Currently downvotes are enabled on a trial basis, this was done by me to see if they can be enabled to prevent spam from rising to the top of communities, along with the fact that is another form of interaction/feedback.
However I’ve gotten some pushback for this and so I’d like to see the general consensus of this decision. Please put any comments/concerns in this thread, and please vote here: (Link gone poll is done)
the results of this poll and the comments will determine if we keep or remove downvotes again
I feel that downvotes serve an important purpose both in keeping out spam, but also in preserving the many-niches architecture common in porn. Without downvotes even more work will be put onto mods in order to make sure the content posted is relevant to the communities its being posted too. Take c/Hotwife which has recently had a few postings that have 0 to do with hotwifing. Allowing downvotes is an imperfect solution, but I think an important one.
To be fair, comparing to Reddit, Lemmy is still niche, let alone LemmyNSFW even nicher. However, without downvotes some communities lose track. Without growing bigger, I do not expect to see some niche NSFW communities here which are already niche on Reddit. With more posters Lemmy shall grow, does not matter if it’s slowly, but it should be steadily.
What about people getting pissed over something (presumably, it’s hard to tell) and then going after people’s posts in other communities and rampage-downvoting everything?
This should be handled by (auto)mod tools, allowing good faith users to help filter non-fitting or low quality posts, and preventing bad actors from downvote fireworks.
There are possibilities to limit available downvotes either by throttling amount per time/community/instance/user, by demanding to have a certain “reputation” in the community/instance or by making downvote cost your own “reputation”.
None of the above is perfect, but IMO outright removing a right to disagree is against community interests.
Currently I can either leave a “harassment” comment: “wtf this is doing in this community”, make complain to a mod (if there is any active), or ignore the post. Neither help community grow stronger, I think.
It seems to me that most valid criticisms are better stated as a polite comment than a numb downvote.