I hope they don’t do this, I’ll have to jump ship again. Downvotes are useful for seeing how a comment is actually being received. Say something that sounds true but isn’t? You can see the downvotes, without it you only see the upvotes and upvote the person thinking it is the truth. This happened on youtube, you can’t tell which videos are actually giving you the right knowledge for say a technical problem, all the bad tutorials just seem to be upvoted. I’ve also seen highly upvoted comments on reddit that were completely full of shit, you can’t see how many people downvoted.
The problem is many Lemmy instances don’t use downvotes (like beehaw), so posts and replies from those sites will unnaturally rise to the top and drown out other users.
That would be a pity -personally I think downvotes, for all they can be abused, are a necessary counterpart to upvotes if you’re going to have a voting system at all. “All attention is good attention” doesn’t work well in real life or online.
Now if a change was made to allow individual magazines to choose upvotes+downvotes, only upvotes or none at all, I think there’s a better case for that - let people try different systems for different circumstances,
Ernest has said he’s open to removing downvotes altogether. I’m sure it will be brought up again.
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/3
I hope they don’t do this, I’ll have to jump ship again. Downvotes are useful for seeing how a comment is actually being received. Say something that sounds true but isn’t? You can see the downvotes, without it you only see the upvotes and upvote the person thinking it is the truth. This happened on youtube, you can’t tell which videos are actually giving you the right knowledge for say a technical problem, all the bad tutorials just seem to be upvoted. I’ve also seen highly upvoted comments on reddit that were completely full of shit, you can’t see how many people downvoted.
The problem is many Lemmy instances don’t use downvotes (like beehaw), so posts and replies from those sites will unnaturally rise to the top and drown out other users.
That would be a pity -personally I think downvotes, for all they can be abused, are a necessary counterpart to upvotes if you’re going to have a voting system at all. “All attention is good attention” doesn’t work well in real life or online.
Now if a change was made to allow individual magazines to choose upvotes+downvotes, only upvotes or none at all, I think there’s a better case for that - let people try different systems for different circumstances,