While it may be a little demoralizing to see a downvote on something you care about, 'tis a part of life. When I see something I posted get downvoted, my first instinct isn’t to assume it’s people being malicious. I take it as an oppurtunity to look at the post and ask myself “what is it about this post that people don’t like?”.

I noticed another person brought up the YouTube Dislike removal thing, and I’d like to add that programmers were rightfully upset to the point of creating a third-party API and browser plugin just to bring it back. That was more in response to the rampant amount of misinformation and scam videos on the platform, but I think it has some resonance here as well. I don’t think taking away a feedback mechanism, regardless of it’s potential for abuse/harassment, is a good idea.

If I may, I’d like to bring in another comparison- E621. Say what you may about E6, but the up/downvote system there works well because some posts just aren’t good. Sure, it may have passed the janitors, but the post itself and/or it’s contents may be objectionable. With E621, you can hide posts that pass a certain score threshold. This is a good way filter out some of the more… questionable things for a lot of users on top of the existing blocklist system they have in place. Some people may try to game the score system to artificially boost or dump a posts’s score, but the admins/moderators are pretty good at nipping that in bud, so to speak.

Finally, I’d like to bring in the (#)fediblock argument. Even if an instance blocks another, it doesn’t stop the offending instance from replying/reacting to posts that it may have discovered through a relay or another instance. All it does is stop the defending instance from seeing the reply/reaction. Disabling downvotes is the same thing. You can just hop to another instance and see if your post was downvoted.

For now, until the lemmyverse becomes a bit more stable, I don’t think messing with any core functionality is a good idea. It is definitely something worth revisiting again at some point. Who knows? Maybe the developers are working on something to address these concerns.

I understand the sentiment of trying to build a more positive oriented community by getting rid of something like downvotes. However, that feels almost exactly like what Youtube did in removing dislikes on their site, which was widely unpopular. It’s a great indicator of spam or other undesirable content and removing it altogether might be doing more harm than good.

Plus, if filtering becomes a thing, being able to, for example, ignore posts with less than 5 upvotes would do wonders for some browsing once the site gains more traffic.

That said, I will always advocate for options. If that became a setting in a menu somewhere, I think that could be the best of both worlds.

I am personally against disabling downvotes, its the best way to tell content is not popular vs. popular.

Yes, it is working out great for us over at Beehaw. I think it encourages people to have more productive discussions.

I see no real positive benefit to having downvotes. If people like content, then they upvote it. If they don’t, then they don’t. Seems like a much better system that avoids brigading and harassment.

Without downvotes, the trolls are only left with making actual comments for their trolling, which makes it easier to identify (and block) them for what they are. They have to come out in the open for everyone to see.

I personally am in favor of removing downvote entirely.

The downvote was meant to help stop both misinformation, and to help keep a topic on track. Like you start a topic on daily life in the furry community, but then someone brings up a whole offtopic subject about cars in that same topic. The downvote is meant to stop the offtopic post in it’s tracks.

It was never meant to be a tool to show your dislike or disapproval of certain topics or certain subject matter. Like gay furries kissing or 2 ferals doing the deed.

Sadly, to many people today, especially coming from Reddit, they see the downvote button as such a tool. They have weaponized it.

I feel by removing it, it takes away the weaponization. And forces people to do what they should have been doing in the first place. And that is to grow up and learn to ignore the material that offends you and your sensibilities.

I mean, their are something’s I do not like seeing posted, but I am not going to downvote anyone over it just because I don’t like it. I simply ignore it.