While I have in the past felt the emotional impact of passive negativity that down voting makes easy, I think down votes are an essential tool for online communities.
Look what happened to youtube when dislikes were removed.
Did dislikes on youtube ever do anything though?
yes, they told you if a video was low quality or misinfo
Also, we laughed at terrible movie trailers, but that was probably the reason that they took away downvotes.
Try to look for a very rare guide on how to fix something and you will be surprised. The dislike button was crucial to give feedback to other users. Now instead looking at the like-dislike ratio, you need to lurk around the comments or even worse - waste your time watching unhelpful/wrong/meme guide
It sucks being downvoted, especially when it feels unfair (eg we offered a correction to misinfo, or being ‘brigaded’). It’s a necessary part of social media though, and was one of the things I appreciated about reddit compared to other social media sites. Life is full of people who disagree, and it’s important we’re exposed to that in some form (imo).
It’s much harder to trust videos before playing on youtube now they removed the downvotes, and unsurprisingly I now often have to watch a couple of low-quality videos before I find the solution I’m looking for… whereas in the past, the shitty non-solutions would have enough downvotes to make it obvious before viewing.
I recommend installing a YouTube downvote extension for your browser if you haven’t already. Sadly, mobile has no such option.
I have downvotes visible on revanced for android.
There is also a fork of NewPipe which comes with SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike preinstalled. Highly HIGHLY recommend
I nearly installed one… I’m a bit para though when it comes to addons, feels like we just install them willy-nilly with little regard or knowledge to what they’re doing under the hood. Many of them aren’t even regulated / moderated and require full browser access to perform their role.
FYI, the extension can be somewhat inaccurate on anything that wasn’t archived before the YouTube api change. So like mid-2021 onwards. It has to “estimate” downvote counts, and it reports some videos as having way more than they should.
Still nice to have, just don’t always trust it.
It’s a good thing.
Some people need to know that their opinions are bad and they should reconsider them haha
For tech support issues, spectators also need to know right away if advice is bad. YT ruined their tech videos because people can’t quickly tell if advice is bad or not.
While I understand the concerns that downvoting can introduce into communities, I personally think they offer more value than not. My biggest argument for them is my same argument against their removal on YouTube. Downvotes often provide quick and easy way to identify misinformation as a lay person that might not understand the intricacies of a back and forth conversation or argument.
I ended up on this instance because it has down votes. I was going to make account on another Instance, but decided not to when I saw they only had up voting.
Was it beehaw? I was going to make an account there as well until I saw that down votes were disabled. They really do feel like a critical part of the experience.
deleted by creator
lemmy currently has a system for displaying upvotes. anything that has been downvoted will have the total number of ups and downs displayed next to the arrows. reddit used to have a similar system with RES, but they removed it for Reasons™
i don’t think it’s possible to sort by upvotes alone but that would be a good feature
deleted by creator
Prefer to have them and have them visible.
But the worst option is to have the downvote, but either not count it or count it, but not show it.
I downvoted you for asking this stupid question. I love downvotes.
Downvotes have a lot of issues, but IMO are a better alternative than anything else I can think of. No downvotes means there’s no real way to get rid of spam, or incorrect advice, or hatespeech. Reporting sometimes works, but moderators don’t have the time to go through every complaint and find out if it’s valid or not.
Looking at successful long term communities like the Chans, I see having any kind of voting as a negative. We don’t want to recreate the hellscape that was Twitter or Reddit, people shouldn’t feel bad expressing their opinion as long as they don’t violate our rules.
It should be used everywhere.
I hate votes, I prefer totalitarianism. Like what is happening on reddit.
/s
I’m not familiar. Need to see some studies as to how it affects things