• @Stoneykins
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        51 year ago

        Not really. Some instances have upvotes only, and they still work perfectly fine as link and comment aggregators.

        It mostly prevents dogpiling and certain types of brigading to not allow downvotes. I haven’t seen any downsides personally.

        • DMmeYourNudes
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          fedilink
          31 year ago

          No instance has no downvotes, they just hide the button in the theme like subreddits would do too. And nothing about this system prevents people from mass downvoting or upvoting a post because of group think, ask me how I know.

          • @Stoneykins
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            1 year ago

            If you downvote my comments they do not register on my instance. It is more than the lack of a visible button, the downvotes do not federate.

            Edit: to be clear, this post is on lemmy.world, so I can be downvoted here (even though I won’t see it unless I browse from lemmy.world). And from lemmy.world you can appear to downvote things on instances without downvotes, but you are basically just downvoting the local copy of the thing. The downvote never gets sent through, it just lives on your instance.

            • DMmeYourNudes
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              fedilink
              31 year ago

              If your instance removed the button, the system will register the votes, even if you can’t see it. This is just more fragmentation of the experience for users fostering more confusion and alienation of new users.

              Wanna check? Log in though an app and… Ta da, downvotes!

              • @Stoneykins
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                41 year ago

                Ok, I logged into jerboa.

                Still no downvotes. Just because some apps can show the downvotes from the api doesn’t mean they are federated.

                For the record, downvote me. Please. I don’t care. I like not having a downvote because it doesn’t allow me to downvote other people. It helps keep me in a better headspace.

                • DMmeYourNudes
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                  1 year ago

                  If you can’t downvote bad posts, then you will see a massive rise of bad posts. This is why YouTube removing the dislike button was such an issue.

                  • @Stoneykins
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                    41 year ago

                    Not really in my experience. I can tell when something is disliked by how few upvotes it recieves. Instead of bad posts sitting at the bottom with -20 votes, they sit at the bottom with 1 vote. Functionally the same.

                    Youtube removing the dislike button was more about their attempt to obfuscate public opinion on things like movie trailers, game trailers, and the various videos related to big PR decisions by companies. The companies posting these things wanted a hosting place where only positive interactions are allowed, regardless of the topic in question, and youtube accommodated them.

                    It is still infinitly possible to distinguish bad videos from good ones without a dislike button on youtube. But it is much more difficult now to find out how many people agree with you that a video is bad, which used to be nice to know on things like movie trailers, game trailers, and big PR decisions.

      • @Sackbut@lemmy.world
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        11 year ago

        Not really. I’m on another Lemmy instance that doesn’t have it, and I really like it. Not sure why people are upset at my comment.

        • DMmeYourNudes
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          1 year ago

          Because if the only way you can interact with a post is by voting up or voting down, then a few problems occur. First, any instance or app that lets you use the downvotes now has a stronger voice than anyone who isn’t using the downvotes. Second, it means users can not push down bad content without a consistent supply of new content to vote over it, a massive problem for small communities. And third, it fragments the community making the service harder to use.