I’ve been so used to judging a post just by its popularity on reddit, but it’s actually so much more useful to have an idea of the downvote ratio. I’m glad we have that here.
It was a scandal when it disappeared from YouTube, but I didn’t realize it was missing from Reddit too for much longer!
Same, first positive thing I noticed. This really feels like Reddit in the beginning–I like it!
at least Reddit showed the upvote - downvote balance, YouTube only shows upvotes, which is a completely useless number.
Looking at you, beehaw.org
hm. The instance I’m on, lemmy.one, doesn’t have a downvote button or a ratio. Can each server owner configure it to remove that? Maybe I should switch instances! Is there an easy way to export all of my communities and migrate to lemmy.ml?
Yes, servers can disable downvotes. Beehaw does that, for instance. I’m on lemmy.world which allows both. I prefer both because I think it helps silence bad faith participation with less active moderation, but I respect that some places don’t want it.
Is there an easy way to check what the “properties” of each instance? Example
- downvote_allowed: true - max_image_size: 500kb - community_allowed: false - no_mail_login: falseunfortunately, “bad faith” is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes I wish to very silently express my disapproval without alerting anyone that there has been disapproval. Everyone finds themselves holding a deeply unpopular/controversial opinion from time to time, bc the universe is a complex place. I see it more as doing my part to “slow the angry mob” when the groupthink starts to get out of control
It also enables bad faith participation such as down-vote brigading.
while that’s true, people will always find a way to be jerks. if people can’t be jerks with a downvote, they’ll express their jerkitude verbally, which is certainly worse. i just wish we could move beyond the point where a downvote (or a bunch) was enough to emotionally devastate a person-- or where people feel the need to do that to others.
this is such a nice place now, but, then again, so was reddit in the beginning.
It’s something that can be configured, at least at the server level, which is cool.
I’m running my own personal instance, and I’m keeping downvotes enabled. It’s something that I’d really like to see, personally, but I have absolutely no judgement or concern for instances that choose to disable downvoting.
I do wonder if that’s something that can be managed at the community level, though. I can definitely imagine some communities opting to disable downvoting, if their server admin(s) allowed it.
its probably my favorite feature of lemmy/kbin
Everyone feel free to downvote me so you can see it in action
B-b-but… Your karm- Oh wait. Never mind.
Added a cheeky down vote for you 😉
Idk about anyone else, but the icons are completely/temporarily invisible on my end. I can hit them and they appear though, sometimes.
Edit: Adding a photo

Yeah, its just lemmy.ml’s servers being overloaded.
Quick, everybody upvote this guy! Positive bullying!
I really like that you can hide scores on posts and comments altogether. I don’t like seeing the upvotes or downvotes. I don’t want to base my opinion on a comment or post on what other people have felt about it, and so just not seeing their reaction to it at all helps prevent that. I don’t think popularity is necessarily a useful factor to consider in judging a post or comment. This is one complaint I have about the Jerboa app right now, is that it doesn’t respect the Hide Scores preference.
Everytime I loomed at my most upvoted comments/submissions on reddit, it would just be populist low effort crap that I wrote.
The meaningful insightful comments that I wrote barely got more than a handful of votes.
The voting system really isn’t that indicative of anything in my opinion, other than how willing we are to lower ourselves to pander to the lowest common denominator.
What I really hope to see is some client-side algorithms that can let you track who vote-voted-for-what. This way, you (your client) could ignore downvotes if you detect brigading or rings and it could boost a particular post if it happened to be upvoted by a friend of yours.













