It does. I will never use an instance without downvotes. Nobody liked it when youtube downvotes were hidden.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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I think there should be an option (unless there is) for mods to turn off (or hide) voting as needed. That might be an effective way to cancel any downvote brigades. Lemmy really doesn't have the population for mass vote manipulation now, but it will soon enough.
Hiding all votes can also help mitigate some superficial bias, but not all. I believe that if a person sees a comment with a few dozen downvotes first, they tend not to read the post objectively. After being on Reddit for such a long time (12 years or so), I found that it was super easy to manipulate voting trends if I caught a post or comment at just the right time.
Hiding only downvotes is just silly though. Some register of public opinion, positive or negative, still has its uses, IMHO.
I dont see any issue with the user choosing weather upvotes or downvotes are visible or not. Not in favor of moderators or admins having a choice on this matter.
I left lemmy.one because of this.
yes
Eh depends, general purpose instance? Yeah. Instance for porn or "controversial" content, thats different.
I have a very controversal piece of software for managing Lemmy that I posted about. It's mainly for personal instances to sync defederated lists from larger entities. I.E. I want to own my account (or small group), and while I would use this larger site, I will use my own to spread the load, but trust the admins' judgment.
If it weren't for down votes, from the post listing page users would think it was a huge hit, and not realize there is a healthy debate about how to use it, why, and when.
IIRC the removal of the upvote is also federated.
When you change it to a downvote you first need to remove the upvote, that's why it changed from 11 to 9.
So, in instances B and C you'll end up with 10 score.
Yes, but if you then downvoted the post it would still show a score of 10 in B and C instead of 9. This is the first of the two advantages I described. Even worse, if the post received 2 downvotes from ten different instances it would still show a score of 10 or 8 instead of -10.
Keep in mind that not everyone is using the upvotes weighting, so it's not just about "those who allow downvotes and those who don't".
Personally, I find the whole upvoting/downvoting thing to be a very toxic feature that encourages hive mind and blaming divergence, so I hide scores and I sort posts and comments by chronological order. I would not use Lemmy if I was forced to be under the influence of social scoring, so defederating from instances which do not apply the same rules on downvoting would feel very detrimental to me.
Upvotes/downvotes were implemented by websites like Reddit as a scaling trick, so they can get millions of users without the need to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators. But it turned out that adding subreddits with volunteer moderators worked better anyway, and this is already what we have on Lemmy, with instance owners and community moderators, so there is really no need for some dystopian scoring of everything someone says.
Voting doesn't seem to affect visibility very much.
It depends how you sort. I'm currently browsing "Top 6 hour" and it's numerically sorted by number of votes
Technically, yes. But you seem to have missed the point of a social network. (Too absorbed by the commercial ones?)
If it mattered at all, the platform would be worthless. There is nothing stopping an instance from just lying about those numbers anyway.
Outright lying about the numbers is very different from just not allowing downvotes though.
Yes. We should get rid of upvotes too to make it fair.