As much as I like the wholesomeness of the concepts of upvotes only, I’d love to downvote idiots on other instances
You make a fair point, but if the replies to a Lemmy post are overtly hostile, I see that as a failure of moderation rather than of the system itself. Twitter has long been an “almost anything goes” sort of place and was never purposely designed for community-oriented discussions. It’s a microblogging site with discussion features grafted onto it — way back in the day, the Tweet box literally asked “What are you doing?” and there was no reply function so people posted their own “top-level” (there was no other kind) Tweets along the lines of . “Lorem ipsum dolar” My opinion is blah blah blah but that wasn’t automatically shown next to user_xyz’s Tweet for all to see.
Also, I’m not certain of this, but I think displaying downvotes without enabling them would require a software patch. I also suspect it would be confusing to many users and lead to a lot of bug reports.
Moderators can’t do anything here, this system just means that there will be a lot more arguing because the replies will be negative, reagardless of the overall toxicity level. Enabling users to display their disagreement with a comment directly has many benefits, how that effects how many people will see the comment is something else, but this is one of the things I really liked about reddit. You can still discuss if you want, but often you don’t wanna waste time and/or get drawn too much into it. It is a more accurate measure of what people think about a comment.
