I find downvotes very useful to make sure hateful or otherwise harmful content doesn’t rise to the top, and I think that outweighs people overusing it where they disagree. That being said, the nice thing about federation is that I can just find another instance if y’all don’t want it.

I think downvoting can be really useful in case of problematic/malicious/inaccurate content as someone else said.

The issue is it’s often abused by being used even for stuff people mildly dislike. But it is my opinion that it might be easier to encourage people on Lemmy to reserve it for more extreme cases rather than simply for stuff they don’t like, because people over here seem to care more about stuff like that than, say, Reddit.

I tend to find it useful to know if something is heavily down voted because I make a mental note to examine it more critically and make sure no false or malicious “information” is presented, maybe this is similar to the cases of correctly utilized dislikes in YouTube videos.

Also, as others said, some apps for Lemmy like the one I use, still show the downvote button even if it’s not available.

Since I am new here and joined this instance without knowing this, I would like to ask, does this prevent me from downvoting content from other instances as well, or just this one? Because if it’s general I would definitely create more accounts to have on other instances to make sure I can practice this if needed.

I seldom downvote anything. When I do, it’s generally because I think the content is overrated, inaccurate or otherwise problematic and needs its upvotes to be annulled. On a very busy network, that can be a valuable feature. As quiescent as Lemmy is right now, it probably won’t be an issue for awhile! I’m leaning toward “no.”

To play devil’s advocate, various UIs still show the downvote button as they’re not smart enough to know it’s disabled. (I’m browsing with wefwef right now and I see the button, although I receive an error toast if I click it.)

If the protocol has a way to signal to the client that the feature’s disabled, then this is just a bug in wefwef. If disabling of downvotes is proprietary to the Lemmy UI, however, then it’s kind of clumsy of them and there might be an argument in favor of leaving features enabled to promote a better UX.

Please DO NOT enable them. I don’t want to see negativity

Friendly reminder to be clear your asking only users of your instance for a vote. Federation shows your post to everyone and everyone can interact!

I think downvotes are dumb if you want my 2c.