Did they get re enabled? I noticed a downvote button yesterday and thought it might be a glitch, but it’s still here today.

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.

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

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.

Liftoff also shows a downvote arrow resulting in the same error as mentioned for wefwef. (I tried it on this post.) I do agree with consideration for UX, but I haven’t missed the ability to do so because I rarely downvote.