Lemmy implements a scoring system allowing people to upvote or downvote posts. You know that since you are using Lemmy :)
Score can be used to increase or lower visibility of posts, in particular when using some sorting algorithms (active, hot, top).
This can be used to increase the visibility of good quality posts, and lower that of low quality or irrelevant posts.
Yet, from what I observe, the tool is mostly used for communities to self-administer filter bubble. Some communities seem to behave like a hive mind, massively upvoting or downvoting until either the dissident is assimilated in a very Borg way, or excommunicated.
Also, scores seem to be used often to convey cheap moral judgement, without having the need to expose oneself to criticism by providing arguments to sustain their opinion.
Overall, I think scores are more toxic than useful, and I would be in favor of hiding them by default, so that new comers are not put out by them.
What is your opinion about this? What are the advantages of having the score visible by default?
Just a clarification: the question is not “should scores exist or not?”. If people find value in scores, good for them. I’m not one to dictate other people preferences. :)
Removed by mod
I did not know that there are such options in Lemmy admin interface. That’s very good! Thank you for the information
Edit: According to the admin documentation, one can indeed disable downvotes but I don’t think one can hide scores for all users by default.
I checked and you are correct about beehaw. Thank you for the pointer. I’ll probably subscribe to their communities :)
I believe this could make a nice issue for the Lemmy project: Allowing to completely hide voting from the user interface as an instance default option (with option in user settings to turn it back on for themselves).