Memes about the Fediverse.
Other relevant communities:
That's typical reddit behavior, many of them brought their childish habits over to the fediverse.
Why care? There is no karma system. Just move on
If you're moderating a small community, downvotes can bury posts and hurt its growth.
I still think downvotes (and upvotes!) should count for more when they come from subscribers. At least for sorting within the community
People even downvote legit news from fairly non-biased sources on Lemmy just because they don't like what is being reported. It's actually kinda wild.
Can't they just block the communities?
Already 2 steps ahead, 3 steps backwards, and 2 forwards. If one shows up on the "all" feed, I block it. Ain't much left AFAIK.
It's best for me to block them rather than just downvote a random post purely based on the community it's in.
for some reason i literally can't downvote anything
You're on a no-downvote instance.
Sorry, sister. As others have said Blahaj Zone doesn't do downvotes. I think it was to ensure a less negative space for The Community (in that you can still downvote things and brigade without being clocked as bigoted) but that's a bit apocryphal.
Instances can disable this feature maybe blahaj has done so?
I think people often use /all to browse, which makes sense for a fairly small site like Lemmy. But the downside is that people then upvote or downvote based on their preferences, not the community's.
(Eg, the fellow below who has decided Apple and Nintendo are like Nazis and must always be downvoted.)
Complaing about downvotes? Straight to jail.
Does it stay in the Apple and Nintendo communities or does it get cross-posted everywhere? I don't downvote for dislike, but I don't want to block a general community because some asshat is crossposting just under spam levels.
I downvote for verifiably false.
I worked at a site with a karma system years before reddit and the like ever came into being. There will always be people who just downvote anything they don't like. Unless you start finding and removing those users, nothing is going to change with them. And if you start removing chunks of your community, you have fewer posters, less interaction, etc.
A good chunk of active Lemmy users are interested in open source and digital freedom. Apple and Nintendo are the opposite, very big on vendor lockin and anti consumer practices.
If you're modding a small community trying to get off the ground and you're suffering from downvoters who aren't participants in your comm, ban the downvoters.
Edit: Hilarious that I got downvoted by an account with 0 comments
You have two downvoters, probably the same person
flyingsquirrel a sockpuppet with 0 comment / 0 posts
https://lemvotes.org/user/flyingsquirrel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
nothis a vote manipulation account with 0 comment / 0 posts
someone I've had to remove from my communities https://lemvotes.org/user/nothis@sh.itjust.works
Probably a real person's main account, but just really combative with nothing to say
Upvotes/downvotes are unfortunately a fundamentally flawed concept. They originally served as an superior alternative to forums' previous sorting method of most-recently commented, but they are far from flawless themselves.
My ideal alternative would be some kind of customisable sort order chosen by the user that uses some kind of sentiment analysis of the text to find the kind of posts the user is interested in. For example, you could sort by whether post look serious or joking, how long they are, ratio of words to hyperlinks, etc. Could also filter out ragebait and similar rubbish.
Of course I can see downsides - performance considerations, and it would only work for text posts and comments, but it's just an idea off the top of my head.
Not just fediverse, I think any site that allows "downvotes" has this issue.
Personally, I don't see why the ability to downvote needs to exist. If someone is trolling, ignore it or report it. A troll post with a score of 1 and no comments is better than one with a score of -100 and no comments. The downvotes probably encourages the troll. They know they've upset a bunch of people. All their posts getting no interaction will bore them.
On the other hand, downvotes existing leads to things being hated on for no reason. Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines. Now sardines isn't looking so bad even though the number of people who like it hasn't changed. What does the downvoting add? It just makes the people who like sardines feel bad. They might end up not contributing in the future and then every answer to asklemmy ends up being identical.
Downvotes are useful to make bad content sink. Without them, the bad content has the exact same score as fresh new content, content that failed the Fluff Principle, etc. And you do want the bad content to sink; if you don't reduce its visibility, some clueless muppet is bound to interact with it, usually generating more bad content.
That's why I'm not sure if the best solution is to outright remove downvotes. It feels to me like throwing the baby out with the dirty water.
Instead I feel like splitting its role into 2+ buttons might alleviate the issue. Perhaps a simple "disagree" button, or a more complex Slashdot-like system, dunno. Either way, giving people way to say "I disagree!" without interfering on the main purpose of the button - sorting content.
This could also solve another issue with downvotes I don't see people mentioning often: you're often downvoted without knowing why.
Someone on asklemmy asks what your favourite pizza topping is and the top comment is pepperoni with a score of 100 and bottom is sardines with a score of -50. You see that and think nobody likes sardines. But what if taking away downvotes changes the scores to 100 pepperoni and 12 sardines.
At least in the default interface, the sardines comment would show +12 -62, so you know at least 11 people upvoted it.
