I seem to recall that we did not had the option of downvoting posts, but I’ve noticed now the red arrow appears for me? Is it a bug, an error, was I blind before, or did the feature get added?
Image for testing purposes, I did not leave the downvote on the donations thread
I enabled it to see if the brigading of down votes had stopped, and because off topic posts have been made to communities but were making it higher up in communities because down votes were not enabled, but that is only really a side reason.
I think downvotes have their place in forums like reddit and lemmy, when not abused. If I see reports of abuse again, they’ll be disabled.
Well, let’s see how it goes, I guess. I’m not a big fan, and lack of downvotes was a good reason to feel more comfortable here.
I’ll keep in mine the criticism, and please do report any apparent harassment of downvotes
I agree with the secondary reasoning of irrelevant community posts. I report quite a few posts for that(mostly from content creators just spamming any and every community). Running a test is fine, but I don’t think much has changed about the primary reasoning though I’m afraid. It might help with the spam at least because that’s been bad recently.
I’m on strike until they get turned off again or the end of time, whichever is sooner.
Why is that?
If you look at my profile, you can see one picture that I decided to leave. It attracted, so far, 4 upvotes and three downvotes. The net score is 1, which is the same as if I hadn’t bothered posting it. Easier not to bother.
Ok, but not all your posts will get downvotes like that.
Why should I get any at all?
You ain’t paying me, it’s rare that people leave a comment thanking me, although some users very kindly have. So all that’s left is the pleasure of seeing a post do well. Unfortunately, because of the mechanics of the board if a post doesn’t do well in the early part of the day or is rushed off the front page by a rush of content then it rarely becomes visible to the Americans when they come online.
And returning to the last post standing, OK it’s not a popular post which I would know if the score was 4. But four people liked it. It bought a very small but significant amount of pleasure to their visit here. Why should it be necessary for people to downvote it? I already know that they are part of the overwhelming majority of people that didn’t upvote it.
Last point: go look at the one comment on that post. I haven’t had a comment like that before. But it happened the day the downvotes got turned on.
I don’t think you can equate downvotes coming back to one rude comment, as I’ve said before please report any rude comments, they will be removed.
I sympathize with the satisfaction of seeing a post doing well and that being affected by downvotes, and I will keep what you’ve said in mind. I think the benefit of pushing spam down will be greater than the effect it has on real posters, but that has yet to be seen, like I said this is a trial run. If you do keep posting please do report any apparent downvote brigading and I will definitely re-visit the issue.
Listen, you’re going to do what you want and so am I. And that’s fair enough.
You’re not blind. Downvotes were re-enabled again yesterday. There’s been no communication from admin regarding it though.
Odd choice, I’m pretty sure that the instances that don’t allow it have done it explicitly because that’s a fairly harmful way of engaging with a community - and also generally ruins post formatting
It was a deliberate choice that was made about a year ago due to a lot of brigading and people being generally shitty to the already limited number of posters. I don’t think anything has changed regarding this though. I’m not sure what you mean by changing post formatting though as it really shouldn’t affect that.
By posts formatting I meant how vote and downvote can shift a conversation up and down, but on second thought the upvotes by themselves already change that, so it isn’t that big of a change
Still sounds like something that is used more for harm than good, however
It’s sure to encourage people to share of themselves when they recieve two parts downvotes to every three parts upvotes. The lemmyverse is a hateful place.
I was disappointed to see it as well and I don’t expect positive outcomes to come from it. We’ll see what happens though I guess.
Yeah I believe its new. I just noticed it yesterday.
