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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42 points

I was on Beehaw and they block downvotes. I didn’t think much of it until I went to a federated channel with low participation (it was a new channel) and I wanted to downvote some bot-spam… but couldn’t cause Beehaw didn’t allow it.

I understand (but don’t agree with) the site operators intention, but their rational breaks down if you view the fediverse as something more than the single instance you’re registered with.

Fortunately, it’s easy to “vote with your feet”.

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17 points

Beehaw seems to want to only be beehaw lol. I’m honestly not sure why they’re even using lemmy to host their community.

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4 points
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1 point

If it becomes a big enough problem, other instances can de-federate with problematic instances. I don’t like de-federation, but I also don’t like disabling downvotes.

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3 points
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Wait, so disallowing downvotes means you can’t downvote posts from any federated instance or did I get it wrong? That’s kinda weird…

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1 point

Users who can’t handle downvotes on their own instance clearly can’t be trusted with downvotes elsewhere.

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0 points

their rational breaks down if you view the fediverse as something more than the single instance you’re registered with.

How so?

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12 points

Well Beehaw’s rational is explained in this thread.

The reason I wanted to downvote was because Reddit communities like GameDeals is one of the new equalization I cannot easily find on Lemmy.

Thus, I found !gamedeals@lemmit.online / https://lemmit.online/c/gamedeals. It uses a bot to scrape the content from Reddit, but the scoring and popularity is missing.

When I joined there were only 13 people subscribed (now it’s 150+). If I’m limited to upvotes, it was difficult to “vote for the threads I liked” vs “vote for the shovelware” that appears in that channel.

With downvote, I was able to downvote shovelware and upvote threads I thought others would be interested. Everything else would be left as neutral.

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