I'm confused, does this mean that if your account was created on an instance without downvotes you can't downvote thongs elsewhere where they're enabled? How does this work the other way?
Not quite. Their downvotes don't influence our algorithms. So here on Blahaj Lemmy, their downvotes don't do anything even if their instance allows them to down vote.
Basically, our ranking algorithms here don't take downvotes in to account, wherever they come from.
Which means that if you view "hot posts" in a community on our instance and then view the same community on another instance, the ranking of the posts might appear different if they count downvotes.
I prefer not having downvotes enabled here. Instead of just downvoting your suggestion, I’m having to actually think about why and put it into words and contribute to the discussion. 😉
Downvoting usually impacts marginalized people far more than “idiots”. (Side note: this sort of casual ableism against people with mental disabilities is extremely common, but we can strive to do better.)
I don't think it really matters either way whether there's downvotes or not,
but I super want to point out that you do not need to get into random debates with people who are just breaking the rules of a community/instance and being bigoted. The correct response is to report and ignore.
Getting back on you about this a little late, something that's been bothering me about this is that I always wish to downvote transphobes. Sure, they're incredibly rare here and usually get moderated away, but whenever I see them I just default to downvote.
I know I could argue with them, show them all the evidence, bomb them with all the links and such, but... At some point you just get tired about it.
I'm also not a big fan that people from other instances can downvote us, while this power is being taken away from us.
But I respect your opinion and in the end, it's not a big deal anyway :)
What about showing both the number of up-and downvotes? This concept of ratios as we know it on twitter leads to the supporters only upvoting the post, but people disliking it upvoting the comments, which means the top comments always disagree. This fosters a climate of rage because the majority of intercations are negative this way. I'd rather just downvote and move on.
You make a fair point, but if the replies to a Lemmy post are overtly hostile, I see that as a failure of moderation rather than of the system itself. Twitter has long been an “almost anything goes” sort of place and was never purposely designed for community-oriented discussions. It’s a microblogging site with discussion features grafted onto it — way back in the day, the Tweet box literally asked “What are you doing?” and there was no reply function so people posted their own “top-level” (there was no other kind) Tweets along the lines of .@user_xyz “Lorem ipsum dolar” My opinion is blah blah blah but that wasn’t automatically shown next to user_xyz’s Tweet for all to see.
Also, I’m not certain of this, but I think displaying downvotes without enabling them would require a software patch. I also suspect it would be confusing to many users and lead to a lot of bug reports.
Yeah I think avoiding downvoting I prefer. Im not sure how it works entirely, but the fact that outside people can't just come here and downvote is actually very appreciated. I know for smaller hobby-type posts, in places like Reddit, seeing downvotes can be very demoralizing for continuing with the hobby, so not having that risk is kinda nice. What would be useful is if Lemmy had some way to allow communities to set if downvotes are allowed or not, but I dont think it does. I rather until Lemmy provides that feature, for this server to not allow downvotes overall.
What would be useful is if Lemmy had some way to allow communities to set if downvotes are allowed or not
Agreed here. On Reddit, some communities use downvotes very effectively as "this information is incorrect" so that mods don't have to remove disinformation all the time. Others it turns into a popularity contest, which isn't great.