I signed up for Lemmy.world, because not having downvotes is stupid and leads to a shitty community.
Ironic that three people downvoted this. But I agree, a “no downvotes” rule is designed to avoid disagreement and conflict, which is impossible on a public forum without extremely restricted expression. If the point is to be always be nice, why not disable open commenting and make users select their replies from a list of canned positive comments. 100% safety and positivity.
I’m torn on the whole no downvote button thing (I missed that when I signed up), but you can be still nice while having a discussion and disagreeing with people.
I would argue that the downvote button can lead to exactly what you are describing though, no disagreement or conflict.
Someone posts a unpopular opinion, a bunch of users downvote it to hell and poof!, no discussion or exchange of ideas. Just out of mind, out of sight.
That’s only true if there is a downvote threshold that automatically hides downvoted comments, which I don’t think Lemmy has implemented. I agree that downvoting can be used to censor and avoid discussion, but the justification for removing downvotes on Beehaw is something like “keeping a positive environment with no negativity from disliking” rather than making sure users have to voice their disagreements and not just smash the blue red arrow like cowards.
There are issues with both sides of the down button debate, but I’m more for it than against.
For a different take on the downvote button, yesterday I put a post up on a technical thread. I hadn’t really read properly what the discussion was about, so my post wasn’t really helpful even if well intentioned. I only noticed when I got a couple of downvotes. I looked again at my post, then at the OP, then realised my error. Eventually I deleted my post. So, in that instance, I found the downvote helpful to myself as well as for the rest of the thread: make sure I read the OP carefully. ;-)
Yes, beehaw one of them.
Maybe when they were a bunch of users it might have been a good idea to prevent brigading, but imho now that there is 1000x user activity it’s needed. I already saw the first spambots posting spam for meds…
I do kinda wonder if beehaw actually has downvotes not do anything for comment ranking and such, or if they just hid the button for it’s users. Because I can still see a downvote button on beehaw communities, being from a different instance, and I often notice comments on that instance that do have a downvote or two, which seems to imply that it does actually record and send data about downvotes from other users
Disabling downvotes is a feature in the lemmy software afaik, but apparently it affects the users on that instance rather than its communities, which certainly seems like it should be the other way around.
All I put was “I like bees and to yeehaw proudly”. Its probably just a way to filter out bot accounts.
Ok now I’m embarrassed about how strongly I pitched myself to get on lemmy.ml. I was like overcaffeinated on the first five minutes of a blind date!
Lol people treating it like a cover letter hahahah! For the instances I joined I just said one or two sentences of what I wanted out of it.
I think things have tightened up a lot over there in the last 5 or so days. I don’t even remember what I put (definitely nothing more substantial than yours) and I have an account over there of similar to age. People who have tried to sign up more recently have mentioned being rejected after multiple serious looking responses.
I put a serious response and was snubbed. Only put a sentence or two so maybe they were looking for something more.
I like lemmy.world so far - relatively neutral admins, no weird stuff like disabling downvotes, you can create communities and post nsfw!
I signed up to lemmy world because I thought it was Lemmy’s World which sounds like Wayne’s World. I like Wayne’s World.
I’m here because I didn’t know what I was doing when I signed up.
