I was reading the rules of Beehaw.org and they opted to disable downvotes, and I see other instances doing the same.
The main reason is that often the downvote is used as “I don’t like it” instead of “This is not relevant to this community”; in the latter case, I think the “report” button is the correct action to perform.
What are your thoughts on this?
Removed by mod
Being downvoted on OC is pretty sad. A lack of upvotes is enough to signal disinterest.
I think downvotes are important; they complement moderation and add a degree of QC. Furthermore, the possibility of occasional misuse is not a strong argument for taking away core functionality of the platform. If I didn’t want downvotes, I’d go on mastodon.
I think downvotes give core users of a community a chance to slow down low-relevance posts, and reposts, which might otherwise hit the main page and get upvoted by people who don’t really look at the community name. So, I like them for that reason. In other circumstances they’re a bit of a net neutral option compared to simply not upvoting.
deleted by creator
I like this idea as well. Ultimately, it seems like upvotes would hold more weight this way?
Fantastic idea to put the load to decide about relevance to the mods instead of community solving it. /s
I don’t agree. Downvotes might be not relevant and counter productive in general discussions, but in porn communities I think they’re critically important. If there’s no downvotes, spam bots or trolls will overtake communities. Mods can only get to things so fast.
I think things can still be relevant to a community and be disliked. At the moment this is mostly an art sharing community, but I saw some talk about creating subcommunities revolving around nsfw discussions and recommendations.
While I doubt downvoting would be used much, I can see it filtering out low effort content or show disagreeable ideas in discussion based communities. Because of that, I dont see an immediate reason to remove this feature.
I also like the idea of a community having slight self governance to take some of the burden off the mods.
In !gonewild there are a few people that seem to downvote all male content.