance is more your thing
I can see the value in that but in these smaller websites the more activity the better, and they already cut lemmy.world out 🫤
They’re worried about spam bots iirc; maybe once Lemmy gets better moderation tools they’ll open up again, though perhaps they also just need self-contained communities with their own moderators like other instances instead of trying to moderate everything themselves.
That’s the real crux of the issue.
In these smaller communities people also tend to upvote and downvote more responsibly. The system isn’t inherently a problem if the users can control their emotions and understand their role. On reddit, there was 0 chance of that. Here, maybe.
I appreciate the upvote-downvote system more on Lemmy, as even if your comment gets disliked you can still see that some people agree with you. That information is not lost.
In the reddit scenario where that information is lost, you end up with group-think. People see a large amount of dislikes and go “comment bad, dislike.”
Oh yes, it’s definitely better this way compared to reddit
You need some signal to know what to look at. It’s at the core of how Reddit works. Sometimes looking at the most downvoted posts can be very informative.