Recently, many of our anti-Zionists posts have been downvoted to oblivion by liberals. As hexberians realized a while back, downvotes only help liberals since they are more numerous and they don’t need to engage in discourse. I am proposing to just get rid of downvotes and instead engage in discourse on content that we disagree on.
I largely ignore voting scores, but occasionally use down votes when I think someone has a bad take. A comment is better,but sometimes it’s not worth the effort to comment about a disagreement. Discourse does not seem to be missing or replaced by down votes.
The idea of removing voting scores altogether is more attractive to me than removing down votes and I think others have made good points for how this functionality can help with moderation and needlessly clogging up threads with emotes that function the same as a downvote. Ultimately, even downvoting in mass has little to no impact on Lemmy.
That said, if there are arguments for how removing the downvote button would improve things, I’m open to listening to them as well as running a trial without down votes for a month or so. In the later case, it would be nice to have some metrics that we could track and follow up with a poll.