By advantage I mean posts from those instances receiving more visibility than others on feeds that sort by score (active, hot, top).

There seems to be at least two ways in which posts from instances that don’t allow downvotes receive an advantage:

  • They don’t federate downvotes. That means other instances only count downvotes from their own users but not from the rest of the fediverse.
  • A downvote sometimes can be counted and federated as an upvote. This happens when you first upvote a post and then change it to a downvote.

Let’s see an example. Suppose we are a user from instance A that allows downvotes and we want to vote a post on instance B that doesn’t allow downvotes. Watch what happens on instance C that also allows downvotes.

  1. Before the vote this is what users from each instance see (upvote - downvote = total score)
    A: 10 - 0 = 10
    B: 10 - 0 = 10
    C: 10 - 0 = 10

  2. Now we upvote the post:
    A: 11 - 0 = 11
    B: 11 - 0 = 11
    C: 11 - 0 = 11

  3. We misclicked, we meant to downvote the post:
    A: 10 - 1 = 9
    B: 11 - 0 = 11
    C: 11 - 0 = 11

If the post was hosted on an instance that allowed downvotes users from instance C would see a total score of 9.

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133 points

It does. I will never use an instance without downvotes. Nobody liked it when youtube downvotes were hidden.

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24 points

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.

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9 points

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.

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12 points

I left lemmy.one because of this.

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yes

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0 points

Eh depends, general purpose instance? Yeah. Instance for porn or “controversial” content, thats different.

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-33 points

I loved it when Youtube downvotes were hidden.

Next on the chopping block: upvotes.

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8 points

Counterargument: it ruined https://youtu.be/Vx5prDjKAcw and that’s not cool.

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6 points

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/Vx5prDjKAcw

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

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5 points

With the return YouTube dislike add-on, it shows as remaining in balance.

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-11 points

That is a tragedy, but sometimes good things must die to allow better to rise from their ashes.

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