You remember when Youtube neutered their downvote button? It's still there but effectively useless? Now we can't warn other users of AI slop, scams, or the other terribleness the web is full of.

But sure let's do that to Lemmy.

If they got rid of downvotes then what are we supposed to do when tankies post their slop?

Weird. Is it because I'm on the Voyager app I don't see downvote options? Or the community my account is on?

As another downvoter I will also take the time to explain:

I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.

If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I'd be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.

The downvote button is a quick shortcut to let people know their comment is "bad", with a lot less risk of raising attention to the level where someone might dig through post/comment history or worse doxx/swat someone.

Does that mean that downvoting is perfect? Of course not. I would say that probably downvotes should be weighted much lower than 1:1 with upvotes, and it wouldn't surprise me if it makes sense to ignore them completely or maybe just a tiebreaker. Might also be important to distinguish comment-downvotes from post-downvotes, but I'll gladly leave it to the software designers to worry about all that.

Disliking must be highly addictive 😂

There are some communities which have downvotes disabled, blahaj is one of them. I don't know how many downvotes you have and I don't care anymore. It's way more interesting to engage. Also, since I'm on blahaj I comment and upvote much more. Downvotes kill discussion.

Honestly, reading comments around, remove display of up/down votes entirely, but keep the system and instead add two tags "Popular" and "Unpopular", both working on certain tresholds to both amount of votes and ratio of votes. Keep positioning mechanics with using votes to position content, but apply them only to tagged elements.

This way we enable discussion on most topics without problems and incentivise actually talking about topics, while still keeping the means to flag both bad will content and content most valued by community.

With Lemmy I'd say having minimum 50 votes total for comment and 100 for post sound good for total vote treshold, while having 75% of upvotes/downotes sounds good as a ratio treshold. But I am not sure on these, as I am honestly freeballin it right now.

Heck, leave the amount of total votes up to communities - some are bigger, some are smaller after all.

i downvoted you bc i disagree with your stance on the existence of the downvote button. i think its a helpful tool for the quality of the site and user experience. i have no idea who you are, i havent even read your username.

I agree with you. Internet forums were better before likes/etc.

Before you had to state an opinion to engage any idea. Which drives conversations. You had to stake your reputation via alias. Which is why forums built such strong communities.

There were certainly downsides and old style forums don't scale well for modern user levels.

But I think the defaultism of likes/voting lowers the bar of participation and in doing so also fundamentally lowers the quality of any conclusions derived therein.

Enforced toxic positivity does not produce better conversations or better communities. It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there's no other option. It's the kind of yes-man thinking you get in corporate meetings that produce really bad ideas because "don't be negative! there are no bad ideas here!"

The average internet user unfortunately is a dumb person and if they come across something they do not understand, they downvote :/ it is that mentality, the bits and the propaganda which led me away from Reddit. Sad to see it here so soon