My wonderful co-admin @supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone has made a modification to the downvote system. It’s not currently enabled, but if we were to turn it on, downvotes would be available for use, but they would weigh 5 times less than an upvote.
Which is to say, it would take 5 downvotes to counter an upvote. This would let downvotes have an impact on what appears in the hot topics sort, but hopefully mitigate some of the more negative impacts of downvoting.
Are there any strong objections from Blahaj Lemmy users to enabling downvotes with this modification?
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Downvotes are a useful tool for sorting content and unless they are being abused should be implemented with a 1:1 weight with downvotes.
That will not be happening.
Is it possible to have no downvotes on Blahaj, but do have downvotes on federated communities?
This would give Blahaj users the same perception of federated communities as other instances have and give us a safe space in Blahaj. It also means we can sort federated communities like normal and see what everyone else sees, while still having downvotes nonexistent in Blahaj communities.
I’ve never really wanted downvotes in Blahaj, but I’ve worried about not having them for other instances. It feels like I’m not on a “level playing field” when I can be downvoted by others on a federated communities, but can’t downvote anything myself. I’m also worried that with downvotes = 1/5, it would result in a skewed perspective of federated communities if Blahaj sorts federated communities that way too.
I don’t know what the code looks like (yet?) but I feel like denying downvotes only on local communities wouldn’t be a hard change to make.
Edit: I also wouldn’t mind if downvotes were 1/5 on Blahaj but 1=1 on federated communities, but I can see that being a harder change to make.
Edit 2: if this is a straightforward change I wouldn’t mind implementing it when I have time. I have some familiarity with Rust, TS, and JS so it wouldn’t be difficult to jump into.
Yeah, I’d like it if other instances were treated “as is” and that their individual policies on voting were respected when displayed to blahaj.zone users. Although, I do not know if it is possible to have two separate policies depending on whether the user is in their home instance.
All this change would do is alter the weighting downvotes have in the sorting algorithm, I dont think it is possible without big changes to alter the displayed score. In anycase the downvotes are still being stored, so anywhere without these changes are unaffected
I think we should give it a try! Can always disable them later.
Weighted downvotes are a good idea. No objections from me
I like this, downvotes would be welcome
I wouldn’t mind trying it but I also always disliked downvoting systems in favour of hiding or reporting/blocking (if it was incredibly out of line). I always thought that down voting was presumptive.
Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it should affect anyone else.
(Edited to say I’m not against it; if it were enabled, I’d be fine with it too. I do like the ability to weight them differently too, so that helps)
After seeing some contentious threads on here recently, it’s actually much nicer to read without seeing all the posts spammed with downvotes. Makes it feel a lot more friendly.
My preference is to keep downvotes disabled.
Some of the comments in the “kick tankies out” post on /c/196 says to me that we need downvotes.
i am largerthanabreadbox
Thanks for sharing!
wow!
I love that we have the fidelity here to implement things like “downvotes are at 0.2x power” and stuff like that! That sounds cool, should totally try that out and see how it ends up feeling. I think people would ultimately be OK with a near-zero-power downvote, if that ends up negatively affecting conversations too much.
Would it be possible to enable this at the topic level but not the comment level? My thinking is that it makes sense for helping users decide what posts to read in the first place, but would still discourage low-effort negativity that doesn’t actually contribute to a discussion.
But even if the answer to that is “no”… I don’t strongly object to trying this out and seeing how it works for this community. 🙂 If de-weighted downvotes still lead to problems, the change could always be reverted. Thank you for exploring the options!
Would it be possible to enable this at the topic level but not the comment level?
That’s actually a really good idea, and it addresses most of my concerns with the downvote system. However, I have no idea what is involved in making that happen in the backend, and don’t want to throw even more work at @supakaity :)
So, looking at the Lemmy code it seems pretty straightforward (like, really straightforward. There’s two checks, one for comments and one for posts, so just make them use different functions). I can try doing it, maybe even propose it as a PR upstream. Might take me a day or two for a PR though.
If you don’t end up making the PR I’m down to go check it out. If you do make the PR, link it so I can go give my support for it lol.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3063 it got denied, and it’s incomplete, but if you want to base yourself off of this I’m all for it.
Ah that’s a shame, although I understand where they’re coming from being wary of complicating settings for the front-end. Either way I’ll look into it a bit when I can get to my PC and see if there’s still any hope for it lol.
Regardless of what happens with it, I appreciate you making the PR!
If it’s straightforward, I’d Very much support this!
I like the partial weights, it basically means that the whole community has to band together to hide something, which is essentially what they were originally supposed to be used for on reddit.
I came into this thread thinking that I want downvotes enabled, and now after reading some pretty compelling arguments I can see how disabled makes a lot of sense too. Hopefully this partial weight approach is a good balance between the two. Can always continue to iterate
I think that is a fair system! I still want the option to throw a downvote if something really needs it - but it keeps brigading or shit from happening.
Having been here for a couple of days I now feel that downvotes are a bad idea. They don’t add anything of value to the discussion that cannot be expressed by simply not upvoting. If they must be re-enabled (which I disagree with) I think they should be at least an order of magnitude different, 20:1 or even 50:1, just to make brigading harder. I don’t miss them from Reddit, and if they’re enabled at 5:1, I’d consider finding another instance where they’re just disabled - but hey, I’m new, so I might be missing something.
