this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Downvotes can be a useful tool to shape a community, the issue comes in when several people start downvoting communities they don't even participate in. Which is one of the main issues brought up here.
It may seem very clear to you that "no one" wants downvotes, but as an admin I get complaints for basically every decision made on this site, so what is the "right" choice is sometimes hard to determine. I've been getting complaints about downvotes being disabled for awhile now, so it wasn't clear to me. Even now, the opinion is still very split. Which is why I enabled them quietly to see if it would cause any issues. It did, so I made this post to see if people think the issues created by downvotes outweigh the benefits, and what peoples' other opinions about them are.
This is my opinion based on what I've read and the results of the poll: I think at a later time when lemmynsfw is larger, downvotes may be viable, especially if lemmy implements a custom home feed so that not everyone sees the same posts. This would help mitigate the issue of people not in communities downvoting posts. But as it stands, I'm leaning towards disabling them again. Frequent posters, which are kind of needed for this site to survive, don't seem to like them, and the poll is split almost 50/50. I have to try to balance enjoyability of posting and enjoyability of consuming content on the site, and it just seems like downvotes really hurts posters and only marginally helps consumers.
I'm leaving the poll up for a few more days and am going to continue to read the comments, but, if nothing changes, that's probably what's going to happen.
I know this is an incredibly divisive topic and I don't envy the position this puts admin in. For what it's worth, I appreciate that you're trying to make it work and involving the community in the process.
Downvotes are a useful tool to shape a community and help with moderation, but with the size of the active posting population as well as the broad reach for posts across the greater Fediverse downvotes don't lend well to fostering the human element. It's fine to have them with a larger active community where people can form their own content bubbles, but pretty much anything that's posted here ends up at the top of local for a few hours and is going to get a lot of eyes on it that may not enjoy the premise of the community. You'll have no posts to downvote after the community has chased away anyone who posts though.
With Yiffit, pornlemmy, and now Lemmyf.uk all shut down this is the only dedicated nsfw instance left that I'm aware of. It honestly just seems like Lemmy in general is hostile to nsfw content.
All this seems very fair. I'm under no illusion as to the popularity of downvotes, I would say that damn near all of them want to be able to downvote.
The question I have asked you and have asked @CombedSpaghetti is what motivates me or any of your other regular posters to post when they know that all their efforts can be nullified, for any reason you can think of, by someone pushing a button at the wrong moment.
And you can't. Not unless you cut us in on that sweet crypto action 😜
Like I said I understand what you're saying, my answer is it's not always as simple as doing something that makes one group of people happy, I have to weigh the options, which is why I made this post.
Also, I don't get paid to do this, they crypto money goes 100% to paying for hosting the site to my knowledge. All the admins have day jobs.
I know, it was a joke because we can all see what the finances are.
Truth is, as I think you already know, that you couldn't pay me enough to overcome this issue.